2. Behaviour Patterns
Over the years as our girls went through their teens we had some serious challenges with three of the girls. All of them had to see counsellors or psychiatrists at various stages in their lives but we were never advised why or whether whatever their problems were, had been resolved. We consider ourselves to be a fairly normal family, certainly middle class. We are also a satellite family in that grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, all live in other states, so we’d had to depend on church groups and friends for family contacts and friendships. When the girls were young they were cared for by babysitters through our church or people whom we knew really well. We were careful who they were left in the care of, and they were always left in a group, and never individually with different people. My husband and I are loving parents and were always mindful of their needs.
Consequently I chose to leave a corporate role and set up a business at home so I could be here for our girls as they went through their teens. One in particular suffered really bad panic attacks and I was often needed to be close by. I could never fathom why she was like that and often wondered if I were responsible and had somehow clung on to her too long and not allowed her the freedom to grow up as her own person - that perhaps she felt she couldn’t cope unless mum was nearby. The reality was she needed both her mum and dad to feel secure and lacked that feeling when away from her home. She could never stay over at friends’ places for sleepovers and would often ring very late at night, sobbing, and begging for us to come pick her up and bring her home again. She tried so many times to stay at friends’ places but could never go through with it. Little did we know the reason for this.
We could never understand why the counsellors didn’t involve us, the parents, or keep us informed. Had the privacy legislation gone as far as keeping parents in the dark about the welfare of their own children? Children who were aged between 13 and 18 years of age during the time they attended these sessions. Once I was invited (by one of my daughters) to come sit in a session but the counsellor suggested that I might be in the way and the reason why problems weren’t resolved. What problems? We were never told and as my daughter and I were very close, and I considered us to be very good friends, I found that very hard to swallow. My daughter disagreed with the psychiatrist’s comment and elected never to go see her again.
One of the other girls went through a period of time when she vehemently hated me and wanted me dead - she was quite verbal about it. I knew she had a problem but I had no idea what it was. When she was only 7 she loved me very much, and in fact did so till in her early teens. As I was her stepmother, but also her fulltime carer, along with her father, I could only assume that perhaps her natural mother had something to do with it and perhaps she’d been made to feel she was being disloyal to her mother if she loved me. My husband and I often discussed the girls’ behaviour and what could be behind it, never knowing, never guessing the real truth. Just how much their mother really knew, to this day we still don’t know. And it’s possible it might have suited her that we didn’t have knowledge as it helped bind her daughters closer to her.
The third experienced the desire to run away often (we thought she was struggling with having to make a decision about whether she wanted to live with us, or her mother and we thought her bad behaviour may have been a sub-conscious effort to make us angry with her, or throw her out - something we would never do). She also self-mutilated, tried to light fires in her room and was generally very difficult to handle at that time.
So, my two step-daughters and one of my own daughters all experienced problems through their teens but we never once thought that it might have been connected - they were all quite different personalities, and our other children never showed signs of similar behaviour patterns. We could never determine what the cause was, just that the three of them had problems as they were growing up - over a span of several years because they all were different ages.