The younger sister of my son who is in a psychiatric facility is escalating her own destructive, anti-social, control issue behaviors. I know that part of the problem, at the moment, is her grief over her birth brother, and part of it involves stepping up to the plate to fill the vacuum caused by his void from our family.

We’ve had several mornings where she purposefully dresses inappropriately for school and then has a rage when told to go change her clothes. Screaming a lie to me, at the top of her lungs, “But I don’t have anything else to wear!”

What bullspit. She has a full closet and three dressers loaded down with clothes. When I calmly point that out, she chooses to slam into her room, throwing stuff everywhere, and refusing to go to school. She’s only ten years old, this isn’t PMS.

She does this at the last minute. I have no time to wait as we have early morning tutoring so I leave her at home with Grandma, dreading having to return home and deal with her control issues. She knows that not going to school controls MY time. I can’t physically drag her kicking and screaming into the building, well I can, but the school would just call me to come pick up an out-of-control child.

She’s lost all her privileges here; no computer time, no Nintendo nor TV on the weekends. She has her own room since she’s so contentious that no one wants to be with her.

Last night they lost the soccer game and she yelled at all the other team, “I HATE you!” and told the daughter of the coach, “You’re a crappy goal keeper!”

I apologized for her as she’d stormed off hatefully; I told them that’s why a therapist comes to our home three times a week. I’m going to make her write a letter of apology to the coach and his sweet daughter who looked as if she’d been slapped last night by those ugly words she’d heard from my daughter.

This letter of apology will take days to write and will involve time-outs and rages. She always rages when her behavior is corrected or she doesn’t get her ill-considered way. I’m guessing it’ll take ten years of therapy to get any empathy into her. Fortunately we have a superb therapist who’s insightful, brilliant and understands all these adoption issues.