Monday, January 3, 2011

Getting Mom's Attention

As the Nurse Practitioner at her physician's office was examining her knee, Daughter went into a long speech about how I was so busy and this was taking time away from my work and she wasn't worth time away from my work. I assured her she was worth my time, but added that there were better ways of getting Mom's attention. She made a comment that this time the injury she was claiming was real.
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Her knee is bruised and swollen, but by the time we got back to the church, she was walking on it almost normally. I think it will hurt her when she doesn't want to do something, but won't interfere with things she wants to do. She did get x-rays on the knee, and NP said if we didn't hear anything, there wasn't a problem. She did not anticipate there being a problem.
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Whenever she injures herself I find myself wondering if it's an intentional act designed to get my attention. I don't think it was this time, as her tears seemed genuine, and the injury is obvious. She seemed unhappy about missing bowling this morning. She had been quite proud of herself this morning about how well she handled getting dressed and out the door. With Daughter, though, I can never be sure. Hopefully she didn't get enough attention to make her want to fall down the stairs again.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Although I'm a functional adult now, I do have PTSD from being abused as a child (and possible BPD? Not so convinced on that one, as now I have a great career and stable marriage of many years). But anyways, about the injuries. When I was younger, unregulated and spinning out of control, I would get myself injured quite a bit. It wasn't to get attention, but I wanted a different pain to distract me from my emotional pain. It just so happened, sometimes I would only have a minor injury, a mild distraction, but sometimes I'd end up with something that would need a trip to the doc to get bandaged up, etc. I just wanted to throw that out there as another possible motivation for your daughter's injuries.

Reverend Mom said...

Thank you, that's helpful perspective.