You should help her out by giving this advice:
“Be a better person”
With a pattern of behavior going back to 14 and no major change recently except the car troubles, I’m now safely on the side of telling B to go deal with it herself. Politely, since you want to model good behavior, but she can’t be a disrespectful brat who runs off to mommy and then expects dad to bail her out.
I have to give you credit for holding firm Sun Jester. A lot of dads would have gone “Yippie I win, her mother loses!” but I think you’re doing the right thing to not give her a car. I hope you are going to try to patch things up, but at her age she may just not be ready yet.
I’ve often wished I had a daughter instead of those noisy smelly boys, but I guess it’s not always gonna work out well.
ETA: And my best to E, this must have been tough for her to deal with also.
I am with TriPolar and the others who feel that B needs to face the music on her own. You are wise not to the be the Daddy-Who-Forgives-Everything-Because-Its-His-Pwecious-Widdle-Girl. (One of my exes did that; his kids played on his guilt and shit on him everyway but Sunday and he forgave every bit of it. Sad).
Hopefully, B will grow up more in the years to come and lose some of her self-absorption and entitlement. Or, maybe not. I applaud E’s generosity in even considering loaning B the car, but counsel against it. At this stage of B’s emotional growth, loaning the car is likely to bring only grief to you and E.
The issue only arises if B asks to borrow the car.
If not, why should it be up to E to take the responsibility of volunteering it, whether or not there was a history such as described above?
If B asks, then it all depends on how they ask and what sort of reference is made to the past. They’re both old enough to be grown up about acknowledging and resolving their differences - or should be; and B should certainly recognise the need to clear the air for what sounds to have been a pretty ungracious and over-entitled (not to say, downright spoilt) reaction in the past.
If, however, E feels it is somehow their responsibility to take the initiative to resolve B’s problem, then maybe that in itself may have something to do with B taking E for granted in the past, and something that might need to be acknowledged and resolved as part of the negotiations.
As for the theoretical question posed, the two go together. You can only expect or show mercy if the consequences the mercy is relieving are already clear. If consequences without mercy are unnecessarily (within close relationships) harsh, then pre-emptive mercy without any sense of the consequences being relieved is merely over-indulgence (and ultimately undermines the development of responsibility).
Mercy
Consequences teach themselves.
I hate to say, “it depends,” but it depends. Is the person sorry and contrite? Or not?
If sorry, then mercy should be the course of action.
I’m trying to teach my child that mercy is for the weak!
It’s hard for me to imagine E loaning B a car after two years of them not speaking to each other. To me this is beyond a question of mercy versus consequences. Their relationship is broken, if they have one at all at this point. I would imagine that, if E doesn’t offer the use of the car, it would be more out of disdain for B (or simply a desire to avoid contact) than an desire to teach a lesson. The lesson is there for B to learn, but that doesn’t mean E is trying to teach it.
Giving hypothetical characters one letter names makes it awkward to read. Please use full names, (presumably fake) or descriptive words.
I think it’s important to teach that whether one receives consequences or mercy is often beyond one’s control; a close family member may default to mercy on a continuing basis, but people outside the family - friends, neighbors, police, the courts - may have entirely different feelings toward a person and so an expectation of mercy is unwise. Police dash cam footage regularly shows poorly-behaved people getting further bent out of shape when an officer applies consequences (whether it’s a ticket or some measure of physical force in order to obtain compliance); I suspect these are people whose parents always showed mercy and never taught them that other people may not be so merciful.
One should always be as compassionate as reasonably possible, but there’s a point where it stops being reasonable. If a person has a history of taking advantage of another person, without anything changing, who’s to say that won’t continue? It’s one thing to borrow stuff without permission and breaking trust at that level, but if you can’t trust someone with $20, you sure as hell can’t trust them with $20,000. How can someone trust someone else with a CAR if they’ve demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness elsewhere. Compassion doesn’t mean just endlessly giving of oneself and letting someone else take advantage.
In that situation, I wouldn’t loan someone my car. And not even as consequences, per se, in the tit for tat sense, but the fact that I just can’t trust them to be responsible with it. The broken trust is the real consequences. How do I know they’re going to drive it safely and not risk damage to the car? How do I know they’re going to not mistreat it or neglect taking care of it? Am I wiling to risk losing this car based on the lack of trust I have with this person?
You say you have a tepid relationship with your daughter, B, and that she is only approachable when she wants something. Can you elaborate on this? Has she been like this since birth or did your relationship change to become this way at a certain point?
To answer your question, my motto in life is something the Dalai Lama once said: “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” But kindness does not mean handing someone whatever they want. In this case, I would say it means working with your daughter to come up with solutions to her problem (that don’t entail E handing B her car). (Dracoi listed some good ones.) And I would suggest just being there as someone for her to bounce ideas off of, not as the proposer of ideas.
Besides helping your daughter get her transportation problem in order, it will be a step in the process of transforming your relationship into one where she sees opportunities to interact with you that don’t involve her coming to you only when she wants you to fix her problems for her. Allow yourself to be someone whose company she can enjoy when there are no problems to be fixed.
As that wise sagacious man, recently in the news, wrote:
Cite. (Among many other articles quoting this.)
Lending a car to someone who has repeatedly mistreated you and offered no apology or amends shouldn’t even be on the table.
We aren’t supposed to be nice to people because we might want their stuff later. That is what nasty users do, not something you should want to teach your kids.
If the girl asks for help, of course you should be compassionate and try to help her figure out how to solve her car problem and how to treat other people decently, but what she does should be left up to her.
Do they mean “about the haircut?”
This is how things are going down. Walked her through how to briefly interview shops to see where she wanted diagnostics done, then how to arrange a tow. She’s got a guy at work who is pretty handy and has offered to do the work for her. So yeah–teaching her how to fish, as it were. Better, but somehow less Daddy, than doing it for her.