The Almost Teen

If living with a teenage daughter is worse than living with a pre-teen daughter I'm quitting now. I'll just pack my bags and run away to Margaritaville because I don't know if either of us will survive if things get worse.

This morning I woke Marissah at the usual time. She has 30 minutes to get dressed and get ready for school. She normally doesn't eat breakfast before school anyway, so that's not an issue. I had her get her backpack together last night (it was a premonition, I guess). At six this morning I reminded her of the time. For my courtesy I got snapped at. "I know, Mom." At five after, when she was still sitting on the couch in her underwear, I reminded her of the time. "Jeez, you don't have to keep telling me!" So I said nothing. At 6:15, the time she normally leaves the house, she was stomping through the house because she couldn't find anything to wear. "I have nothing to wear," she whined. "It's your fault! I can't wear these jeans! They feel yucky!" I'm trying to keep my cool, but it's getting harder and harder. I show her two pair of clean jeans that, to my knowledge, did not feel yucky last week. They, of course, were all wrong.

At this point I thought it might help to remind my dear, sweet (yeah, right) daughter that if she misses the bus and I have to drive her to school I am not going to be happy. I work from home in the mornings. I have another child to get ready for school and off to the bus. I don't have time for this kind of crap!

Finally she gets a pair of jeans on. We managed to find a shirt that would tuck in (school dress code) and she got her socks on. Which turned out to be all wrong. She insisted they were not hers. I know better. She's never folded a pair of socks in her life, so I am fairly certain she wouldn't know the difference between her socks and her dad's. I cracked the whip again (figuratively speaking, of course) and made her get her shoes on.

I think the thing that most surprised her was when I took her coat, purse and backpack outside and waited on the front walk for her. She walked out the door and I greeted her by handing her her things and instructed her to get her butt to the bus stop (which I had already scoped out to make sure she hadn't missed the bus). Of course, she was totally indignant over this. She actually stopped and put her coat on s-l-o-w-l-y. As far as I know she made the bus. I had already told her that if she missed it she wasn't going to school today and I wouldn't be writing her an excuse either, so she might have rather walked to school (about 3 miles) than come back and tell me she missed the bus.

I'm contemplating different ways to prevent this type of thing from happening again. So far I've had few good ideas. I could make her pick out her clothes the night before, but I know that would bomb. Those clothes would morph in the dark into something yucky, into a shirt that doesn't tuck in. Something would happen to make them completely unacceptable to her tastes. I suppose I could get her up earlier, but frankly that just gives her more time to whine and I have no desire to go through that. I've decided my best bet is probably to get that whip. And crack it frequently.