A Glimmer of Hope and The Black Eye

Well, Shandi has earned the first post of the blog. Sigh...

Shandi has been to hell and back over the past two years. Some of that ride to hell she willfully hitchhiked on the back of Satan's Harley with the searing heat at her back and the wind streaming through her hair, and some of it she did not.  Shandi is smart. And dumb. She is the smartest dumb person I've ever met in my entire life. With that being said, she is also a really good kid that has made one bad decision in her entire life.  Time will scab over the wound left by that decision, but most likely it will never heal.  That's another post for another time.

Shandi is also a bad-friend magnet. She attracts and is attracted to the most unsavory characters EVER. She feels sorry for them and befriends them. They use her, they argue, she gets a clue, and moves on to the next crappy friend. I cannot figure out for the life of me why she likes the company of crappy people, and I've long since quit trying to figure it out. It is what it is.

Recently though, she has been doing great. She works hard at her job, she goes to church without complaining, loves her new calling in Young Women, and is nicer to her brothers.   She is more tolerant of my nagging and pestering her about the small things, and overall is beginning to exhibit adult like qualities. A glimmer of hope for her future.

Fast forward to the black eye. Again, I sigh.

The most recent crappy friend never moved on when Shandi finally got her clue the girl was using her. She has been harassing her, stalking her, prank calling her, posting videos of her on YouTube, and trying to get her fired from her job. Shandi has absolutely handled this situation with the utmost of maturity, and I was (key word is was) so proud of her. The glimmer of hope was so bright... And then she came home with a black eye. On the sabbath.

Not that this is relevant to the story, but everyone stayed home sick from church on New Years Day. My first clue that something was amiss was when Shandi abruptly left the house at 9:30 pm to go to a friends house. I asked no questions, which I don't regret because then I would have just known in advance she had literally snapped and was going to meet the girl to beat the living daylights out of her.  It's so difficult to sit back and watch your children make mistakes that you absolutely without a doubt know will backfire right back at them at exactly the moment you thought they would.  When she came home at 11:30, she quietly came into our bedroom and announced that we were going to be mad at her. Then I saw the literal (I kid you not) footprint on the side of her head, which caused the black eye.  What.the.crap. Turns out that was nothing compared to her bloody swollen knuckles.  And that was nothing compared to what the other girls face looked like.

I am not a fighter. Apparently though, I have raised one heck of one.