There are some people for whom “he needed killing” should be a legitimate defense.
Jesus. You know what? I got nothin’.
My wife had a guy her father basically took in do that. He spent down all their savings, loaded up their credit cards and then couldn’t understand why everyone else in the family hated him. They didn’t kill anyone though, just got my father-in-law evicted. And yea, my wife would love to see the guy put away somewhere for what he did to her dad.
It feels morbid to even “joke” about, but my cousin totally wet the bed till pretty late in childhood and absolutely killed a shit ton of small animals and large insects as a kid (he loved blowing up those giant Louisiana grasshoppers–seriously those things are like 4" long–with M80s). Of course he winds up being totally bugshit crazy.
That sucks about your father-in-law, @Scuzz :(. People can be fucking horrid.
After doing all that I suppose your lucky he wasn’t a mass murderer.
I’m not even technically allowed to post in this thread.
My immediate and extended family is totally awesome.
If anything, I am the black sheep, although I normalized quite a few years ago when I realized I was mortal.
Ooh, I have one like this.
I have three kids. Connor, 20, Caitlin, 18 and Odin, 5 (family 2.0).
My mother (their grandmother) has seen Connor twice (once when he was two weeks old), Caitlin once (when she was about five), and has never met Odin.
She was given plenty of opportunities to see them and spend time with them. She made up bullshit excuses for why she could not (like the time she said she was up all night with a migraine and could not come to visit even though we made special arrangements for her and Connor had to miss his baseball game). She now lives in the Florida panhandle with terrible service and is technologically illiterate. It’s very likely she’s never even seen a picture of these kids on Facebook.
I still talk to her a few times a year. For some reason.
Hey, you want to hear something nuts? My two kids’ names are Connor and Caitlin.
You realize, of course, that the next child must be named Odin.
So there’s another (moderately) funny story about my kids’ names. One day when my daughter was just a few months old, my son was watching Thomas the Tank Engine, like you do. I was only half paying attention but there were these two really fast train engines whizzing around Thomas and his friends, and they finally stop and introduce themselves. I half hear this and go, wait what? So I back it up and sure enough, the two trains say “Hi, I’m Connor!” “And I’m Caitlin!”
Yeah, I saw that episode! There is a little crank truck named Odin if you watch to the end.
No, not really. But that is pretty freaky. I know they collect stats on most popular name in a given year, but i wonder if anyone has collected any stats on names that go well together.
That’s so cool! I assume, of course, that your Connor is named for Connor MacLeod as well?
Ha, I’m afraid my reason is kind of boring - those two names were pretty much the only names my wife and I both liked for a boy and a girl. We went through a lot of names.
Connor is the name I often give to my character in a video game. It goes back to the Kings Quest 7 hero.
I often use Connor of Scuzz. :)
I’ve been disassociated from my dad for many years now.
My mother was his first wife. When I was in college they called me up and told me about something that came up during marriage counseling. I wasn’t surprised to learn that he had slept with at least a couple hundred women at that point.
Fast forward to marriage number two, let’s just call her Betty since that was her name. She tried to sleep with me before the marriage, and when I told him about it, he basically shrugged his shoulders. After that marriage blew up, her kids got his substantial pension in the divorce settlement, my sister and I were the beneficiaries initially. Then she drank herself to death within a couple years, in her 40s.
Marriage number three which was to a nice woman, let’s just call her Judy since that is her name. That ended when dad and her son, out on the left Coast, divulged to her that they were seeing hookers together, doing crack and smoking dope. He was in his early 70s at the time. I thought crack should kill you if you’re in your 70s but apparently not.
He’s still alive at age 86, having outlived my mother who died in early February. This is the tip of the iceberg and there would be more to be revealed if I cared to. But my brain is dirty now and I need to air it out.
I understand the feeling. Be strong.
Thank you Rich :). I’ve been dealing with this going on (ok I know how old this makes me sound but remember I only grew up recently) 7 decades.
Lots of time to reflect on the damage done to our family, plus the rest of that iceberg is that my Dad was responsible for the drowning death of my little brother Dimitri in Jamaica back in ‘68. He’d be 56 now.
My point is that when we finally broke ties completely about 10 years ago, I think that’s when the healing began for me. Or went as far as it’s going to go.
I’ve had friends or others hear this and say, you should forgive him. Or reconcile while he’s alive for your own good. To which I say, for me anyway, these are things that are unforgivable, in this lifetime. Until you’ve walked a mile in another man’s shoes …
(not me, but…)
For years, the weirdest one-sentence precis of a family gone off the rails was something a co-worker told me in 1989 or so: “Our brothers used to beat us up and fuck us.”
That still tops the list for horrid.
But last year, a friend of mine told me, “I was five years old the first time my mother told me, ‘You will be a consort to kings!’”