Shields Up; May 8 2024

I… am being crushed by the weight of adulthood. Too much adulting kills. You heard it here first.

We received news that the house we rent is going back up for sale. Naturally, this means we’ve been in Crisis Mode, poring over rental sites to find something even remotely equivalent to our current place.

There’s nothing.

Surprisingly, I’ve managed to wind up in a pretty okay mental place about the whole thing. I won’t be looking for places until it’s one-hundred percent guaranteed we’re being kicked out. Since we live in the basement, it’s more likely that someone buying the house would want to live upstairs. It would be awful to see our neighbours go, but I’m confident they’d find another place a lot easier than our household would – the parents are doctors.

They have two kids, upstairs. One of them is my kid’s age, and they play together all the time. Seeing her friend go would be devastating for my kid, is my big worry there.

But, then again, maybe she’d be okay with it, because… Okay, here’s the thing I was originally going to blog about, and the segue works well here, so here goes: her friend is kind of a bully.

They’re both strong-willed kids, so it’s natural they’d clash on some things. Generally, sometimes with coaching, they can figure it out amongst themselves. But lately it’s been escalating, the friend saying mean things to my daughter, claiming she’ll only remain her friend if my daughter gives her money or her toys, and – yesterday – trying to wreck some of my kid’s stuff. When I told the friend that wasn’t an acceptable way to treat people, she just said, “You’re not my dad,” and ran off.

So I’m going to be talking to the parents tonight.

I’m still angry, to be honest, but I’m confident I can approach this rationally. I haven’t lost the awareness that this is a five-year-old, still figuring out how to interact with friends and learning what is and isn’t appropriate.

But if she’s not going to own up to her behaviour and make a change, she’s not welcome anywhere near my daughter ever again.