Preface:
I wrote this on Monday, and I was going to be brave and just share it. But then I panicked and couldn't. I decided to first ask my mom for permission to share what was going on and reach out to others, and she responded in a panicky way that I took that as a solid no, so I sat on it and stewed for a bit, and then I came up with a plan that I thought would actually work. I told my mom the plan, and I thought we'd be OK, because it only required the most minimal involvement and cooperation from all of them. But no one will follow through, no one will cooperate, they won't even talk to each other, and it's not going to work, so this is back to where we're at. I can't figure out a way to do this on my own. I can't figure out how to get people organized and get this done, and I need help or ideas, or a dragon... or something. So, without further ado.
The Original post:
I am dusting off my poor abandoned blog, and writing this because my family is in serious trouble,
and it’s more than we can fix on our own.
We’ve been trying for months, we’ve explored every avenue we can think
of, but it’s not enough and the situation is desperate. I know that by writing this, I am betraying
my mother’s confidence and violating her express wish to keep this private, to keep
it in the family, to not let others know that she’s struggling and needs help. But she is not the only one who is suffering
and imperiled. My sister is in trouble, the kids are in trouble, and
they are being put in a situation that is far beyond what any kid should have
to deal with. So for their sake, I am
breaking the rules.* (I am actually
terrified to post this, just white-knuckle, hands-shaking terrified. Such is
the power of Family Guilt…)
The immediate crisis:
My mother is behind on her mortgage and is in danger of
losing her house. The foreclosure
process is well underway. She was able
to negotiate a payment plan to get caught up over a 6-month period, and made some
kind of balloon payment and the first 3 payments, but she can’t afford to
make the final 3 back payments that she owes.
She is retired and cannot go back to work; she has no money left in
savings or retirement funds; she also owes the IRS a substantial sum in back
taxes. We need to come up with about
$4500 to pay that up by the end of the summer ($1500 per month for 3 more
months, the first of these payments is due the end of June), and another $1000
or so (my rough estimate, it will probably more) to get a lawyer to help her negotiate
with the IRS, and prevent them from also going after the house, as it’s her
only asset, or garnishing her social security, as it's her only income.
She doesn’t want to ask for help from anyone outside the
immediate family. She doesn’t even want people
within what I would consider the
immediate family, people she talks to on a weekly basis, to know. To be honest, I fear she wouldn’t have even
told ME what was happening until it was too late, but my sister finally broke
down sobbing and explained it all to me on New Years’ Eve, way too late to stop
the worst of it, but at least a few months before the bank showed up to actually seize
the house.
My mom has always been a hard-worker, stubborn as an ox,
caring in her own coarse, roughly-worded way, proud beyond measure, and very (too)
generous and cavalier with her money.
She made really good money as a Civil Engineer, but has also always been
fantastically terrible at managing her finances, at knowing what she’s got and
what she can afford, at remembering to pay bills, and above all, at saying “no.” (I honestly don’t think the phrase “I can’t”
is in her vocabulary, and if someone breaks down and cries at her, she just blindly
writes a check without even looking to see if she’s got money to cover it.)
She worked her ass off her whole life so she would always
have enough money to take care of the people she feels responsible for, but our
family has incurred more needs than anyone could have ever anticipated, and she
has made some very rash decisions trying to fix things in ways that were
unsustainable and disastrous. She has
been utterly lost since my dad died 8 years ago, and just did the only thing
she knew how to do; she put her head down and kept working and doing the best
that she could, but she is heartbroken and depressed, has no thought to care for
herself, has nothing but need and misery surrounding her, and as far as I can
see, no feeling of hope or ambition for anything more than this, or any desire
to do anything but to keep grandma happy, and a roof over people’s heads. This situation is all so sad I can barely
breathe a lot of the time. But there is
no time for being sad right now, because there are problems that need to be
solved.
