I just dipped into this thread for the first time, because I thought my family was nutso. Holy cow, I got nothing.
I think hal9000’s dad might be bill brasky.
To Bill Brasky!!
Did I ever tell you about the time Hal9000’s dad went hunting? He decides he’s going to hunt down all four of the Banana Splits. He stalks and kills every one of them with a machete. They all begged for their lives…except Fleagle.
Holy fuck. This seriously is a movie script, which I’d roll my eyes at and be cynical towards. Life is so strange.
On the positive side, he obviously has skill to be able to do this as frequently, despite his moral failings. One thing that should give you comfort is that you are both a better person who likely has as good or better skills, aptitude and traits (sorry if I’m making you an RPG character). But very interesting.
Oh heavens, thank heavens we could at least poach. It wasn’t the Revanant!!!
@Giles_Habibula he’s a legit Putin fan, but not sure that he likes Trump that much. He values physical fitness a ton. I’m not like him because…well, he once said that you could have a father who does everything right, or everything wrong, and should learn just as much from either one.
@divedivedive I LOLd. :P
@Desslock I love thinking about it from an RPG perspective. Ha! I guess I put more in wisdom than him, but he went hardcore into the CHA stat!
It’s been almost one full month since my sisters sent me to do a wellness check on my mom, the alcoholic. Something triggered my sister from afar to ask me what it would take to do this wellness check, and I asked her what she meant. You see I see my mom every 2 weeks because she comes here to clean my house, which I pay her to do, and after that we often do shopping, movies or whatever. In addition, I invite my mom to almost every movie I see because she needs to get out of the house. My friends have accepted this sometime awkward presence, but hey I do lots of other things with my mom. So I asked questions because I see her at least every two weeks, if there is anything local we want to do, like Costco runs, gardening shows, whatever, we do that in addition to the two weeks and of course birthdays, all the jazz. I often call her or she calls me every 2-3 days… I hear from my mom all the time and I see her.
So here is my sister worried because she got a tearful call about my mom fearing one of her grandsons, the one afar of course, barely knows her. I am told this was full sobbing, so maybe a little more going on. I contact my little sister and ask her if she is worried and… she is. The drinking has increased. My little sister sees my mom almost daily.
So here I am trying to bring myself to go see her and the reason for my hesitation is the last time I was sent to do a wellness check, it went like this.
Your mom isn’t answering the door. She won’t answer the phone. Your dad gave her his prescription grade pain medicine. You have a key right? Yes. Okay, can you go see if she is dead.
So yeah, during my first actual Go-Live experience, i left my 14 hour day, no days off for about month, and drove to my mom’s house to see if she killed herself with drugs and alcohol. So I’m sitting here realizing that my family thinks it is perfectly okay that I may very likely be the one to one day just find her dead in her home. But I’m also sitting here thinking is it really that bad, and I didn’t see it… this time?
My little sister is now in her mid twenties. She’s had a troubled start, had a child young with a very, very bad man, and just struggles to get to where she needs to be. I have never shared any of this with her. It’s like this wan to protect her, but she knows about the drinking so for the first time all three of us are engaged about this problem and I hear story I don’t remember but it was around the same time… at some point my mom called my distant sister while she was pregnant to say good-bye. It was definitely a suicide call, her significant other was angry as hell… I was about to get a call it seems when my little sister arrived at my moms home unexpectedly and that encounter well ended without my knowledge.
So protection time is over. She already knows the problem, and we’re all talking about my safety. And this throws me because I don’t believe my mom will ever bring a gun into her home again because her brother killed himself with her gun when I was young. I know this because I was the first one to see the body but didn’t fully register he was dead, we’re talking like 6 years old or something, and just an acknowledgement he is on her bed, there is screaming, we’re rushed into a back room and all I can see if flashing lights along with sirens which eventually turn-off.
