I posted this in the teenagers board but it's relevant here too.
I have 5 children aged 13, 15, 17, 21 and 23.
Their father left us 3 years ago, me and the kids went from a nice house in a nice area to a horrible council house in a horrible, rough area with next to no money but we do manage ok, I feel I'm quite close to my kids.
Anyway, my DS is the 17 year old (nearly 18) and he's in his 2nd year at college resitting what he did last year as he managed to somehow fail it , anyway he got with this girl who is in her 1st year, they became very close and he spent alot of time with her and she spent alot of time here.
Turned out she had a lot of problems, she was only 16 but lived on her own in a shared student house, she had a volatile relationship with her mum etc. One weekend after she'd spent the night here my son asked me if she could move in with us (various reasons, one being that she was being accused of being a thief and thrown out of the shared house) I'm pretty "liberal" and after a bit of bargaining I agreed as long as she paid me some kind of rent...she got £40 a week and gave me £25 which I was happy with.
She seemed ok at first, was very quiet, shy and kept herself to herself but after a few nights she started acting a bit odd. One night for instance she went to wash her hair and didnt put the shower head over the taps properly and water went everywhere, instead of stopping and turning the taps off she just carried on letting it soak the bathroom, it got so bad that water was seaping through the ceiling downstairs!
I shouted up that the water was going everywhere and it stopped, I then went up to make sure she wasn't offended by me shouting up (didnt want her to feel unwelcome) and she was in hysterics, so much so that she couldn't speak to me for laughing, even DS seemed confused and kept asking what she was laughing at.
Anyway I didn't think much of it but after a whilst she started trying to delibrately wind everyone up, for instance she recruited my 15 year old DD on a mission to wind up my son by messing around with his PC putting silly noises on it etc, they got it to shout "f* off then" everytime he closed a menu and he was furious and blamed my DD fully which caused a row.
She then moved onto my eldest son (23) who suffers from OCD. Basically his room is untouchable, everything has its place, no creases can be made on his bed covers, no CD's out of place, the curtains open at a certain distance at each side...he's that bad that if you pick a dvd off his shelf, look at it and then put it back on the shelf he'd know as it would be 'out of place' when he returned. SHE KNOWS THIS. so what does she do...go in and deliberatly mess things up, she had permision to use his playstation whilst he's at work so she goes in and one time she hid one of his slippers in his bed, she'll take a dvd and put in the floor and one time she even went as far as to empty the bottom of a crisp packet on his carpet. She knows how crazy he goes about it so runs off and hides in the bedroom when he gets in from work, listens to him kick off (last time he punched a hole in the wall he was so angry) and she sits laughing to herself.
My DS wont have anything said against her but I'm starting to wonder if this is going to work out, there are other examples too but I'll post them later if anyone is interested.
I'm trying to be "liberal" and tolerant but if I'm honest she's starting to seem a bit of a nutcase.
Thanks for listening. sorry it's so long.