I am going to sketch out a rough overview of what all is
going on around this mess below, as diplomatically as possible, to give some
context to the present situation, and then I will explain what kind of help we need. Because we need help. I need help.
I’ve exhausted every resource that I have at my disposal, and that I can
think of. I can’t walk away and let this
all go up in flames, because there are too many vulnerable people in peril (ironically,
they have largely imperiled each other,) and I can’t figure out a solution on
my own.
Grandma:
My grandmother, “Grandma Nick” to me, Ruth, to most, became
very ill last January. She has congenital
heart failure and dementia. When she went
into the hospital, she was dehydrated, suffering from a kidney infection, and so
far gone physically and mentally that she was barely conscious, and when she
was, she was completely “unstuck in time,” constantly jumping back and forth
from the present, all the way back to her childhood. Based on the condition of her heart and her
kidneys, and some internal bleeding she was suffering from, the doctors said
that she was dying and there was no hope, she had days to live, possibly months
at the outside, but definitely no more than 6 months.
Grandma worked for a time as a CNA in nursing homes, back in
The Dalles in the 80’s. What she saw there
broke her heart, and she made her kids promise her that NO MATTER WHAT, she
wouldn’t be put in a home, that she would be allowed to die in her own house,
under her own recognizance, even if that meant dying alone in misery. We tried several times to get her to move in
with us leading up to this, but were always overruled because, I have now realized,
my mom and my uncle are terrified of my grandma. Even in her fragile state, they are SCARED TO
DEATH of her of her judgement and disapproval.
To me, she’s just grandma, and I got the grandkids’ allotment of
kindness, compassion, and patience that her own kids didn’t get, but to every
one else, she is something else.
I love my grandma a lot, but I can also clearly recognize
that grandma can be/is/was a mean old manipulative bitch, able to wield guilt
and shame like a renaissance master.
(She does this because she knows what’s right for you, even if you don’t
know or can’t see it, or heaven forbid, don’t agree. The road to this Hell we are all in is paved
in an intricate mosaic of conflicting and misguided good intentions.) Grandma married my grandpa when she was 15
and he was shipping off to war. She
worked in the shipyards in WWIII, was the real Rosie the Riveter, an OG badass who
went on to spend 50 years battling it out with my Grandpa, the Most Stubborn
Man Alive, surviving myriad health problems and heartaches, and fighting
through it all, and no one, definitely not her kids, is going to make her do one
goddamn thing she doesn’t want to do. (Except
me, I can talk her into almost anything, but only when the gatekeepers will let me...)
When the doctors said she had to be discharged, I argued strongly
that she be put in a care facility, even though that’s not what grandma
wanted. We just didn’t have the man
power to provide the level of care that she needed. My mom barely walks, my sister is extremely
ill, I have 4 kids of my own, and a job, and a household to try and keep track
of. There just wasn’t anyone capable of
providing 24-7 skilled nursing care at home, but there was a decent facility just
a few blocks from my house that we could all get over to daily to keep her
company . . . but I was categorically overruled (reasons were given, but I still don't know and probably will never know if any of them were actually true...), and she was discharged on hospice
to die at home.
My mom decided to move into grandma’s house with her, to supervise
and assist with her care, and to hire caregivers to come in and do whatever we
couldn’t. This was perceived as a short-term
solution to a short-term need, and it was profoundly expensive because
initially it was 24-7 care. It also didn’t
work very well at first, because grandma doesn’t like caregivers and couldn’t
remember who they were half the time, but even when she couldn’t find the strength
to do anything else, she still had the strength, apparently, to battle. My cousin was driving up and spending all of
her days off helping, (she still does this a lot,) I went over as many days as
I could, prepared meals to bring over, other cousins also came over and helped
as much as they could, which was all really, really helpful, but it was still
too much, and we were struggling. After
a few months of this, my uncle retired from his job in Eugene and moved up to
also stay with them and help out. And then
things changed dramatically.
