Jme enjoys making short digital films. She had a cheap little video camera that did this, and she has collected hundreds of short clips of people around her doing whatever. Her toy camera broke a couple of months ago, and so she has been using our digital video camera, recording onto the memory card and downloading to her computer.
Jme came back from her travels on Thursday. She’d been gone for two weeks, and that’s a long time for her to be gone, given the tenuous state of our new family. She’s already been fourteen years raising herself. She doesn’t need to be on her own any more. She had been staying with her cousin in town and going to the fair. While she was gone we cringed whenever we wondered how she was or what she was up to.
Almost as soon as she was home, one of Jme’s “friends” named Ave came over. Ave has been here in the bush all summer, but she wasn’t in our school last year so we don’t know her that well. Everything we have been told is that she is trouble, so we weren’t exactly thrilled to see her show up at our door. Nonetheless, they hung out for the afternoon.
After dinner, Wifey and I put the boys for bed for the night and went over to a neighbor’s house to visit for a while. We told Jme where we’d be and told her that her only responsibility was to grab the boys in case there was a fire. We left her and Ave in the house while we were out. When we got back an hour and a half later, the first thing we noticed was how much perfume was in the room. They had dosed themselves up. Jme asked if she could spend the night over at Ave’s house. Wifey said no, that this was her first night home after two weeks away, and that she didn’t want Jme to stay out another night. Jme was pissed and sullen the rest of the night. She hardly said a word.
On Friday, Ave came back over again and they hung out together for most of the afternoon. Jme asked if Ave could stay overnight at our house. Wifey agreed. They spent that night in Jme’s room with the door closed. They only came out to get more snacks, and they ate something like an full Sam’s sized box of those chewy cookie granola bars. We were like, “What the heck?”
Today after they got up, sometime after noon, they asked to go out to Ave’s house for the afternoon and Wifey drove them out there and dropped them off. After Wifey returned home again, she picked up our video camera that Jme has been using. Wifey started to peruse the video clips to see what the girls had been filming. As it turns out, there was a lengthy clip of the two of them in Jme’s room, getting high, dangling a baggie of weed in front of the camera, and making plans to go over to Ave’s house later and smoke more. Wifey called me over to show me. We sat and watched the clip together several times over in disbelief and disappointment. As we began to recall the two previous day, we realized she and Ave got high in our house on Thursday evening while we were out, while she was watching our boys. They got high again Friday afternoon before they came in for the night. I immediately drove out to pick her up again and bring her back home.
This evening, we sat her down for a talk. We were at a bit of a loss and not sure how to approach her. She was pretty clammed up. She couldn’t ever bring herself to show any real remorse or to apologize. She wouldn’t acknowledge that she’d done anything wrong. Wifey did a great job during this confrontation. She told Jme how disappointed we were, but how much we loved her, cared about her, and expected so much better for her.
We don’t have much experience with “grounding” a kid for punishment. More than anything, we just want to make sure she is safe from the influences of others and from her own poor choices. She’s grounded all right, and we’re wondering if she will ever be “un-grounded” again. Can we ground her ‘til she’s twenty-one? Until Jme can find something to say about this, until she can apologize, until she can earn some trust back, she has lost those freedoms she has enjoyed so far.
