Limited Sanity

This past Summer, my beautiful, smart, sassy future step-daughter was diagnosed as a Type 1 diabetic at 8 years old. I had mentioned this in a previous post and talked about dealing with her mother more frequently. The past 7 months have certainly been interesting, navigating not only lack of co-parenting, but with her mother’s need to control everything and D’s lack of wanting to rock the boat.

Fast forward to the weekly exchange for our weekend, Friday to Monday, and her and D are arguing on the porch while I sit inside with kiddo. Monday is President’s Day, no school, so D wanted to keep kiddo for the day, rather than daycare, as should be his right as her father. You can imagine about how well that went. High Conflict Baby Mama (HCBM from here on out) stormed to her vehicle, peeled out and left, without double checking that kiddo had everything out of her car, so naturally, we had to let her know to turn around so we could get her diabetic bag and supplies because naturally… she refuses to leave us extra insulin, pens, or needles. Boy did that piss her off.

Now, kiddo is 8, going on 9 this May. Yes, she should start learning and being held accountable for her diabetic supplies because this is her life…. but at the end of the day, she is still 8 and still needs someone to be the parent. HCBM demanded that kiddo come out to get her supplies when she came back so she could “talk to her” about it. I certainly wasn’t going to send her out there to get yelled at, instead, I took the brunt of the woman’s anger.

After two minutes of “who the fuck are you” and “she’s my daughter” and “you’re just jealous” bullshit, as well as me asking nicely for her supplies at least 4 times, I finally shut the door in her face before I punched it. I don’t think of myself as a confrontational person, but if you’re standing at my door, yelling at me or obscenities about me and/or my family, I can turn that way real quick if you keep pushing it.

I’m apparently jealous that she has 3 children because I brought up the fact that if she can’t handle having a diabetic child, 3 kids, multiple jobs, then perhaps her priorities need to change. I only brought up the kids because they are her excuse for everything. Being late, not having homework done, being tired, whatever it is, bet your ass it’s blamed on the kids. I told her to her face that I don’t give a shit what’s going on in her life, how busy it is, she chose to have multiple children and if she can’t handle that, well… that’s not my fault, nor the fault of her children. Now during this confrontation, I did make a mistake. I called her a bad parent. However, in the context of the conversation, I called her a bad parent for refusing to hand over her supplies rather than lecture me and show the entire neighborhood just how ghetto she can be. You can take the girl out of the ghetto… Ugh. If I have any regrets about that conversation before shutting the door in her face, it would be that bad parent comment, but I really do think she’s a shit parent lol.

I just get tired of dealing with this woman. I know I have years left of dealing with her and I’ve accepted that because I absolutely adore D and kiddo. That doesn’t mean that I don’t imagine dropping her off of a cliff or burying her alive every now and then, but I feel that’s probably natural in a high conflict co parenting situation.

My main focus on all of this is of course getting her blood sugar numbers under control and making sure she’s happy and healthy. D and HCBM most of the time, unfortunately act like children because they hate each other. I get it. So I’ve really been focusing my time and energy on helping her get caught up with homework (yes, she’s behind, thanks HCBM and COVID) and reading a lot of diabetic materials about glucose indices, loads, insulin stacking, eating to the meter, etc because she’s my little walking experiment. I think kiddo does get annoyed sometimes at how closely I watch her numbers or suggest drinking water or whatever, but ultimately, she knows I’m doing it for her and to help her. We’ve talked about it and lack of monitoring at her mom’s or when she’s anywhere but here, and we’ve also talked about she’s going to have to be a big girl to make sure she’s checking it when she’s not here with us because someday, it’ll be her responsibility when she’s on her own. Sadly, I’ve heard less than pleasant things from kiddo about how her diabetes is handled elsewhere, so I’m just trying to make sure we’ve got a good handle on it at our house. I’ve even sent her mother suggestions about upping basal insulin and changing ratios because I don’t think she really downloads the information from her monitor to notice trends and she’s mostly stopped keeping track of numbers in the physical log. Thank God for Dexcom and other CGMs because definitely makes our lives a bit easier, especially with monitoring lows and highs in the evening.

Here’s to the freaking weekend and hoping there is no more HCBM drama!