The important role that isolation and depression plays in the declining health
of the elderly cannot be overstated. Grandma,
suddenly having her fondest wish come true of having both her kids back home
with her, spending all day every day with her, decided to pull off one of the
greatest rallies of all time. She had
been in bed, unconscious for 20+ hours a day, unable to lift her own spoon or
get to the bathroom on her own and thus catheterized, hallucinating and talking
to dead people; she was basically hopeless and just waiting for her heart to
give out in the night. But after a few days
of Uncle Mike and Momma being there together, she scared everyone to death one
morning by waking up on her own, and walking out to the refrigerator at 6 am to
get herself a glass of milk. After that
initial shock, she continued to improve over for a time, and for a while was up
and walking around quite a bit, getting snacks, playing cards again, going on
drives, etc. The doctors made it clear
that she wasn’t cured, and still was in this “she could go any time” state, but
she sure as hell isn’t planning on going anytime soon.
Her recovery didn’t last forever, and while she is very,
very far from the state she was in at first, she is on a slow, steady decline
again, and is sleeping much of the day, and kind of winding down like a clock with a dying battery. Well, exactly like a clock with a dying battery. My
mom’s car broke down, and they can no longer go on drives. Grandma is feeling bored and frustrated that
she is not getting better, and is giving up.
But not entirely, not immediately.
I have a feeling that if we could do some things to perk up her
situation again, and get her out of the house here and there, she might rally
once again, but we’re all in disaster mode right now, and no one can manage it.
In addition to the money my mom spent on caregivers, Momma
also had to make a bunch of very expensive emergency repairs to the house, and
a lot of other related things. It made
sense to her to do this at the time, at least this is how she reasoned it, because
grandma has a lot of equity in her house, my mom and uncle are the sole heirs,
and they agreed that after grandma died the house would be sold, and my mom
would be reimbursed for the money she spent on grandma’s care and home repairs before
anything else was done. It was only a
temporary hardship, it was to make grandma happy, and so, they reasoned, it was worth it.
However, in the meantime, Momma has also
continued to support my sister, my 2 nieces and my nephew, who are still living
in her house (Momma’s house in Troutdale), paying for their utilities, car insurance
and payments, helping them out with money for food, and above all medicine. Because on top of all of this, my sister has
been desperately ill this whole time, and in need of very extensive and expensive
medical care, and that is the other half of this equation.
My Sister and Family:
This situation is a lot more complicated, and much harder and
sadder to explain. People get old, they get
sick, they need care, they eventually die.
That is sad, but it’s the natural and expected trajectory of life. This is different.
My sister has been suffering from serious health problems
for decades, as well as mental health concerns and some chemical dependency
issues that arose after having to undergo a series of extremely painful
surgeries, and then struggling in vain to find a diagnosis for a mysterious, underlying
health condition that was plaguing her. She went to
the doctor a hundred times (many hundreds of times, thousands, at this point)
because something was wrong with her body, but they couldn’t tell her what it
was. They’d run some tests, and give her
some pain pills, and send her home with no answers, and then eventually just
wrote her off as a pill junkie and stopped even trying to find answers. Problems ensued…
And through it all, something WAS wrong with her body, or
maybe enough time went on that something eventually became wrong with her
body. There’s no way to know for sure,
except that she is very, very sick, now. They didn’t figure out what until she finally
presented with some new bizarre and distinctive symptoms that prompted a dermatologist,
of all things, to finally take the matter seriously and start asking the right
questions and running the right tests. (My
sister has Oregon health plan, which is better than having no insurance, I guess,
but it turns you a parasitic nuisance in the eyes of most doctors, and makes getting
long-term, serious care almost impossible.)
A little more than a year ago, she was diagnosed with chronic
sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that you can read about at your leisure,
should you care to, but it’s not pleasant.
