Work has been sort of stressful for me lately. This past Saturday I volunteered to stay an extra hour since I was one of 2 out of 4 staff that could drive. So I told the shift leader that I would stay and take 4 girls off-campus to the monster truck pit party, where they would meet and get autographs from the truck drivers and motorcycle daredevils. It should have been an easy and fun thing to do.
However, as we're standing in line at the Assembly Hall, one of the girls begins to hit, jokingly, one of her peers. I politely ask her to stop because it a huge no-no for them to horseplay because it often leads to fist-fights with CCH clients. She then turns to me and punches me in the stomach. She then proceeds to get in my face and tell me that I'm not her mother and I can't tell her what to do. My response was, "No, I'm not your mother, but I am your staff and you need to follow directions when staff give them to you, especially in public." Her response was that she didn't want to come anyway.
I then gave her an ultimatum: I take her back to the unit, or she behaves. She spent the rest of the time being sour, but the horseplay was finished.
Today at work, nearly the exact same thing happened. I'm watching a movie with her and another one of her peers. She starts hitting her peer, I tell her to stop, she ignores me and then eventually tells me again that she doesn't have to listen to me. She then tries to horseplay with me and I give her a similar ultimatum, which would be a room restriction program for 24 hours. She attempts to calm down, throwing glares over her shoulder at me.
She then starts sucking her thumb, but she is 14-years-old, and knows that one of her goals is to work on not doing that out in the milieu. I politely ask her to go and wash her hands because that is how germs are spread. She walks over to me and wipes her hand, including the wet thumb that was just in her mouth, on my shirt. She stood there waiting for me to react.
I pretended that I didn't care all that much, knowing that she likes to feed on other people's anger, asked her to step out of my space, and placed all of my focus on the movie that we were watching. Lucky for me and the anger I truly felt inside, she walked away as if nothing had happened.
Apparently, I'm her new target. Sometimes these kids will choose a certain staff to test their limits, how far they can go so to speak, before getting into a lot of trouble. It appears as though I'm "it" for this girl for the time being. She has really gotten under my skin the past couple of times I've worked. But I know how important it is to not lose my cool in front of them, especially those that feed off of that emotion, like she does.
I truly think that it has a lot to do with how much I've been working the past 1 1/2 months. I'm glad to finally have work off, for the rest of the week, since 2nd semester classes start for me tomorrow. I can only hope that she does not continue to act this way toward me when I go back to work...
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