Sunday and Parenting

We are now a four PDA fam­i­ly, as real_pochacco’s moth­er gave him an old Palm III she was­n’t using. One more to go and we’ll be an even geeki­er house­hold. I’m not real­ly count­ing on R not los­ing his, though, which is why we weren’t going to buy one for him or G any­time soon.

I’ve been going through our address book in Time & Chaos to clean it up so that it’s more usable when syn­chro­nized with our PDAs, and found a name nei­ther of us rec­og­nizes. Lucy Smith. She lives in Snel­lville and I have her email address, but that address does­n’t appear in either of our email archives, we don’t rec­og­nize the name or address, and there are no notes in the record to clue us in. Who is this per­son? I have her home num­ber, but I don’t quite have the cojones to email or call her and say “Hi, why are you in my address book?” because she might not know either. Or she might be ter­ri­bly offend­ed. Who can tell?

god­dessin­ga and greyknight depart­ed for home, sam­bear got shad­owkatt to rehearsal, real_pochacco stayed heads-down over his neglect­ed home­work, and I super­vised G this after­noon. She con­tin­ues to get into SOME kind of trou­ble every time she isn’t being direct­ly supervised.

Last week the ther­a­pist said that she and R are engag­ing in pow­er strug­gles, try­ing to manip­u­late us so that they have more con­trol in the house­hold despite the neg­a­tive con­se­quences they expe­ri­ence. It sucks to have to be the hardass all the time, but appar­ent­ly, that’s the only thing that will get through at all. And we’re not sup­posed to show any kind of emo­tion­al reac­tion to their mis­be­hav­ior, either—everything has to be mat­ter-of-fact and imme­di­ate with absolute sol­i­dar­i­ty among all adults in their lives.

I can’t help feel­ing resent­ful, because it feels like we are being pun­ished because R and G are being so dif­fi­cult. I know it’s just part of being a good par­ent, but my inner child is pitch­ing one hell of a tem­per tantrum.