About 4 years ago, my then 12-year-old stepson decided it was time to start having sex. My wife had gotten a call from the girl’s mother informing my wife about what had happened. Luckily he used a condom. He ended up getting a “good talking to” from his (generally useless) father :rolleyes: . The girl ended up going in for a full gynecological exam. The mother wanted to teach her a lesson in having to deal with the consequences of her actions.
When he was 13, we discovered he was smoking. He still smokes. I posted a thread about it here some time ago.
About a week and a half ago, my wife answers the phone at 3:15am. It was the Tybee Island police (Tybee Island is a small town about 15 miles east). The stepson had been stopped for going 50 in a 35 zone. He also admitted to the police officer that he had been drinking. My wife had to go pick him up. Why the police officer didn’t arrest him for underage drinking, I don’t know other than not having actual proof.
Last week, there was a lockdown at his school (where my wife teaches) and the drug dogs were brought in (even though it’s a private school, they request that the police do this randomly throughout the year). Well, Officer Fido finds some pot seeds in my stepson’s truck. My stepson has an attitude problem and had been suspended from school a couple of times and this was the last straw. He was expelled on Friday.
My wife tried to get him enrolled in a nearby public school, but they wouldn’t take him because he had been expelled. She is now trying to get him into another private school.
When she and I got married, we had agreed that we would share the disciplinary responsibilities. Unfortunately, this lasted about two months. When he (or my stepdaughter) did something they shouldn’t have been doing and I stepped in to mete out a punishment (go to their room, no TV or video games, etc), I would find that within a few minutes, she had rescinded the punishment explaining that she didn’t like having conflict in the house. This effectively de-balled me in the eyes of both children. She insisted that she would take care of the discipline since she had done so in her previous marriage. I tried to explain to her that by letting the kids get away with even the smallest thing would backfire on her.
Now it is doing just that.
I told her about my younger brother (I’ve posted about him before - married 4-5 times, has 5-6 kids (depending on the DNA), has numerous DUIs, been in jail a couple of times, etc) and how my mother babied him in exactly the same way and how I thought the stepson would follow the same path. She insisted that I was wrong. This was different. This was her son.
I reminded her today about our arrangement had she said, “Well, I never said you couldn’t discipline them”.
WTF?
I said she effectively told the children in no uncertain terms, that they didn’t have to listen to me because she would go behind my back and reverse whatever I had said.
The stepson now realizes the error of his ways :rolleyes: or so she would have me believe. I ain’t buying it. He’s only sorry because he got busted. Unless some sort of miracle ensues, the next call she gets at 3:15am is gonna be from the police to bail him out or the morgue asking her to identify the corpse.
Now it may look like I’m some sort of hardass. I’m far from it. I just believe that, if you don’t teach children from an early age about the consequences of their actions, they’ll be in for one helluva shock when (or if) they become adults and mama ain’t there to fix it.
I am nearing my wits’ end on this subject.