Anyway, so now my sister are worried about me, but I am trying to convince them there is no way she has a gun, and they’re worried about her, so I just have to get the courage to go see her. And if there is risk, I’m the older local sister, it should be me anyway since her only surviving sibling is not talking to her. This time, the chances of her being dead should be remote, no idiot gave her an easy way to off herself.
So I do, I go there. She’s shocked to me. I don’t really just drop by people’s houses like that. I have a cellphone. I call people, try to be polite. I start surveying the home, asking questions, acting like it’s just a visit. I asked about her Roku, the webcam she has some trouble with while I take note that the old people whose houses she cleans keep giving her crap, and she’s having a hard time giving it way. It’s a little cluttered but I know houses that are worse than this even after someone cleans. The fridge and freezer are almost empty. My mom spends a lot of time telling people she doesn’t eat. She is absolutely under weight, and it makes her look 20 years older than she is. She always has bags under her eyes because she doesn’t sleep well since she drinks so much before going to bed.
We have more conversation, and since she’s not actually an idiot, she knows something is up at this point. We shift to the reality, and I start asking her questions, tears show up, I offer to buy her food, she doesn’t want me to because she’s fine and then find out, the reason my mom wears sunglasses, huge ass 80s sunglasses that cover almost her entire face isn’t because she is hiding her drinking, it’s because she thinks she’s too ugly to go to the store. My mom doesn’t like shopping at night. I thought it was because her eyesight isn’t great an a lot of people in my family don’t drive at night. No. It’s because she feels weird wearing sunglasses at night.
My mom thinks she is too ugly to go to the grocery store, and she’s lonely.
I don’t make enough money to send her where she needs to go, rehab, live in, around the clock rehab. The kind place that addresses her drinking, her abusive childhood, her dead brother, her missing older sister who’s body, sadly, was not recovered with the Green River killers confessions, the ten years of anger and love and then hate divorcing my parents went through, and of course her relationship with me, the daughter that took her place when I flew out to be with my sister when she miscarried and later got all the mother calls for when my nephew was born. What she doesn’t know is my sisters SO called me, and during that same time, just days after my maybe she suicide visit, I got his call and said your sister is not okay. She needs you here. And during our black out days, before I even proved I could do my job, actually support the system I helped build I had to go to my manager and tell him I needed to go to her. I said I could bring my work laptop, work part -time, fix what I could but I had to be there for her, and if that wouldn’t work, I’d have to quit.
He let me go.
I took conference calls in their spare bedroom learning what I could while my sister cried in a nearby room, then I spent the rest of the day with her, talking, gaming, whatever she wanted to do. By the time I left she was out of bed everyday, getting dressed, smiling evening.
But I took my mom’s place, the woman that called my sister to tell her goodbye before she intended to commit suicide, while she was pregnant with a baby she would eventually lose.
I don’t allow this stuff to surface when I engage my mom. I think about her every night, knowing she has never been thing enough, or young enough, just understanding these 2 hour beauty routines she used to do was to achieve some image that can’t be achieved, and of course this does not get better as she gets older. And she chases her demons with alcohol.
And that’s just one family member covering a couple incidents in only two years.
I saw on Shark Tank a woman who pitched an idea who described herself as “the one who made it.” She supports several members of her family in her house, rent for those who aren’t just… so much.
And I keep telling myself maybe I can get there, but I don’t think I can. It’s never enough. I was asked recently what I would do if i won the lottery, and of course we’re talking 100s of millions when someone asks me this because anyone who knows me at all knows I don’t play. No.1 Rehab for the half dozen alcoholics in my family, the live in kind, the luxury type places so they know they weren’t abandoned and it will cost a lot because I suspect they’ll be there a long time.
