Amy could make a control battle out of anything… and she did. She wouldn’t collect all the towels, or make her bed, or put away clothes, or wash herself, or do much of anything anyone asked. You could ignore her, get in her face, or do something in between… no change. She once spent two weeks in her room, during the summer, missing all kinds of activities, for want of doing 15 minutes of family chores. All she had to do was say, “I’d like to be a part of this family and I want to show you by ____________” and then name and perform some basic chore she had been asked to do in the past, like vacuum the steps. I believe it was 16 days to be exact. (I might do that differently now, but who knows... nothing seemed to faze her one way or the other.)


She never, in over a decade, mastered scooping dog poop… therefore she never “graduated” off that job. Rather than change the bag regularly, she would fill the trash can heaping full of poop and then have to scoop it out and fill additional bags so the can could be emptied. That was a nasty, nasty job. Or she would let the bag fall down in the can and pile the poop on top, and then have to deal with it. This happened over, and over, and over, and yet she never approached it any differently. And don't think we didn't walk her through it over and over, because we did... it just didn't matter. This went on well into her teen years… no change.


She hit puberty and dealt with it (so to speak) for six months before I ever knew, and then I only learned by accident. Clearly I was the wrong mom to share that stuff with her. She never really “dealt” with it… but I won’t gross you out on that.


Until she got old enough that teachers actually started expecting something of her (and even then, it was variable) it was virtually impossible for me to stay out of her schooling as much as I would have liked. And it was a huge thorn to have to continually deal with her school issues. She would never tell me when lunch money was almost gone, and in the years she was in the same school as Steph, she would deplete the account and Steph would suffer as well. For years, I drove her 15-30 minutes each way to different schools, trying to find a place that would hold her accountable and motivate her. (Of course, this often meant paying additional monies as well.) At one of those schools, the principal made her scrape the lunch plates of her classmates to "motivate" her to bring in lunch money. That time it worked.