Lola, you should move out- living in a refrigerator box under a bridge would be preferable to living with such a bitch as your stepmom sounds like.
Muffin, fuck off you judgmental bitch!
[sub]That is all.[/sub]
That’s all well and fine, but it simply is not working in Lola’s family.
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Again, this simply is not happening in Lola’s family.
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Read what I wrote: “What it comes down to is that there is discord in the home, and that Lola and her step-mother are not able to work it out between them. It does not matter who has what rights, or who is right. The simple fact is that unless Lola and her step-mother learn to get along, either Lola or her father’s wife will have to leave her father’s home. Time for Lola to leave the nest.”
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Simple. Pointing fingers at who is not living up to their responsibilities, assigning blame, and determining who is a bitch, is not a solution. Recognizing that the three of them need to work together is obvious, but what is also obvious is that the three of them are not capable of working together. Thus it is time for Lola to move out.
Oh, the irony.
Muffin, are you telling me you don’t have the right to be treated decently as a human being without a fucking law saying so?
So in that thread, I’m going to assume that I can throw away any personal possessions of any houseguest I may ever have.
I mean, they can get the fuck out if they don’t like it. :rolleyes:
[tangent]
Nine generations of your family is from Barbados? You don’t happen to have a house down there that you’d be willing to share with a poor Doper, do you? 
[/tangent]
Well, if you warn them in advance "Hey, I’m psycho and I tend to throw things away arbtrarily. But if you can live with that, then you are welcome to stay.
QueerGeekGirl, what are you suggesting Lola should do about her rights being violated? She can’t call the cops, becasue no crime has been commited. As far as I can see, either she can a) suck it up and continue to live there or b) begin to make sensible ,concrete steps towards moving out. You seem to be acting like hte central issue here is whether or not stepmom qualifies as a bitch by some sort of objective standard. To that I, and I suspect (the male, btw) Muffin respond, Who the fuck cares? Why, in any way, shape or form, does it matter who is right? Al that matters is htat thesituation is clearly intolerable, and if anything is going to change, that change will have to come from Lola. Is this fair? No. It’s just the way it is.
Now then, this whole post is just repeating what Muffin already said. If you still think anyone’s main point is that Lola is a bitch, I suggest you go reread his posts carefully.
I have a question about this comment. What kind of family dynamics are going on here that your mother has to smuggle in a bed for you? She couldn’t just bring your bed to you? How did you explain the sudden appearance of your futon? Did your dad and step-mother really expect you to sleep on the floor forever? Or were you playing martyr and sleeping on the floor to spite them?
Where exactly are you living? In the laundry room?
Oh, and I have a large freezer. I keep it locked, too, just out of my own anal-retentivness, so I know it’s closed. You have to shut it hard, so the vacuum seal thingy seals.
One time my then-8-year-old daughter got something out of it once and didn’t shut it properly and the door came open and everything in it thawed. Not a pretty picture.
Manda-
I completely agree that Lola’s best alternative is to move out. That, however, was not the initial debate between Muffin and myself. The initial debate was over Lola having rights and privleges as a rent paying member of the household. Muffin believes Lola has no rights due to Tenant laws. I believe Lola has the right to be treated respectfully in a home she pays to live in.
It was never about anyone being a bitch, even though the StepMoo was. Also, if you look back, if was Muffin who started the debate over rights with me, so perhaps you should re-read the posts one more time.
I realize that Muffin mentioned Lola should move in a post directed to me (and at a later point in time, with another person, drove home that point). I agree. That simply wasn’t what Muffin and I were discussing. We were discussing our difference in opinion over rights in the household.
With that said, if you and I gang up on Muffin, I think we can get that Barbados house. 
Oh, the truth.
The journal, no doubt, does not have an alarm clock on it to warn itself to return to a place where the child won’t find it. And the den is certainly a place where the child can be expected to venture.
I can’t believe no-one called the OP on her statement that if her father dies, she gets 50% of the house. Really? Did your dad and step mom specifically tell you that or are you just assuming?
I would be very surprised that you would get any part of the house. Why would the step mom agree to this? She loses her husband, a major source of income and then loses her home? There is no way, IMHO, the wife would agree to this in a will.
I say this because my step son assumed he owned half of my wife’s and my house if my wife died. He was extremely shocked and dismayed to find out otherwise. (my wife is not dead but he brought it up in front of her and she corrected him). To this day he thinks this is the height of unfairness. I don’t know where people get their ideas sometimes - I never once assumed my parents home was anything but THEIRS.
Is it really so unreasonable to expect the step-mother to teach her TEN YEAR OLD a little bit of respect for other people’s privacy?
Um…excuse me. I live in Ottawa, and I have a two bedroom apartment for $723.00, and a friend of mine rents a three bedroom apartment for $789.00. Split three ways, that would be $263.00 per month. This is in downtown Ottawa, (Sandy Hill, to be exact.) And they’re both really nice apartments, parkay floors, new kitchens. We have our own garden plots and our own laundry room on the first floor. They allow pets. I even have a backyard.
Yes, there is a housing crunch in Ottawa, but you can find something decent if you look around, and are willing to do some footwork.
(Or even willing to do some yard work. A friend of mine used to rent a bachelor for $250 per month. The catch - he had to shovel snow in the winter, cut the grass in the summer, and do a little yard work for the little old lady he rented from.)
Even if she’s giving us a completely accurate picture of her situation, (which I’m not so sure about), she should definately move out. Trust me, you, and the parental units, will be happier in the end.