As for my dad, well he got his house on the shores of WA, the one he said he only needed his children to pay 100 dollars a month to get. He is taking social security early and still working, some sort of scheme about paying his girlfriend because she is tired of working to keep his income low. The truck is in the shop. He tells me he has a line in his credit report that says can take on high debt but couldn’t get a loan to get a newish truck to replace the one that is constantly in the shop. I pray daily that he somehow manages to keep that house because I can’t handle covering him and his girlfriend and…
My little sister. Fiance is unemployed. She’s doing babysitting in the home but at the same time trying to get pregnant. She owes the state around 14k because she lost her unemployment fight. She’s going to collection due to student debt of somekind. She said she withdrew from classes but somehow managed to keep the tuition money and… spent it. My nephew, turning 10, has never been to the dentist. I’d take him, but I don’t actually have rights to make decisions for him. If I gave her money, she’d probably do what she did when I gave her money for her dogs surgery… use it for something else.
Is my family nutso, or at least more so than other. I don’t know. Maybe. As far as I know no one has actually murdered each other, unless that rumor about my grandpa and my grandma i never knew is true (not kidding).
We’ll see what next week brings.
Wow, @Nesrie that was a lot. I clicked on here expecting (hoping?) to see another of Hal9000’s crazy stories about his dad.
That was intense, and honestly, thanks for sharing. I wouldn’t say nutso, though. You seem like a good person, doing the best you can.
Very much so.
She’s the one everyone else turns to when they screw up their own lives. A massive amount of weight on her shoulders.
At least that’s my take on what I read there, and in a few of her other posts in the past.
Best wishes to you, @Nesrie. They’re all counting on you.
I’m both incredibly sorry that you have to deal with your family’s various situations, @Nesrie, and incredibly proud to be even tangentially associated with someone who is doing her best to help as much as possible. I’m sure this is a whole lot easier said than done, but please, don’t feel any less secure or confident in yourself because you can’t mitigate your family’s issues.
Sorry Nesrie. My family is messed up too (not in a “let’s compare,” type of way, just in a way that maybe I understand a little bit of what some of this feels like and such). It’s very difficult, and it has left an imprint on me in a fundamental way that I just try to do my best with.
I’m sorry it is so difficult for you too.
The reason this came up yesterday is we’re at the start of what I like to call the marathon of family birthdays, a huge chunk starts in Feb and goes through march, then we have some holidays, and then the summer babies get celebrated. My mom is going to be 60 years old, and she is unemployable. I told her last year the only way I would help her again, and I did last year because she can’t pay her heating bills, is if she got a different job. She hasn’t filed or paid taxes for years, doesn’t make enough money to pay what little rent she has, it’s just a mobile lot lease, and her car is falling apart. And I realized I gave her a goal she can’t really achieve. She would never pass an interview, and she is I think at least five years away from SSI which will be pretty small anyway.
My mom worked 3 jobs one, too many hours to count, to keep the house from going in foreclosure and now she is unemployable and her car sounds like rattling metal. It’s actually falling apart. We have two family members with problems with cars on their last leg.
My dad sent pics of hew home, on two lots he is very proud of buying where he used his classic cars a collateral to get and it probably took around a year for him to finance the house itself. His semi is often in the shop, and he can’t get a loan to get a different one. It was supposed to be paid of this year but he extends the loan with repairs and now this need to pay his girlfriend to sit in the truck with him. He’s in debt up to his eyeballs.
My mom called after the SOTU… due to the time, i couldn’t be sure if she was drunk yet or not so I didn’t answer.
The funny thing is when I bought this house, I tried to get homes with mother-in law set-ups. I knew someone could wind up there eventually. I couldn’t win. The amount money those went for, well above the asking price, and I was terrified of taking on that much debt because I have’t a backup. i have a limited time bedroom in NJ if anything ever goes extremely bad, and that’s it.
Dont’ worry. I don’t take it that way. It’s not a competition, and it does help knowing other people are in similar or worse situations. It’s a weight of some kind, like every professional decision I make, every financial decision I make, there are a dozen or so other lives tied to it.
And despite all this mess I am entangled with, my sister said she would move back here in a heartbeat if she could, and she assured me if i vanished to some house by a lake or something I would miss them and of course I would.
