Taking off the training wheels

I tried to reply to this in the comments from this morning, but it got too lengthy. (Me? Lengthy? Never!) Anyway, you know the number one reason I feel I absolutely cannot continue the ‘modified plan’ for Danger Mouse the way I am for Boo Bug and Captain Adventure?

It’s this. The first week of school, I put $60 into her lunch fund. I KID YOU NOT, less than a week later – she skitters past me, stopping just long enough to blurt out, “Oh! And! I’m out of lunch money!”

“No, you’re not,” I said confidently.

“Well, the lunch lady said so, and I had to have cheese and crackers for lunch,” she tells me.

Uh, wha-now?!

MUCH. PRODDING. LATER., I learn that my beloved idiot of a child has blown through $60 buying French toast sticks and fruit snacks for “everybody,” plus getting cash-back (!?!?!) at the register of her middle school for the ice cream truck later.

(I’m sorry. I need a moment. I am still so @^*&@ing pissed about that last one. IN WHAT REALITY is that even possible?! I MEAN, I KNOW, it’s middle school, blah blah blah responsibility blah blah blah growing up etc. etc. etc., BUT LORD LOVE A DUCK, that is just…ARGH!)

Needless to say, I called the school the next day and said, “Yeah, hi, I’m Danger Mouse’s mom – can we put a block on her lunch account so she can’t purchase the a la carte stuff?”

This is what we did at her elementary school to keep her from doing the same exact thing, minus the cash back part which they were not STUPID ENOUGH to allow.

{collects self…deep breath, and hooooold for a moment…long slow release…OK! moving on!}

The fact that she couldn’t do it didn’t teach her a damned thing. The instant she discovered that she could do it, bam. Her lunch money burned a hole right through the floor of the cafeteria.

And now? Now? We are in Middle School. Which apparently is some kind of magic ‘all-grown-up’ place where the same kids who three months earlier couldn’t be held accountable for wiping their own noses are suddenly more than capable of handling all their own responsibilities without anything by way of adult intervention.

Which is why they responded to this with, “Oh, hell to the no. SHE has to take responsibility for HER OWN actions.”

And I looked at this kid of mine, starting to wear bras, about two seconds from having to arm-wrestle her big sister for the box of menstrual pads, and suddenly…it hit me, hard, that this kid, this same kid who had just done this incredibly brainless thing, this too-smart-to-be-so-stupid child…was never in a million years going to be “with it” enough to make a lunch in the mornings. Or remember the lunch. And I’ve been out of the house for three hours before she leaves for school – it’s out of my hands.

She’s going to be going without food from dinner the night before until 3:30 the following day, every day, because this is how she is, she’ll never get her act together on this, it’s just not how she is, it’s not her nature, and hang on a second…why do we take that ‘as read’ with her?!

I sat there in this tunnel of past and future rushing by me, counting up all the various ways we’ve tried to impress the concept of budgeting on her; all the times we’ve walked her through how this stuff works, slowly, carefully, with charts and graphs, with budgets and ‘tell me what $7 plus $5 is,’ with real money and pretend money.

And always, always, having to bail her out. Having to wrestle the money out of her hand, slap her upside the head and say, “What did I just say?! You cannot spend this whole thing at the first churro stand you run across!!!”

We intervene. Every single time. We go back to the charts. We explain how 2 + 2 ends up as 4. We talk it to death. We have different color cards. We use different kinds of money-markers. We talk until we’re blue, and the instant we hand her money again?

The instant you take your hand off the brake, she is full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes.

It’s like giving an ADHD squirrel a plate of frosted sugar cookies for snack with a Red Bull to wash them down, and then trying to take it for a walk on a leash made out of embroidery floss.

After six years of trying to teach her self-control…I’ve got to start letting her crash, if she’s going to insist on speeding up as she approaches the wall instead of applying a little brake…and then instead of rushing in with the Neosporin and band-aids, I’ll have to just tell her where they are and remind her what to do with them.

Hopefully, by the time she’s having to buy gas (OHMYGAH, WHA?!?!), she’ll be better able to remember to take care of those most important things first, and then have her fun.

(I don’t promise not to nag, though. I can’t help it. I’m like a walking, talking calculator with her. “That’s $6.50…that would leave you with only $39.75, are you sure you want to…I mean, seriously, dude, you don’t even like that color, why do you need to buy…OK, it’s your funeral, I’m just sayin’…!”)

(MEANWHILE, Boo Bug [her younger sister] is all, “Oh, I’m out of lunch money…oh, wait, it costs how much for breakfast at school? Welllllllll, we have plenty of muffins and waffles in the freezer, how about just lunches…and I’ll make a lunch on Thursday because I don’t like the school lunch on Thursday…” Heh. How can four kids with the same two parents all be so different?!)