Hello everyone!
My name is Mina, and I'm new here! :-)
I lived in Bristol up until I married my husband in 1990, at which point I moved to Germany with him and proceeded to have two amazing, lovely children- a daughter, who is now seventeen years old and just finished high school, and a fourteen-year-old son. I currently live with them and my ailing mother.
My daughter, Charlotte (or Charlie), has finished high school a few weeks ago. She went to a full-time private boarding school on a full scholarship and did amazingly well, receiving multiple awards and a standing ovation from her headmaster. I am extremely proud of her. Now, for the first time in years, she is staying at home for an extended stretch of time during a non-holiday season (she'll move out again in September to study law), meaning that for the first time in years, our everyday life is being affected by her presence. Sadly, the effects have not been entirely positive.
The problems started the moment she stepped into our house, basically. At first, conflicts with her father arose. The two of them are quite similar, personality-wise: Both are extremely intelligent, at times almost frighteningly logical, scientifically minded, and, to a certain degree, workaholics. Their relationship during my daughter's childhood, before Charlie went away to boarding school, was excellent. He read to her, they collected and classified leaf samples together, and generally were thick as thieves. As Charlie got older, there was a lot of apparently friendly teasing and affectionate sarcasm. They share a rather dry sense of humour.
But for the past two weeks, they basically have not talked to one another. There were a couple of extremely loud, shouting arguments during her first days, arguments that, I'm sorry to say, I don't think she was at fault for. My husband , during our first family dinner together, started to make a few rather snarky remarks about her high school grades in music, an ultimately unimportant subject in which she was never bad, just a little less brilliant than in other subjects. She answered with a few quips of her own, but I could tell she thought he was overstepping. By the time we were eating dessert, he was being downright hurtful, criticising her academic achievements as being 'undeserved' because 'school these days is easier than back in my days'. Fast-forward two hours, and they were screaming at each other. She accused him of being intimidated by the presence of someone whose intellect equalled his own, he threw back that she had a God-complex and couldn't tolerate criticism.
That scene basically repeated itself a few times. Now, they are not speaking. The house has, without a word, been divided into zones. They manage to go whole days without seeing each other. He refuses to recognise his part in the argument, she advised me to make him undergo therapy, since his behaviour is, according to her, completely abnormal.
Then, there is her brother, David. He's fourteen years old, a lovely, sweet boy, but doesn't have that spark of brilliance his sister and father have. He's also a bit of a slob, as I suppose a lot of teenage boys are.
Since my daughter's former room is now used to house my terminally ill mother, her return home meant she had to move into her brother's room with him. We put up a bed, and both she and I were confident it wouldn't cause problems- after all, she had gone to boarding school for years, sharing a room with another girl without any issues! My son wasn't perfectly enthusiastic about the plan, but not downright against it either.
Since my son still goes to school and takes French classes, and she's the only other member of the family who speaks French (very well, I should say) and he is struggling with the subject, I thought it would be a good idea to have her take a look at his homework. Nope. He started yelling about her having no right to do so, being arrogant, and trying to criticise everything he did. I watched them work on his homework together, and from what I saw, she was being constructive and fair, albeit a little brusque (as I said, she's not the coddling type) whereas he was being volatile and easily angered. Still, she took it with grace, and we dropped the homework plan.
Living in the same room as him turned out to be an issue of its own, though. He listened to loud music and left rubbish everywhere.
A week ago, she apparently had enough and tidied the whole room, washing every single piece of clothing he had left on the floor. I was so grateful I was about to weep, though I obviously recognise she infringed on his privacy with that. The resulting argument with him caused her to move to the living room couch, where she has been sleeping since then. I feel very bad about this arrangement- she is my daughter, this is her home, she shouldn't have to sleep on the couch!
Basically, the house is now divided into two fronts: My husband and my son, who both seem to detest her very presence, and me, who is extremely grateful for it: whereas both my son and my husband don't help much around the house, she is unfailingly helpful. She mops the floors, does the dishes, helps with taking care of my mother, helps with the cooking, hoovers and does her own laundry. For the past two years, I've had to limit myself to make time for caring for my mother, but my daughter's help has allowed me to enjoy more free time. Last week, after weeks of postponing, finally managed to see a friend for lunch, knowing she'd take care of my mother, and when I came back, she hadn't just done that, but also fixed our wifi!
Having Charlie around is basically like having a handyman in the house. She can set up all the complicated medical machinery my mother needs and fixes broken home appliances my husband ignores for weeks before my nagging finally gets to him. I feel like she's basically taken on a lot of stereotypical "men's roles" in our household, which doesn't seem to be good for the family dynamic, but is a huge relief to me.
I feel extremely frustrated that her presence seems to cause so much conflict, especially since I don't think she's at fault. With her brother, that's just a bad bout of puberty, but her conflict with my husband worries me. I tried to get him to apologise for the things he said during her first days with us, but he insists she overreacted and the situation is in no way his fault. I am worried I no longer see things objectively because she is so much more attentive and helpful than the male family members. At the same time, I recognise that I have allowed my husband and son to get away with a lot of bad behaviour for the past few years. I think Charlie's presence and her vocal orders to get up and stop being couch potatoes intimidate and anger them. I feel caught between two fronts and wonder how I should best resolve the situation.... Does anyone have advice?
Oh my, sorry this is such a wall of text! Thanks so much for reading this, everyone!