In some cases, it’s pretty mild; it only affects one part of the body,
it flares up, it goes away. In my sister’s
case, though, it’s affecting her whole body: her skin, joints, lungs, heart, and
liver all appear to be involved. She has
irregular heartbeats, trouble breathing, random terrible (I mean catastrophic) joint
swelling, all of it. It is possible that
at some point, they will find a treatment protocol that will ease some of that,
and best-case scenario, put it into remission.
But it hasn’t happened yet, and her doctors have apparently categorized her
condition as terminal, meaning that someday, either the sarcoidosis, itself, or
a side effect like a random bout of pneumonia or heart irregularity, will eventually cause her to die.
When she was first diagnosed, she was prescribed massive amounts
of prednisone, which helps some, but not enough, and prednisone causes its own
barrage of terrible side effects. They
recommended a bunch of additional medications, some of which cost hundreds and
even thousands of dollars per fill, and she’s been going without most of those
due to the cost. She finally got a
doctor that is working with the drug companies to try and get her the medicine
for no or reduced cost, and she recently started an immune-suppressant that will
hopefully reduce her need for prednisone, but it’s only been a few days, and
that’s making her sick, too, and it’s scary because that increases her risk of
infection so much... It's all just terrifying.
Most days, she is too tired and ill to do anything but get
dressed and attend doctor appointments. She
sleeps most of the time, and says she is surprised every morning to see that
she has actually woken up alive. She is
miserable, frightened, and physically destroyed, and in emotional and physical
anguish beyond the telling of it. She is
embarrassed about how much weight she has gained from the prednisone, and has a
hard time going out even when she feels up to it. She can’t work, will most likely never be
able to work again, and is trying to get on disability. But the average time to process a disability
claim is something like 2 years in Oregon, and getting doctors to stay on top
of the paperwork and write the requisite forms is hard enough when you are
more-or-less functioning, and nearly impossible when you are not.
The Family Dynamic
My sister and my mom, when they talk, mostly fight, because that
is what they do, it is what they have always done. They have both been resentfully
dependent on one another for a very, very long time. They don’t know how to talk to each other
with any of the empathy or compassion that they are able to summon for other
people. There have been power struggles
and frustration and manipulation, and enough tears to fill the sea. Everyone is angry that no one is doing
anything, but neither one of them can see that they are ALL incapacitated in
one form or another, and are doing as much as they can. It’s not enough, but it’s not for sheer lack
of effort or desire. They just can’t, and currently, they aren't speaking at all, even when the only thing we need to be able to help them, is for them to communicate and get on the same page.
My nieces and nephew are doing their best to take care of my
sister and to take care of themselves. They
want to stay near their mom, and help her, provide her comfort, and keep her
from worrying. They are 21, 17, and 15
right now. The oldest is struggling with
her own issues, is not working and due to mental health issues, may frankly not
be emotionally capable of working as things are. She is
also planning to have a major surgery in the next few months; I have no idea how
that is going to work, and I fear that it’s a bad idea, but she is adamant. I
am exercising diplomacy here and not saying any more about it.
The youngest two are in free-fall, struggling to stay in
school, not knowing what to do or how to help. They keep the household running, prepare
meals for themselves, do the laundry, take the trash out, try to keep things
(kind of) tidy. They could of course
live with us, they will never be homeless and we would be happy to have them,
and to be able to help THEM and let them be kids, but we don’t have room for
everyone even in our giant, weird house (my sister and her oldest would have to stay with
my mom at Grandma Nick’s house, so they also have a theoretical place to go, but it would put everyone in very tight
quarters,) and the kids don’t want to leave their mom in such distress.
The kids right now are panicking because all they know for
sure is that their mom is desperately ill and they are in danger of losing their
home. We don’t know if there is any way
we can save it, which leaves them and their mom, and by extension them, without
a place to live (again, this how they perceive it, because they can’t even THINK
about leaving their mom under these conditions; we’ve talked to them about it, and it’s just not
something their brains can hold).