My eldest nephew is turning 10. He’s into all kinds of fun things right now, but he can’t have any friends over to his house which upsets him, and he can’t have friends over because his mom, my sister, lies about where she lives to keep him in a school district she doesn’t pay for. And when we go to this movie and dinner he wants this Friday, and we’re celebrating I am going be conscious of the fact that there are no friends there because he doesn’t have any he can get close to. And that’s just not fair, probably worse than the crooked teeth problem for a young guy.
My dad died nearly twenty years ago - I don’t talk about him too much, mainly because it’s hard to talk about him without talking about his problems. And it seems somehow, I don’t know, disrespectful of the dead to talk about his problems. Anyway, what I guess I can say is that the last couple years of his life my dad moved back in with my grandfather. Toward the end my grandfather was getting pretty sick of his shit and threatened to kick him out, and I had that oh no feeling when I thought he might ask to move in with me. That’s not fun.
Sometimes I feel bad about airing this kind of thing too. Facts are facts.
Here’s the one. My parents, both fo them, came from heavily abusive homes, severe physical as well as mental abuse. We’re talking about like being hit by 2x4s and the kids running away repeatedly and just being dragged back.
They broke the cycle of physical abuse with their children, and I do remind them of that. My dad has a less than junior high education, not even a diploma. My mom’s memory is so bad she doesn’t really remembering getting her GED, but she did get it.
They’re not terrible people. But that oh no feeling, you’re talking about… yeah understand that.
I’d lose my job within a week if my mother was living with me.
Ugh, aging parent living accommodations.
You know, I wrote a couple-hundred word set of paragraphs about my mother-in-law’s story, but I think I’m going to skip it. Suffice it to say that despite being set up for a comfortable upper-middle-class retirement by her late husband, she’s squandered it all and is effectively broke. She has enough monthly income to pay the mortgage for her too-large house, and nothing else. She’s one unexpected car repair away from not being able to buy food.
My oldest kid is off at college and my younger one will be going off in the next couple years. We have a guest bedroom, and I could refinish the basement into a proper MIL suite complete with an old-person shower/tub if I needed to… though it would cost me my precious workroom. Mentally, I’ve been steeling myself for just that for the last couple years.
My wife though, is dead-set against her mother moving in. My MIL is not a bad or nasty person, but she is astoundingly self-absorbed, and the only thing she knows to talk about is herself. And talk. And talk. And talk.
My wife will bear the brunt of that: If her mother moved in with us, she’d suck up every second of my wife’s non-work time endlessly recounting the litany of woes (mostly self-inflicted though she can’t see that) that make up my MIL’s life. My wife would probably last a week before melting down and turning the house into a horrific passive-aggressive dystopia. She has basically told me that our marriage is doomed if her mother moves in, because she will turn my wife into a spite-filled monster.
So we’re in this weird place where my MIL needs to move to some place affordable, I’ve reluctantly mentally accepted that it probably needs to be our house, and my wife is fighting tooth-and-nail against that happening.
Oh man Nesrie, that is a huge load you are shouldering. If internet hugs mean anything, I’m sending some. Make sure you take care of yourself too.
Tin_Wisdom, none of my business, but I’ll say anyway, you need to heed your wife in this case!
They do mean something, and thank you. Thank you for listening and caring all that.
Believe me when I say I will do anything I can to find a better solution. I have been very much looking forward to “empty nest syndrome” – a time when my expenses go down, my pay remains high, and my free-time expands. And the idea of acquiring a new dependent - especially an overweight need one - is not particularity welcome.
I just don’t see it shaking out any other way unless my MIL goes to live in some squalid old-folks home waaaay out in the country.
My wife takes care of her dad. But he doesn’t live with us, he lives a couple blocks away in an apartment we set him up with. My wife loves him, and he is nice enough but she has some baggage with him that rises to the top from time to time, and there is no way he could live with us. And after seeing him 4-5 days in a row she has to call her sister and beg for a break.
I fully understand where you are coming from.