She’s Not Allowing Her Stepdaughter In Her Home Anymore Because Her Stepdaughter Has Lice And Refuses To Cut Her Hair To Take Care Of The Issue
This woman married Matt three years ago, and they dated for three years before marriage. She had their daughter four months ago, and Matt has a 13-year-old daughter, Anna, from a previous relationship.
Anna adores her half-sister and always wants to spend time with her. A month ago, Anna held the baby for a while and handed her back. Moments later, she noticed a lice bug in the baby’s hair.
“I immediately panicked and asked my stepdaughter if she had head lice. She starts dodging the question, so I look for myself, and she is loaded. If I had been more observant before this moment, I am sure I would have caught it or seen the signs,” she said.
However, since giving birth, she hasn’t been focusing on much else aside from her baby. She spoke to Matt about the situation, and he asked his ex if she’d noticed the lice. Anna’s biological mother admitted that she’d been aware of the lice for several weeks and that she combed Anna’s hair and did a treatment to get rid of it.
Since Anna’s hair is incredibly thick and long, reaching her hips, she knew Anna needed more than one lice treatment and combing to solve the issue. She spent $80 on lice treatment and used the products on Anna’s hair.
Afterward, she combed Anna’s hair for nearly three hours but had to do more treatments to eliminate the rest of the lice. Matt helped wash and comb Anna’s hair. She communicated this with Matt’s ex and ensured Anna brought lice treatment products to her biological mother’s house when she had custody.
Matt is in the military, and he was home when they first discovered Anna had lice. He left for a two-month deployment three days later. Two weeks ago, over the weekend, Anna came back to her house, and she noticed the lice was back and as bad as before the treatments. She asked Anna if her mother had combed through and checked her hair.
“She shrugged and said, ‘A little.’ I told her at this point that she needed to cut her hair. There’s no way I can get rid of it or at least manage it properly with her hair being this long and this thick. She immediately said no (she’s fond of her hair, and I don’t blame her; it’s beautiful),” she explained.
Before this conversation, she’d repeatedly asked Anna to cover her hair or wear it in a ponytail or bun. Anna rejected these ideas and claimed that wearing her hair up causes migraines. While she didn’t want to be in the position where the only option was for Anna to cut her hair, she had no other ideas since Anna and her biological mother weren’t doing anything else to resolve the problem.
Minerva Studio – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
In response, she bluntly told Anna that she couldn’t allow her to be around the baby while she had lice. Her baby’s head is fragile and still has a soft spot, so she couldn’t use a lice comb on her baby or any other lice treatment. She told Anna that if she didn’t agree to cut her hair, she couldn’t spend time with the baby because, in her view, this was a reasonable compromise.
During the conversation, she lectured Anna that she was at the age where she should be combing through her hair by herself, so she advised that she do that from now on. Anna was furious and marched off to her bedroom. Thirty minutes later, Anna’s mom called her in a rage.
“Her mother stated that I’m ‘ignorant’ to try forcing her kid to chop her hair off over an issue that they are ‘taking care of’ and said, ‘These things take time, but you’d rather traumatize her, ruin her self-image, and threaten to keep the baby away from her instead of be an actual parent and help,” she shared.
She chose not to respond to this verbal attack and hung up. After the phone call, she updated Matt on what was happening and said he needed to deal with the situation. She told him Anna wasn’t allowed at their house until her lice were gone because she couldn’t risk the baby getting lice.
Over the last two months, Anna’s mother only used a treatment once and combed Anna’s hair twice, forcing her to do the rest of the work while she was feeding and caring for a baby. Anna doesn’t only have a “‘few bugs'” in her hair.
When she initially combed through Anna’s hair, the comb was filled with lice, which fell onto the floor and her. In her view, Anna’s lice was a sign of neglect. Because Anna’s mom was unemployed, she had no reasonable excuse not to fix the problem.
Matt was furious because Anna enjoyed coming to the house to spend time with the baby even while he was deployed, so he thought it was unfair for her not to allow Anna at the house anymore. Others familiar with the issue are angry and have accused her of distancing herself from Anna and “‘replacing'” her with a baby.
What advice would you give her?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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