Harassment

Akila's class must recently have had a discussion on harassment. She now thinks she is the queen of calling out when she thinks someone is harassing. Yet she is totally oblivious to the fact that she is in fact the queen of harassment in our house. She is constantly harassing all of us, but especially the other 3 kids.

Today was day 6 of a 17 day winter break. Yes, 17 days. I know that must be making all of you sick to the stomach, like it does to me-unless you're a teacher. We had a PCA at the beginning of the week, but today was day 1 of 5 days with no PCA. Lord help me.

This is how the day goes: Akila brings all of her barbie doll stuff down into the living room to play. She wants to be as close to me as possible and I am usually in the kitchen area. She will not play them in her room- drives me nuts. The kids usually play in our pool room (a big family room with an indoor pool, which has been drained and is now our toy pit, with area rugs in it). Imani has been gone at a friends for two days, a kind of respite for her. The boys sometimes go up to their bedroom to play. When they are upstairs, they can get loud. They are boys. They horse around, wrestle, have fun. Akila can't stand it. She goes nuts every time they go upstairs and make any kind of noise. If Hezekiah jumps out of his bunkbed she loses it. She is constantly harping on me to go harp on them. Even when I explain to her that they are fine, there is no need for me to yell at them.

But this doesn't satisfy her. She gets extremely worked up, and decides to take the matter into her own hands- which means I have to intervene or she will go up and start a fight with them. This happened today at least 15 times, I think way more than that actually. They were playing quietly in the pool room at one point, and she went down there and was yelling at them for the way they were playing a game. Then she starts to accuse them of harassing her. This, after about 10 minutes of harassing them.

On Sunday, Akila was in the pool room with the kids when she started to accuse them of harassing her. They were telling her that she was the one who was harassing when she calls mom a stupid white woman. I have said the same thing to her, several times and tried to have a discussion about harassment. She never listens. But she did kind of listen to them and agreed with them. It was kind of cool. But I am still being called names, and so are they.

The part of the lesson from school that seemed to stick in her brain is that if you do or say something over and over again, it is harassment. So, when she starts to call me on harassment when I am giving her a direction, and repeating the instructions, I then point out to her that she just threatened to kill me three times in a row. Clear cut case of harassment. Not in her court of law. I lose every time.