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I have had repeated problems with these people and I'm done, but my daughter and their daughter are best friends and I just feel bad for the girls. Here's the situation. Over the weekend, I took both girls shopping for 8th grade graduation dresses. We go into Kohl's and the girls take off to the junior section to try on dressing while I shop around. They make their choices and proceed to the register where my daughter's friend says she has a $100 gift card and she has a coupon for a 30% discount. She tells me daughter give me your stuff and I'll get the discount pay and then your mom can give me cash. I meet them at the register when the transaction is done and the explain to me what they did and I so I gave her the money for my daughter's stuff. The next morning I get an angry phone call from the girl's step-father yelling at me about allowing his step-daughter to pay with his card without even calling him. I tried to explain to him that the girls had done it before I made up to the register and didn't understand what the big deal was giving her cash for the gift card. He was SCREAMING at me, cussing at me (he used the F-word), and called me stupid and hang up. Now mind, I know this man. He is from the same small town as I am and I am very familiar with who he is. He's a jerk. He's an alcoholic and a drug addict to who got sober supposedly and met my daughter's friend's mother in AA (she to being an addict and alcoholic). He is a bully and has two ex-wives who have said he is abusive both physically and verbally. I was in shock that a man who was not my husband, not related to me at all, and who does not even know me would speak to me this way. Then I became furious because I am a single mom with no "man" to come to my defense and that is precisely why this man thought he could intimidate and bully me. I called him back and yelled at him, telling him he could not intimidate me or bully me. That I didn't know what his problem was, but it was inappropriate and unacceptable for him to speak to me this way and I would for sure being warning the other moms whose daughter's spend time with his step-daughter and then I hung up. His wife immediately texted me an apology for how her husband had behaved. Long story short, I found out that what my daughter's friend had called, in her exact words, "a $100 gift card" was actually her step-father's Kohls credit card. I understood at the point why he would be upset at what he perceived was me using his credit card on my daughter. Still didn't justify how he spoke to me or the fact that he was screaming in rage at me because I wasn't even part of the transaction as his daughter and my daughter did without me getting to the register. However, I would have apologized for my daughter's part in it. I called the wife and explained her that her daughter had misled me and my daughter and we thought it was a gift card. I didn't know if her daughter purposefully misled or not, but that was the case.
The problem is that this isn't the first time this girl has misled or flat out lied to me and her mom and step-dad and gotten me into hot water in the process. She's told me she has had her parents permission to do stuff and what she does is she leaves out details about what is going on. For example, I drop my daughter and a group of friends off at amusement park and pick them up later in the day. They stay together as a group and check in with their cellphones. All the parents are okay with dropping them and all have been the mom to drop them off and pick them up. This girl was invited to do and said her mom said she could go only to find later her mom didn't know there were no parents staying at the park the whole day. They find out later and act as though I knew they wouldn't like that and I dropped her off anyway. I've taken her to the movies only to bring her home and be told we wanted her home by 10 and it was 10:45. Nobody told me that, we ate first and saw a later movie so sorry. Stuff like that over and over.
So after this latest situation, I've pretty much decided that my daughter isn't going to be spending a lot of time with her anymore. Problem is I feel bad. This girl is a very unhappy girl stuck in a very unhappy home. She has never said her step-dad is physically abusive, but she has told me he had backed her brother up against a wall and was screaming in his face and he has behaved that way towards her. She's afraid of him. And her mother seems to be afraid of him as well. We had invited this girl to go on vacation with us in July and her mom has said yes, but now I just don't know if I need the stress of taking this child with me knowing that I will probably do something they won't approve of. I just feel like I'm leaving this little girl in this environment without trying to help her. I want to protect my daughter and myself (because these people seem dead set on making me out to be some sort of bad parent), but I don't want this girl to feel abandoned. Her and her brother lived with their dad who got custody of them in the divorce because their mom was on drugs. She cleaned herself up and wanted custody back. She married got pregnant "accidentally" (at the age of 38) by the loser she's with now and had to marry him. Then ripped her kids away from their dad and their friends in the town they lived in their whole lives to move in with this guy. Since then this girl has felt ignored and abandoned. They had the baby and it's all about the baby and they make the girl take care of the baby all of the time because mom's too tired or step-dad has to leave. They never come to school functions because of "the baby." I give the girl a ride to school every morning and pick her and her brother up (along with my daughter) from practices and school activities. They NEVER do any of that stuff EVER. If they ever gave my daughter a ride anywhere, I would die from shock.
I told the mom and the step-dad over the weekend that if their daughter is lying to them, then the problem is theirs not mine and they need to address that at home and quit trying to blame me or my daughter. I fear they may use everything I've said to them to punish their daughter. I just don't know what to do. I feel so sorry for her.
Sorry this so long. I'm just really sad and frustrated for this girl.
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