I have had a very heated discussion with my 19 year old dd this morning.
She lives with us full time by choice (myself, dh, dd2 and half the time two tween dss’s). She has an amicable relationship with her dad who lives 15 mins away but does not much like his girlfriend and so chose to live with us when she turned 18.
She did very well in her a levels and was going to go travelling for a year then to her deferred place at uni. She had a minor falling out with the friend she was going travelling with, and so didn’t go and now works as a receptionist which she hates. Says she doesn’t now want her deferred place at uni, and is instead teaching herself biology a level with a view to now doing a degree related to that if and when she achieves the a level.
she has fallen out with a lot of her old school friends and has a boyfriend but doesn’t see him that much. She doesn’t seem that bothered about him.
I question some of her choices as outlined above but they are her choices to make. Any discussion about them results in her getting cross anyway so I’ve learned not to broach it.
DD is incredibly rude to us at home, 80% of the time. She comes and goes without saying hello or bye. She rolls her eyes at us constantly or gives one word answers. She keeps her own room very tidy but nothing outside of that and regularly leaves the kitchen a bit of a mess, or her laundry in the machine so I have to take it out to use it. She is negative about our family and downright horrible to her sister and step brothers. She is not asked to pay rent but if so much as asked to buy a pint of milk or food for her own cat she either ignores it or huffs about it.
The 20% the time she is nice she is very nice. Interesting to talk to and sometimes quite fun.
It came to a head this morning as we were talking about Easter and I told her we were having some family visiting for a day. She got huffy about it before even hearing the details. I asked her why she must be so negative and mean to us all so much? She has no answer except to say she might as well go and live with her dad then. Later on during the discussion all she could come up with was we don’t keep our air fryer clean and she cleaned the fridge a month ago and no one has bothered to keep it clean since.
I pointed out that cleaning isn’t a one and done thing, and that she regularly
fails to contribute to cleaning her own mess up. I work full time and there are four other people in the house plus animals. Could it be cleaner? Yes. It is my priority? No. If she is that bothered she can clean herself.
she managed to turn it around to all this equating to me telling her to move to her dads. I’ve clearly said to her that I don’t want her to do that but if she is so unhappy living with us that it makes her act in the way she does toward us then maybe it would be a better choice for her.
I don’t think we can carry on walking on egg shells in the house around her and having to deal with her mardy behaviour ruining family meals etc.
I get that she probably feels a bit lost. But she won’t hear of any course of action other than the choices she has made. I wonder if she is a bit depressed. She ‘doesn’t believe’ in mental illness and accuses me of ‘diagnosing everyone I see’ (due to my job which is MH related). So she won’t even consider investigating or talking about that.
she has now gone out with dh and dss2 for what was dss2’s birthday treat-something expensive that she was interested in. The rest of the time she actively avoids family stuff.
this whole situation is making me very miserable and not want to be at home with her even. I love her but her behaviour is awful and she can’t see it at all.
any advice?