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I recently moved into a house with my sister after her relationship ended(new lease not her home). We both have adult children who live with us. My daughter is 20 and my nephew is 22. Since we moved in about 3 months ago, issues have come up to do with my nephew and his behavior. My sister has a room with its own bathroom and I share a bathroom with my daughter and nephew. Not long after we moved in I noticed that my nephew would leave drops of urine on the floor and sometimes toilet seat. I told my sister about this and she said that she would talk to him but didn't seem surprised. Apparently this issue had been a point of tension with her ex partner when they lived with him. The second incident involved us coming home to find my nephew smoking weed at the side of the house - right by the neighbors fence. My sister talked to him about it and he got angry and took off saying that he was going to stay at his grandparents for a couple of weeks (he couldn't see what the problem was). I was really anxious about this because we live in a really nice neighborhood and I was sure that someone would have reported this to the police or landlord. Luckily no one has but the risk was there.
The next incident involved my nephew turning on the drier in the garage entrance way at 5 am. It sounds like the drier is in the room with me because I am right beside that space of the house so I got up and told him that he had woken me and that he needs to be more organised. He apologized but later that night when he came home he refused to talk to me, picked up some things and left the house making a point of saying goodbye to his mother and not me. I later found that he had gone number 2 in the toilet and left it there. This is when me and my sister had words about it and while she acknowledge that it was not okay she also said things like, 'this is just part of learning to share a house', and (when I showed her the toilet), 'Oa look I'll flush it, I'm sure he didn't mean to'.
We share cooking and dish washing chores in our house and my nephew often leaves part of his job undone like leaving pots unwashed or leaving dishes for others to dry and put away or just not doing the dishes at all. My sister has instructed me to leave the dishes for as long as it takes for him to do them but that makes using the kitchen unpleasant and doesn't really address the problem. I have said no to doing this and my sister has since said that she feels it is me that see's this in a certain way and that she is ok with the way things are because she just goes with the flow. As God is my witness out of all the people in our family she is the one person who has never been able to go with our flow, sets the strongest boundaries on being asked to help because we need to learn to look after ourselves etc. Plus, I hear my sister getting angry with him about these same things, or more so since I have been raising these issues. To me my sister is labeling inconsistent rules as 'going with the flow'.
Part of me knows this isn't right and another part wonders if I am over reacting. It would be great to get some perspective so if anyone could share some insight, I would really appreciate it. Particularly as I have just said to my sister that I feel she knew that this would be an issue and that I feel she knowingly created this situation (I know in truth I made the decision to move in but I just feel 'duped').
When my nephew did this {when he was around 9 or 10 years old} his mother started to sprinkled drops of water on the toilet seat when she was pretty sure it was about time for him to do #2.
He screamed bloody murder when he sat on that wet seat, thinking he just sat on someone else's pee. LOL
Jayerdu - I agree with you and in the beginning I really just felt shocked I guess that it happened at all and I while we are family we've always lived in separate houses so this would be the first time I've ever had to address anything like this. Part of me finds it awkward and part of me feels resentful that this is an issue at all.
To be fair though, I lost my husband at a young age and raised a child alone and got a degree and built a career so through that I had to be very focused on teaching my daughter why it is important to be responsible, particularly because at that time my family felt it was important for me to pick myself up with little help so, I guess I feel like I did that, it was really hard, but it resulted in my daughter being quite a strong independent person who has had to be considerate and mindful of others. So, to be honest, sitting in the background of all these details is the feeling that I'm having to do for my sister what she didn't put effort into when she was raising her son. Geez, maybe I need to go to family counselling or something. Or just bite the bullet and take responsibility for teaching my nephew some things....
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