A wife does not have to “agree” to her husband’s will - she doesn’t even have a right to see it unless he shows it to her. (There may be exceptions in individual circumstances if there are prenuptial agreements in place).
lola, are you in school? Are you working full-time or part-time?
On the issue of the bed, did they just not want to take the time to go down and get it, or did you really have to “smuggle” it in? Did they offer you any place other than the floor to sleep?
Finally, congrats on getting back your journal. As your dad said, don’t do it again.
Oh hey, found the renting rates online! Conservation Coop
Not unreasonable in the least…but he’s still just a ten-year-old kid. If he saw semi-naked pictures (or any type of picture, really), I say his curiosity is going to get the better of him and he’s going to fully open it to see what it is.
Even if it wasn’t opened at all (lying on the table), he might just absent-mindedly pick it up and thumb through it, not knowing what it was.
Out of my own curiosity…Lola, how old are you?
Queergeekgirl, you say:
and then you say
I read this to mean you are talking about 'social rights" (for lack of a better term), not “legal rights.”. Well, near as Ican tell, the only value in determining whether or not someone is violating your “social rights” is so that you can decide whether you have the moral high ground in the situation–all it is good for is deciding whether or not StepMom is a bitch. There is no way to enforce “social rights”, so Lola needs to move out. Energy spent ruminating on the unfairness of it all and making itemized lists of unfair actions is simply useless.
ENugent, are you saying the wife does not have any say in a marriages joint possessions? The husband may have a will and not show it to his wife but his wife does have claim to joint assets (like the house) which makes the will invalid.
Well I’ve read every one of these posts. The good and the bad and the ugly. First, I’ll ease the pressure by stating that I’m totally a controlling bitch, and you wouldn’t want to live with me under any circumstances nor would I invite you to or expect you to.
So evidently the OP has just moved in with her father and stepmother within the last 9 months or so taking in fact that she stated her things weren’t all there yet and she had no bed. So where were you living before?
There are always two sides to every story and my oh my this evil stepmother is sure getting dumped on. We won’t go into how my son had to live while he was under my roof. I will venture to say that he walked the line and if he didn’t like it there was a highway right in front of our house that he could take in either direction. I worked two jobs, supported him and myself and yes, I had every right in the world to search his room at any time that I felt inclined to do so up until the day he moved out. Porn, cigarettes, anything I didn’t approve of was thrown out. He started hiding it outside but that’s ok, it wasn’t in my house.
I was also a stepmother with an 11-year-old step daughter. I told her for one month, while she was out for summer break from school, to clean up her room. I told her that I was going in her room on a given date and I would clean it myself if she did not have it done. Well she evidently didn’t believe the snake would bite. I went into the room and I threw everything under the bed, crammed in the closets, and thrown on the floor away. CD player, cds, all kinds of expensive toys and makeup and clothes. Yep, I threw her clothes away. She had five bureaus in that room and half of the drawers had nothing in them. After that day, I told her that I would tell her one time to do something and if she didn’t do it, I would, and she wouldn’t like the results. I keep my word.
So Lola is an adult. Big difference? Not at all. She is paying SOME rent, I can believe that it’s not enough to cover food, water, electricity, etc. for her. Life is expensive. I wonder if she’s unable to support herself now, when will that happen? Maybe the good fairy will come down and grant her three wishes and one of those would be for a better paying job, or a new house, or tons of free money. We’ll have to wait on that one. In the meantime I still think there’s something missing in this story that isn’t being told.
So yea, I’d say suck it up, learn to live with it, it beats living in a cardboard box doesn’t it? And stop causing problems for your dad and stepmom. You were told what would happen if the journal was left out again, she didn’t throw it away the first time. I sure hope that this is the biggest problem you face in life.
It’s always easy when you aren’t the parent to tell others what they should and shouldn’t do and how to do it. But it don’t work that way. Every person on the face of the earth has a different personality and kids can’t be taught the same way, each has to be dealt with on their level. I respect the other posters here that have kids and know the tale, but until you have walked that walk be careful on your thinking cause one day you are gonna be dealing with the same thing and I have all ideas that you will change your point of view.
We presently have in our lovely state, not far from where I live, a military guy that is in the US Air Force charged with 97 counts of statutory rape. Seems that the mother of two daughters, one 12 and one 14, decided to read the diary of her 14 year-old daughter and discovered that both her children were having sex with this man twice a month since 2001. I’m sure she was a terrible bitch to live with and heaven help us that she should do such an evil act as to read her child’s diary. Wonder which will scar the child most, the sex or the betrayal of the diary reading.
Is that really true in Canada?
There is clearly value in Muffin’s points as regards tenant law. The law provides a remedy to those persons whose rights are violated.
If you want to talk about basic moral rights to be treated with dignity… well, I agree that exists, but what remedy is there when this right is violated - other than, as Manda JO cogently points out, the ability to claim the moral high ground?
Even if we all agree that stepmom is being a bitch, lola cannot enforce her rights to basic human dignity in any effective way. This is why, back on page 1, I suggested that it wasn’t useful to frame the issue as one of violated rights.
Stepmom’s actions were rude. Ideally, people would not be rude to one another. Sometimes they are. What’s to be done about the rudeness in this case?
I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been a more in-depth mention of the disparity in housing prices between what lola believes and what others have posted. If other posts are to be believed, lola may have an excellent chance of living on her own, on her current salary.
- Rick