I hope you win!

[RWS]

I had a terrible relationship with my dad when I was a teen.  He was the last person I wanted to spend time with.   

[wizer]

That is the part wizer doesn't understand.    Teenagers do not sit around wanting to hang with parents. I have told wizer countless times to not take it personal, altho as a parent i understand how hard it is not to.  A parent is the last person a teenager WANTS to hang out with, no matter how cool that parent is. I was the coolest parent on earth! (LOL) but my kids didn't WANT to start hanging out with me until they turned 18!  And even then it was surprising that they really DID want to hang wit me!  lmao

I understand it, I guess I don't want to accept it, that's all. I had big plans for these kids when they were born..now, years later...the realization that there are many, many things that I did with my dad as a kid..just aren't going to happen with them, and of course it's worse than that, at the moment not only do neither of them want to spend time with me, they don't even want to speak to me. That's not "quite" the same thing as your typical teen rebellion. But I get what you guys are saying, and I realize that I am just going to have to back off and let things run their course without trying to force the issue. Like Jade said to me recently..it's like a relationship where the guy was "dumped" by the girlfriend, and yet he continues to chase after her. It only makes matters worse...and the same applies to my father-daughter relationship. I am just going to back off, although I am still going to work on the legal end of things...for whatever good that will do.

[theWiz]

I think GW hit the nail on the head.  You are stressed so little things get to you.

I sometimes listen to this AM radio show in the afternoons.  The host takes callers and around half of them ask him how he's doing.  He typically gives them a terse reply of "do you really care"?  Sometimes he says "fine" but it's laced in disdain.  You can tell he hates having the callers ask him that.  I think some ask him just to **** him off.

LOL, many years ago there was an AM radio deejay in Chicago named John Landecker, who had a very successful Sunday evening show called "Boogie Check."  He would take a few requests and play a few songs, but mostly the thing was that people would call in to have their boogie 'checked."  He would talk with them no more than forty seconds or so, then come up with some trenchant and succinct comment about their boogie, and terminate the call.  Sometimes he would do it in five seconds or less.  I knew a lot of people who were ADDICTED to listening to the show, and some clowns would call in week after week in hopes of finally having their boogie check 'positive.'