I don't know if this is the right forum or not, but it seems to fit better than others, so here goes.
Since the age of four, my oldest daughter and I have been locked in a battle of wills. Until age four, we were very close, and she was a sunny, happy little girl, and there was never any problems between us. Maybe I spoiled her too much. I even carried her around on my hip until I was seven months pregnant with my second baby, born a couple of months after her fourth birthday.
She didn't like having a new baby in the house, and begged me to send it back, telling me that she was the only baby I needed. Once she even told me the baby's real mommy and daddy might be looking for it. I thought what she was saying was cute, and laughed at it.
The baby was very difficult for me. She had day and night mixed up and would wake up at 11:00, just as my husband and I were going to bed. I'd end up being up with her until 4-5:00 in the morning, and had to be up by 5:30 to get my husband off to work, and my oldest daughter would be up before I had a chance to get any more sleep. The baby also refused to breast feed, and even with the bottle, I had force feed her.
Within a couple of weeks of her birth I was a bumbling zombie, seeing huge haloes around the lights and not able to even think straight. So my husband contacted his sisters, who lived several hundred miles from us, and begged them to come and get the oldest girl and keep her for awhile until I got the baby on a normal schedule, and regained my strength and equalibrium. Which they did. She was with them for two weeks.
When they brought her home, it was as if she'd been switched with someone else's child. She glared at me, refused to listen when I talked to her, or to do anything I asked her to do. I've never found my daughter since, and the older she gets, the worse it becomes between us. She acts like she wishes I'd drop dead, and sometimes, when I'm not trying to understand why she changed so drastically, I wish her aunts had never brought her home.
She's never liked her little sister, and when her brother was born when she was six, she ignored him, but at the age of eight, a new baby brother became her living doll, and she spoiled him. Then, when he was four or five, she decided he was a little brat and became verbally abusive to him. She's basically isolated herself from the whole family, with the exception of her father, who is the only one she still responds to at all positively.
Since the age of four, my oldest daughter and I have been locked in a battle of wills. Until age four, we were very close, and she was a sunny, happy little girl, and there was never any problems between us. Maybe I spoiled her too much. I even carried her around on my hip until I was seven months pregnant with my second baby, born a couple of months after her fourth birthday.
She didn't like having a new baby in the house, and begged me to send it back, telling me that she was the only baby I needed. Once she even told me the baby's real mommy and daddy might be looking for it. I thought what she was saying was cute, and laughed at it.
The baby was very difficult for me. She had day and night mixed up and would wake up at 11:00, just as my husband and I were going to bed. I'd end up being up with her until 4-5:00 in the morning, and had to be up by 5:30 to get my husband off to work, and my oldest daughter would be up before I had a chance to get any more sleep. The baby also refused to breast feed, and even with the bottle, I had force feed her.
Within a couple of weeks of her birth I was a bumbling zombie, seeing huge haloes around the lights and not able to even think straight. So my husband contacted his sisters, who lived several hundred miles from us, and begged them to come and get the oldest girl and keep her for awhile until I got the baby on a normal schedule, and regained my strength and equalibrium. Which they did. She was with them for two weeks.
When they brought her home, it was as if she'd been switched with someone else's child. She glared at me, refused to listen when I talked to her, or to do anything I asked her to do. I've never found my daughter since, and the older she gets, the worse it becomes between us. She acts like she wishes I'd drop dead, and sometimes, when I'm not trying to understand why she changed so drastically, I wish her aunts had never brought her home.
She's never liked her little sister, and when her brother was born when she was six, she ignored him, but at the age of eight, a new baby brother became her living doll, and she spoiled him. Then, when he was four or five, she decided he was a little brat and became verbally abusive to him. She's basically isolated herself from the whole family, with the exception of her father, who is the only one she still responds to at all positively.
