One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…

We’ve been having a lot of behavioral issue the last few weeks with Thing 1. Lies and general not-thinking-about-safety issues that happen to be hammering Keli and I – one occurrence after the other. She was grounded for the past week for a string of lies which, as almost always happens, reared their ugly head and she decided to go down with the ship instead of coming clean. Today was her first day of freedom and you know what happened? She got caught in another vortex of sneakiness and deception. The entire time this new scenario was revealing itself, I couldn’t help but hear The Dude’s voice in my head, “This aggression will not stand, man!”

Even though I play the role of Bad Cop most of the time around the house, I don’t enjoy it. Apparently I’m dead inside just enough to be alright doling out the punishments in a manner that makes me not feel bad about the tears and wailing.

That symphony we were going to have a dad-daughter afternoon date to? Yeah, that was canceled an hour before it started.

That play dates she had “scheduled”? Called off.

The day out with the grandparents? She’s no longer going.

What I want to do is put her 9-year-old behind in her room with nothing but some clothes, a mattress, a Black Flag album, a blank notebook and a pen for the next nine years in hopes that when she gets older, she’ll thank me for forcing brutally honest music and a book of empty pages upon her.

Maybe the years of scrawling her heart and soul – whether it be in pictures or words – onto those empty pages will help the basic values and ideals of becoming a decent human being sink in. Because God knows, she sure doesn’t listen to us.

Luckily for her, California State law and her mother would not allow this.

So I’ve accepted that my only other choice is to adapt to the constant ebb and flow of her pre-pubescent emotional state, continue to lead by example and try my best to find new ways to make counting to ten in my head exciting and different from all of the other times.

In a perfect example of life’s irony, I now have to go and figure out why on God’s green earth re-grounded Thing 1 is spraying Thing 2 with a water bottle.

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