In March of 2009, circumstances landed both my daughter and I under the same roof for the first time since she was two years old. On her part, the circumstances were that her mother was about two inches from having her committed to whatever facility they had in Orlando where parents send kids they Simply Cannot Deal With, and being suddenly uprooted and shipped off to a tiny little shitburg in Oklahoma seemed like a better idea than basically having her locked up.
One thing I noticed right from the get-go — something I hadn’t noticed during the various visitations I’d had with her and her brother over the years — was that she seriously lacked any respect for anything. I tried working on it, making a point to be precisely what her mother wasn’t (at least according to my daughter), but that pretty much ended the moment I caught her out in a particularly egregious bit of wrongdoing. Of course, by this time she was over eighteen, making most courses of action less than effective.