Friend staying with me really isn’t going how I expected
I just want to vent in depth for a little bit, I don’t expect anyone to read all of this.
So my friend very very kindly offered to drive out (a full 24 hour drive) to come and stay with me for the next month and a half. I’m almost 38 weeks pregnant and I thought it would be nice to have some support and help around the house and not have to spend my first couple of weeks as a new mom all alone (my husband is currently deployed and won’t be back until late May at the very earliest).
Anyway, she has a service dog for a medical condition. Which would be fine if she were actually well trained, but she isn’t and it’s causing me and my cat a pretty heavy amount of stress. She keeps eating all of the cats food and drinking all of her water and won’t leave her alone when she hisses at her (a clear “leave me the fuck alone) and rather than trying to teach the dog to leave the cat alone, my friend asks my cat why she’s hissing 😑 The dog is also really rowdy and jumps on me, usually when I’m trying to eat but she’ll do it other times too. She also tries to eat the food that I’m eating and has ended up licking my food a few times already. She also jumped up on me and scratched me on the arm really bad yesterday. She barks at every tiny sound she hears and spends the entire night whimpering while my friend just tells her to shhh. And my friend let go of her leash the other day and she ended up chasing after a tiny chihuahua. I was also sorting through the baby’s clothes the other day while they were out and my friend let her dog come in with dirty paws and then she stepped all over the baby’s clothes and got some of them dirty and I had to scramble to pack everything back up. I know it isn’t the dogs fault but my friend does nothing to correct her and she doesn’t seem to care much about actually making sure she’s trained.
And on top of all that my friend is asking for accommodations like sleeping in my roommates bedroom in their bed (they’re also away right now), and when I told her no she asked if she could buy a futon mattress to put in there. I told her no to that too because first of all it’s not my room and that’s also the only safe spot the cat has away from the dog and I moved her food and water dish are in there so the dog can’t get to them. And I don’t want her dog jumping up on my roommates bed. She wants to sleep in there because she doesn’t like sleeping in the living room, apparently I wake her up when I go to the kitchen at night to get water. But it doesn’t matter that her dog wakes me in the middle of the night all the time apparently. And then she got upset and acted like it was unreasonable for me to say no. I also have to clean up after my friend because she doesn’t do her dishes or pick up her dirty laundry or her trash. It just accumulates on the living room floor and the coffee table. We both have some health issues so I understand that it can be hard to keep things clean and tidy but this is my home and she’s not been very respectful of it.
It’s just really not working out the way I hoped and it’s causing me unneeded stress and I’m worried about how her dog will be around the newborn baby that will be here in 2 weeks (give or take). I feel bad asking her to leave because she came all the way here to spend time with me and help me out but I just can’t deal with all of this when I already have so many other things to worry about. We talked about it yesterday and she said she’d stay until I have my baby and then go home instead of staying the full amount of time she planned to be here. I said we’d give it a few more days and if things don’t get better then I don’t think she can stay here. I feel so bad about it but it’s not what I expected at all. I just feel like my space has been completely taken over.
Achieve your health goals from period to parenting.