Ten minutes ago I went into my 14-year-old daughter’s bedroom and asked if I could see her reading project. The reading project that she was only halfway done with when her father picked her up yesterday afternoon. The reading project that is due tomorrow morning – first period. The reading project that she told her father she had finished earlier today.
Well guess what…it’s not done. I knew that it was not done the second I asked to see it, and rather than just get up and hand it to me, she said, “Why do you need to see it?”
She is supposed to have written a month-long diary from the point of view of the main character in Slake’s Limbo by Felice Holman. When she left here yesterday, she had written 14 of the 30 required diary entries. At her dad’s house she was supposed to compose the other 16 entries and then copy everything neatly into a composition book that her character is using for a diary. Notice I said ‘was supposed to’. What she actually did at her father’s house was write ONE more diary entry and copy maybe 10 of the ones she’d already written into the journal. To say that I am not very happy right now is the biggest understatement in the history of the world. It is 10:30pm, we have to be up at 5:45am (a little over 7 hours from now), and she is not even half finished.
What gets me the most…well, actually there are two things. The first is that she lied to me…again. Her dad called me earlier to make arrangements to drop her off this evening, and told me that she had finished the project. At that announcement, I asked to speak with her so that I could hear for myself that it was done. She got on the phone and assured me repeatedly that it was finished. HA. The second thing that is annoying the living crap out of me right now is that she has been home FOR THREE HOURS and did not once get the thing out of her backpack and work on it. I’m not sure when she was planning to finish it – if she was planning to finish it at all. She can’t seem to give me an answer, either.
So what has my daughter been doing for the last 3 hours in lieu of working on her crucial-to-her-Reading-grade project, you ask? She’s been in her room, headphones on, listening to a CD. She’s developed an obsession – and I do not use that word lightly – with the band Evanescence lately, and wants to do nothing more than listen to their CDs or look up information about them on the internet. I guess it’s an Asperger’s thing…
So for the next week, my daughter is going to be a not-so-happy camper. I have confiscated her CD player and her Evanescence CD’s. I guess I’ll decide whether or not I’ll let her dad know that she lied to him when I see how late I have to stay up tonight waiting for her to finish this project…