Gas money?

Moms of teens, please help with some advice.

My daughter is almost 18. She doesn’t have her drivers license and doesn’t want to learn how to drive.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been off work with her younger siblings (still partially remote schooling here and daycares are only at 50% capacity in my area too, wait list is currently 2 years long at any decent care center, obviously will shrink as soon as they are allowed to reopen fully) and my SO was laid off for 6 months at the start of the pandemic.

Money got tight, we cut back on a lot of extras. We’re still making high payments now on credit cards because SO actually went 3 months without unemployment because it was so backed up, so extras are still out. Her dad does not pay child support so my SO’s income completely covers everything. I do have a side gig selling some stuff on Etsy but only make $120/week doing that. Not going back to work right now as I can’t even get childcare for the little ones at the moment.

She doesn’t think this is fair, she wants me to still buy all her friends birthday and Christmas gifts and pay for her to do things with them like going to the movies, roller skating, etc. I just couldn’t pay for one person to spend $30 at the movies every week while the rest of us don’t even have Netflix anymore. I get wanting to do normal teenage stuff, I really do, but it is not essential stuff and we are on a really tight budget. I told her that if she wanted money for extras right now, she needed to get a job, and in walking distance though obviously I’d drive her in bad weather.

So now she finally got a job, her first job, but it’s 13 miles away. She works 4-5 days a week. That’s up to 260 miles a week in gas with me driving her back and forth, not to mention the time, because she refuses to learn to drive. The gas money for this is NOT in my budget and I literally can’t cut anymore to make up for it! Her bio dad won’t help because she refuses to see him.

Would it be completely out of line to ask that she covers $15/week in gas expenses for driving back and forth?

EDit : I said SO WAS laid off, not currently. His income is support 3 kids right now though (her included), is covering all our bills, and our high credit card payments because we depended on them while he was laid off. That’s where the extra money is going right now. He did drive taxi under the table a bit for his brother in law while laid off but that didn’t come anywhere near to covering our expenses. Some things were locked in contracts (cable and internet, higher phone bills, etc) so I couldn’t immediately cut those expenses and we certainly didn’t plan for the pandemic to affect things this long.

And no, I’m not going to kill myself working overnight and caring for children all day so that she can buy her friends presents.