We thought, a few months ago, before we knew about the
taxes, that we had something figured out that would work, that we could take
out a personal loan to keep them afloat temporarily, and help my mom get her
house refinanced, but then the problem was revealed to be exponentially bigger than
we knew, refinancing is off the table, my mom is having a hard time following
through on the bare minimum paperwork things that SHE and only she can do, and
so we had to tell them “now we don’t know.”
Apparently having some hope and having that hope taken away was worse for
my sister, at least, than not having any hope to begin with, so although we are
still working very hard to find solutions, I am afraid to say so until anything
is certain.
The kids are doing what they can, more than kids should ever
have to do, and are trying their best to go through the mountains of stuff at the
house looking for things they can sell.
They want to have a garage sale, to make some extra money to maybe help
with the mortgage, or maybe set aside in case they do end up needing to find a
new place to live with their mom, and to try and reduce the volume of stuff in
the house that needs dealt with at some point, one way or another. I honestly believe there is enough stuff in
the way of sewing machines, fabric, records, collectible glass, etc. that we could
sell enough to cover my mom’s back mortgage payments. We all think that, and the kids are over
there right now trying to figure it out.
But they’re kids, they’re scared, and they don’t know what
to do, or how to do it, and the volume of STUFF in that house is so overwhelming. (There is a subtheme in the family of hoarding:
hoarding books, video games, movies, sewing machines, fabric, art glass, tools,
etc. Everyone, my dad included, chose a genre or two of things to
hoard, and just really went all-in on it.)
I am overwhelmed by it, and I don’t even live in it. I get ambitious, and I go over there to look
around and try to figure out where to start, what there is (there are, for example
FOUR different sets of snow tires, only one of which is for a car that anyone
still owns,) what we’re authorized to get rid of, what is easy to get rid of,
and about 15 minutes in, my chest starts to tighten up, and I feel like I can’t
breathe, because of the enormity of the situation, because I don’t know what’s
what, because people chime in and say they were hoping to save X, Y, and Z, because
of the tragedy of my sister’s condition, because my mom thinks everything is
worth more than we could sell it for, because of the state of the house that my
daddy put so much work into, because of the memories good and bad that I have in
that place, at the thought of liquidating all of my daddy’s stuff, of losing
the house that’s the last testament to him, of my mom possibly ending up with
NOWHERE to live, if she’s not careful, and the room starts to go black, and I
have to leave to keep from screaming or crying or passing out, because the last
thing anyone needs is another person breaking down right now, and I’m no good
to anyone like that.
But nothing is getting done that needs to get done. It just feels so futile, sometimes: can we
really sell of a couple of small things here and a couple of small things
there, and have any hope of saving the house?
There are so many small things that it seems like it should be doable, and
a few larger things that would make a much bigger dent, and make it even easier:
some broken down cars with intact bodies that could at least be sold for parts,
a couple of very expensive sewing machines if we could only find a buyer, some really
fancy power tools still new and in the box, enough fabric to costume an entire
Broadway production. Logically, it seems
doable, but just, how, how, how can we ever hope to get it done with my husband
and I being the only intact, semi-functioning grown-ups, and a bunch of
teenager assistants, several of who are in severe emotional distress, all of
whom need to be working on school for at least another few weeks?
THE CALL FOR HELP:
The thing that pushed me over into breaking my silence,
breaking “the rules,” and speaking up about this is that my nephew is, right
now, as we speak, going through and getting ready to sell off ALL of his Magic
cards to help. And I mean, staying up
all night frantically scanning cards, trying to figure out what he has and how
to sell it, every single card except his best commander deck that we won’t let
him sell.
And that is the nice thing about having a collectible hobby;
when times get tough, you can sell your toys to pay the bills. But HE’S A FREAKING KID, and he’s doing this
in a panicked, frantic state, literally doing the only thing he can think of to
try to help save his mom and save his home, and it shouldn’t have to be like
this. This is not OK, and we, the grownups, have to do better.
