Hi all,
I am step-mum to a 14 year old girl who lives with me and her dad. Mum is an alcoholic. SD came to live with us 18 months ago of her own accord, and we have residency of her. Things have been okay generally, she's doing well at school, lots of friends etc., but have been somewhat tumultuous between her and her mum. She's had periods of no contact with her mum, her own choice, and we have respected that.
Since the beginning of last December, things have changed with her. At that time, we heard that her mum has alcoholic liver disease, and had been told if she didn't stop drinking would die within a year. She hasn't stopped drinking and is in denial of her condition, and has recently turned down a residential place in rehab, so she's clearly not ready. But, because we do believe she will die, probably this year (she's anorexic, but has a puffy yellow face, sure signs of either alcoholic hepatitis or cirrhosis), we have opened our door to her to visit her daughter in a supervised environment (due to lies she's told SD, which have upset and angered her and caused her to stop seeing her mum), because we want their contact to be safe so as not to cause SD any further distress. We began this just before Christmas, and it's been okay(ish). Their contact is reasonable, but SD does try to push mum away and doesn't talk to her much. This we cannot change, mum has caused her daughter to react to her in this way, but at least we can try to facilitate as much contact as possible before the inevitable happens.
Due to a childhood living in an alcoholic home, SD has been having counselling weekly via the school for over a year now. We also took her to a couple of Al-Anon meetings, but they weren't really suitable for her (there is no Alateen locally). We talk to her openly about alcoholism and how it affects her mother, particularly by way of being let down by mum all the time and broken promises. We thought she was dealing with it well. Up until December, she was spending a lot of time with friends, socialising well and was happy. However, since we opened our door to mum, she started being a lot more withdrawn, just wanting to shut herself away in her room with her laptop and phone. Because we were concerned about this, we restricted her to 2 hours per day total of phone and computer time, and tried to encourage her to invite friends round after school and make arrangements to meet up with them at weekends. It hasn't worked. She says she tries, but no-one wants to meet up with her and she said she doesn't like inviting people round. It seems she just wants to be by herself. This behaviour has gone on for a few weeks now, despite our best efforts to encourage her to go out or have friends round (she has loads of friends). She said she feels like we are forcing her out, but we explained to her that we want her to have a social life, like she did before.
Anyway, the other evening she left her phone unlocked (it's a smartphone), so we decided to go onto her Facebook and just have a look to see if we could find any answers as to her behaviour. OMG. There was a whole thread of messages between her and a boy, going back to the beginning of December, basically very suggestive of sexual acts they wanted to do. She was leading him on, he was suggesting things they could do, but it was apparent that they hadn't actually met up outside of school, despite her begging him to come to our house whilst we were at work (after school). He's in her year. Of course we were shocked and angry and upset, and thought this could explain her reluctance to go out, as it seemed she wanted to keep herself free in case he wanted to see her outside of school. We knew we had to confront her, but left it until Friday evening as the evening after we discovered it was her Options Evening at school, which is very important. So, Friday evening we told her what we'd discovered. She was distraught, upset, emotional and apologetic. She assured us she hadn't done anything and didn't intend to. She was 14 two weeks ago, so some of this had been going on when she was 13. We spoke at length to her about how dangerous her behaviour was, in that she was leading on a 14 year old boy. It was a very difficult conversation, but we told her she is to have no more to do with him. We also told her that if she wanted to keep Facebook, we wanted to have her login details so we could check it. She reluctantly agreed. This seemed to explain her behaviour, but sadly worse was to come. She works part time in my brother's cafe on a Saturday, and when she went to work yesterday we checked her Facebook again. We discovered another thread of messages, with one of her close female friends, where she admitted to her friend that she had self-harmed. This had happened in early December following being dumped by another boy (who we knew about and had met). She also told her friend it was because of her mum. When she got back from work we confronted her with it. She was ashamed, and said it had only happened twice, and she had cut herself with a blunt hairgrip. She has scarring on her arm. She told us it was because she always feels emotional about her mum, but that the boy dumping her tipped her over the edge. We told her that we will make an appointment with the GP for her to be referred for more specialised Counselling, which she said she would like.
We did some research about self-harm, and it recommended that parents encourage the child to be more sociable and try to stop them spending long periods of time alone. She is an over-thinker and tends to over-react to things generally. Everything is a drama (I know that's typical for girls). Today, Sunday, we told her to organise going out with a friend, rather than spending another Sunday in her room listening to music and moping about, but she hasn't bothered.
I just wondered if anyone had any experience of this, any words of wisdom or advice because we are so worried about this previously social girl becoming so withdrawn and depressed.
Sorry for the long post. Thank you.