Okay, this has been a long time coming. I just need to get through it and put it down on theoretical paper. I will try to keep it in chronological order, but most events I found out about after the fact from concerned parties. There have been a lot of concerned parties. I also found some scattered notes in her room, while I was cleaning it out that added some additional clarification.
First, she went to school on her birthday. I went to pick her up for an orthodontist appointment around lunch time. I was intercepted in the school parking lot by the principal and school psychologist. They informed me that my oldest had me barred from the school and removed any and all permissions I may have had in the past. She left without any of her belongings and most importantly left without any of her medications. Remember, she was on medication for ADHD, a nightmare destroying pill and an anti-psychotic. It was quite the cocktail to go cold turkey on.
She had apparently arranged to live with a friend’s family. This friend had graduated the previous year. This was after asking and being rebuked by multiple families, including her boyfriend’s. I found a thank you note she wrote to a family (not the one she ended up with), which was telling that she would be out of their hair after her boyfriend got a job to get her an apartment. Not that she would be getting a job, or anything, but her boyfriend. This family owned a winery outside of town and had some animals. Her sister and I heard that the police and ambulance were called out there several times while she lived there. I also know that there were two ambulance calls as our insurance was charged for the ambulance visits.
Originally, she told everyone we were just overbearing and refused to let her learn how to be an adult. We had an entire team of specialists that can tell you just how backwards that story was, but apparently nobody needed to reach out to them to find out. Eventually everyone realized that she does not want to be an adult. They tried to push her to get a job, but to this day she still does not have a job.
Once everyone learned that her original story was not true and that she needed treatment and medication to be functional, they called us and basically told us that they were tricked. They asked us to fix this. However, her being 18, there was not really anything we could do that would not continue to push her away from us. Our therapists told us we basically have to wait for her to realize that she had it good with us and that the plan we had was probably the best life plan she could ever handle. This plan was after graduation, she would move into an adult group home where they would help her get a job and figure out daily tasks. That way she would not have to fight with us all the time and would have more freedom and hopefully our relationship could improve.
While cleaning through her room, we found her “Wedding Planning Binder”. It has become clear to me that she thought her and her boyfriend were going to graduate, get married and then he would take care of her. You know, continue what she was doing at our house, but as a “wife”. She had made him countless lists of foods that she enjoys and that he should cook for her. She made no such list as to what she would contribute to this relationship.
I am supposing that her boyfriend did not want to get married straight out of high school. His parents were divorced, so I do not think they would have been keen on a teenage marriage either. About the time that the family she was staying with was getting tired of her sitting around being a mooch, she was getting very upset with her boyfriend. She was probably pressuring him and he declined. She made threats of harming herself or even killing herself. Her boyfriend did what he should and told his mom. His mom called 911. My oldest was furious. We heard from his mother that our daughter tried to turn their friends against him and when that failed, he broke up with her!
This is the part where everyone called us demanding to have her picked up for a psych hold. She had been off her meds for about 4 months at this time. Her new plan after being dumped was to go live with her birth mother across the country. How would she get there? She had no money and no documents. We mailed the documents to the school, since we could not go there. We sent them during the first month after she left, but at the time we did not know who she was living with. She apparently never received them and has sent us threatening messages about it, but I bet she threw it away once she saw it was from us. Without her meds, she would not even remember something like that.
Our oldest needed to cross the country to live with her birth mother, who we visited the year before for a couple hours. The girls had no memory of their mother as they had not seen her since they were babies. At one time they were told she was dead. Due to the pandemic and just the mental state of the girls we could not get a visit until last year.
How was she going to get there? Her online boyfriend! Apparently while trying to marry her high school boyfriend, she met a military 20-something online and was dating him as well! They are apparently engaged to be engaged at this point in time with the plan to move to the south. She is already planning on being pregnant!
Currently she is living with her birth mom, her soon to be ex-husband, and their three children and a bunch of cats and dogs. From my youngest, I have heard that the birth mom is divorcing her husband, eventually. The children do not attend school because they missed so much, they were kicked off the bus route. Birth mom and my oldest are driving while unlicensed. The husband quit working. They apparently live in a sketchy neighborhood where she has to have pepper spray and a taser to walk around.
We did talk to birth mom about this before our oldest even contacted her. We told her that she has mental health issues and needs treatment and medication. We also tried to make her have our oldest graduate before leaving. Birth mom promised to do all these things if she was contacted. She was contacted and now our oldest is a high school drop out who plans to marry a man she met online and has spent a total of a day with. (He only drove her a short distance between the family she was staying with and the birth mom’s husband did the majority of the drive.)
Our oldest’s narrative since being with birth mom has completely changed. She has accused us of some very dark and horrible things and birth mom believes her. Neither of them will talk to us any more. Both birth mom and our oldest are trying to convince our youngest to run off as well and come live with them.
They currently do not have enough money for food as my youngest tells me. Birth mom is working in a pizzeria and is going to use the money to go visit a friend in a different state. The husband is no longer working. Our oldest says she is waiting to get a job until after she gets married and moves. Apparently the birth mom has been getting money from the abusive grandparents her entire adult life. She had our oldest call grandma and now grandma is possibly paying for some insurance. We do not know for sure as it seems they are trying to hide things from our youngest.
Our oldest who was deeply traumatized by these grandparents, is now forced to talk to them in order to have money to live. She even accused the grandfather of raping her. This is probably the biggest failure that I feel about this situation. It was not our failure. She had all of her needs met when she lived with us and was in our care.
Birth mom herself has told us how horrible her parents were to her growing up and that is why she ran off from them. After telling us what horrible people they were, she then told us she thought they would be different to her daughters. That is why she left them with her. At least that is the story she told us. And them when we met her last year. She thought these incredibly abusive people would treat her children better and so she left them with her own abusers.
She also told us that she was no longer talking to them, but we never believed her because the next time we would talk to her she would tell us that she was again going to stop talking to them “for real” this time. I did not know that she was still financially dependent on them. I assumed her husband made enough for her to be a stay at home wife. They had to depend on the grandparents all this time to run their house.
Now our oldest that needs stability, routine and consideration in order to be successful is living in a home dependent on all the biggest causes of trauma in her life.
She is 18. It is her life. I cannot really do anything any more. I can still be sad. I had hoped for so much more for her. We are not mom and dad any more. She just calls us by our names when she talks to her sister.
Parenting is hard.
Mother of Trauma 
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