I honestly didn’t even realize how much I was still trying to play this
broken game, according to this ridiculous, toxic set of rules, until I saw how
stressed he was, and realized that of all of the things I have tried, I never
once asked anyone else for help, or even advice, because I wasn’t supposed to
for reasons both unspoken and explicit, and for some reason, it turns out, I’m
apparently also terrified of my mom’s anger and disapproval to the point of
dysfunction and self-destruction. GO FUCKING
FIGURE. (Oh, God, ow. I literally
didn’t realize that was what was going on until just this moment. I really hope I’m not doing this to my own
kids…)
So, ANYWAY, sorry for the distraction. The important
question, here, is there any way you can help?
UNREASONABLE FANTASY
REQUEST:
I don’t expect, and I’m not really asking for, someone to swoop in
and bail my mom out with a loan. I mean,
if you can, and you’re willing, that would be amazing and I would make her
accept it, even though it would hurt her pride (there is so much more on the
line than pride here, which is why I’m even mentioning it,) and there is no way
I could guarantee you’d be repaid until my grandma passes away and her house
gets sold and her estate is resolved, which could be months, but knowing
grandma, could be years, could be never. If anyone was unexpectedly immortal, it would be her. I would also
help ensure that you had a proper promissory note, and that the money got directly
to the bank where it needs to go, and didn’t get diverted to any one of the
short-term minor emergencies that will certainly arise in the next hours/weeks/days,
as they continually do. (For various
reasons that I am diplomatically not explaining, none of these people can handle the responsibility of cash.) I absolutely do NOT expect that to happen,
but times are tough, and I’m not above throwing it out there as a possibility.
REALISTIC, ACTUAL REQUEST:
What I really need, though, and am hoping that there are
people out there who could possibly help
with this, is going through The Stuff and liquidating things to come up with
the funds my mom needs to get caught up on the mortgage and start dealing with
the IRS. Grandma Nick wants a bunch of
her extra furniture and stuff sold, my mom’s house is a dragon’s hoard full of every
kind of randomness. But I suck at
commerce, I get overwhelmed trying to figure out the best way to sell various things,
how much to ask, etc., and garage sales blend together commerce and social anxiety
in a way that gives me hives, and I am utterly overwhelmed and defeated right
now and I don’t know where to start.
- Even some assistance formulating, and following up with me occasionally
to see that I am stick with a PLAN of action would be an amazing piece of help. I do this for other people in my job all the
time. I apparently am not capable of
doing it to myself.
- If you are willing or able to come over and help sell stuff,
I’d be happy to give you a cut of whatever we get. Like I keep trying to tell everyone, any
amount of money is more than the no money you currently have, going through and
selling this stuff is a lot of work, and I don’t know many people who can
afford to work without getting some kind of compensation for their time.
- Advice would even help: is there anyone out there who could
help me start going through this, or who can at least give me some advice on
how to sell stuff like Fenton art glass, and tons of fabric?
- Physical organization/mental health solidarity would also
help. Does anyone have the time or
energy to meet me over at one of the houses some time, and spend an afternoon
helping me pull stuff out that we can sell and getting it ready? Or, do you want to help me throw the mother
of all yard sales? Like, how do I even
advertise a yard sale so we can sell some of this collectible stuff to the
people who would be interested in it? I
don’t know how to do these things properly, and I have a hard time doing things
I don’t know how to do right.
- Do you know how to sell busted cars, because we’ve got a Mustang
and an SUV that are both not running, but at least have some value in parts,
and so forth? How about snow tires, and random old card parts for a Pontiac my dad was going to fix up one day, but didn't get the chance.
- How about records, does anyone know the best way to sell a
bunch of LPs, like Beatles, Sgt. Peppers with the original cutouts and
everything? Or sewing machines? Or a
welding tank? Or freaking horse tack? (My mom still has Roy Tan’s saddle and tack
in her garage; Roy Tan was the horse she had when I was a baby that was sold
when I was three because he bit me. WHY
DO WE STILL HAVE HIS SADDLE IN THE GARAGE?!?)
Hyperventilating now . . . let me get it reigned (ha ha) back in.
- Does anyone know any reliable antique pickers who’d be able
to look through the antique tools that daddy salvaged from my grandpa’s shops?
- Do you by chance just want to buy a bunch of Fenton art glass, random horse tack, antique tools,
and random fabric? Because I can also
help you out there. Are there agencies
or people who do this stuff, and do you know any who are reliable?
I don’t know how to think about it or get started, or get
organized or anything, but I feel like if I had even just a little bit of help
from people who aren’t so painfully emotionally invested in the stuff and the
situation, that we might be able to get some traction, and once we do, it might
feel less futile and overwhelming, and make it easier to keep going.
I don’t know. I don’t
know what help exactly to ask for, because I don’t know what is reasonable to
ask, so I’m just generally asking for help.
I’ll also take advice, but (no offense, this is frustration
over how many dozens of fruitless phone calls I’ve made) before you say “I
think there are agencies that will help with that, have you called x?”. I
probably have, but go ahead and mention them, and I’ll add them to the list
just in case I’ve missed one. I lost track
of exactly how many different agencies I’ve been in contact with, after it got to
the point that they started just referring me back to try places that I had
already talked to. I called every kind of
senior services, adult assistance, mortgage help, whatever aid agency you can
think of at the local, county, and state level.
We also talked to a lawyer, we talked to an accountant, we
talked to a real estate agent and a mortgage broker, I even crossed a line and consulted
my LSAT students, because one of them is a tax-law professional, and some have
connected parents who know things, and the answer has overwhelmingly been the
same: My mom makes just enough money
to not qualify for any kind of low-income or age-related assistance, there is
no way she’s getting out of her taxes, but a lawyer could make the IRS leave
her alone, she can’t refinance the mortgage, at least until she gets out of hoc
and stays that way for an entire year, she doesn’t meet the conditions for an
involuntary conservatorship or anything like that, and above all, with housing
prices as they are, the number of people with their housing at risk, and the amount
of equity she has in her house, it’s in everyone’s best interests for us to
move mountains, if we have to, to keep her from losing her stupid.
The problem is that moving mountains seems pretty easy
compared with what we have to do. Give
me a mountain to move, I’ll damn sure get it moved. Ask me to sell off a dragon’s hoard, though,
and I can’t even start.
And lastly, I’m sorry.
This is the first time I’ve even been able to talk about it openly in
any kind of coherent sense, because I feel guilty talking about it, there is
too much to explain in a passing conversation, it’s a pretty gigantic freaking
downer, and it’s also hard to even organize my thoughts around what all is at
stake, to just lay it all out to see how bad it really is. But there, it’s all laid out, now, and it seems
a little less overwhelming than it did before, so maybe, if nothing else, I’ve
managed to help myself a bit so I can function better. At the expense of my family’s honor and
pride, of course, but honor and pride got us all here, and it doesn’t seem to
be getting us out…
Thank you for reading, if you’ve kept at it this long. If nothing else, it helps not feeling all alone
with this, and having it out of my head.
-sigh- Maybe now I can get some
stuff done.
*The first rule of the codependent, dysfunctional family is
that you do not speak about the codependent, dysfunctional family to anyone
outside of the family. You don’t tell
people what’s going on at home, you keep your friends away from your house, you
don’t bring shame on the family by exposing their behavior, and above all, you
don’t risk other people pointing out to you that, “hey, you know that’s not how
other families work, right? You don’t ‘have
to’ keep playing this game if you don’t want to.” But if it never even occurs to you to ask “is
this normal?” and compare notes with people on the outside, you just grow up
assuming it is, marry someone from the same type of family, teach it to your
kids, and the cycle repeats…
