I am done trying to be diplomatic. This situation is insane, and I can’t deal
with it anymore.
I went over on Friday to help my mom out with some stuff, or
to try and help. She spends all of her time playing games on
her tablet, eating cake (literally, she was eating cake, and then asked me to
bake another cake while I was there,) and when I left, she and my uncle were
planning to spend the rest of the day doing a Jurassic Park marathon.
Her response to Rome burning is to do NOTHING AT ALL to try
and help herself. There is so much she
could be doing from the comfort of her power recliner, things she could be researching or listing stuff for sale, and there are online work-at-home jobs I told her about that she could be doing to make some extra
money. She does nothing. I get that she’s depressed, but who the fuck
isn’t right now? At some point, you have
to pitch in.
I got burned out, mainly by the Jurassic Park thing for some
reason—why don’t you kick back and Netflix and chill today, Marie Antoinette, while my husband is
outside in the fucking pouring down rain trying to get Grandma’s car started so
we can move it, and I’m banging my head against the wall trying to get you to
focus on anything useful, but really, you deserve that break from all of this
nasty, hard real life—and I decided to try and take a break from it for a few
days, but it didn’t work.
We never get a break from this. We’ve been doing research all weekend to try
and figure out how much to sell the cars for, do we really need to get the
replacement titles, etc. and all kinds of other things, and just thinking about
this and talking about it all the time, but I needed a break from talking to
her. There are phone calls to be made,
and phone calls to be answered, and my phone got bombed all day with texts from
my sister and nephew about various things. The garage sale they were trying to
run, the magic cards he’s trying to sell, it just never stops.
Then my mom calls me yesterday afternoon in tears. She isn’t going to be able to make her May
payment after all. She is short at least
$500, she won’t tell me exactly how much, or what happened, just a vague
statement about “other things came up.” “Other
things like what?” She had to pay her
past due power bill to keep the electricity from getting shut off, for one, (which she hilariously believes is completely unreasonable and unfair,) but
I’m sure it’s more than that.
The payment is due Friday, she called me on Tuesday. There
is no fucking way it was a surprise and she just figured it out then, but she
cries first, and then is passive-aggressive when I’m shocked and upset to hear it, and switches over into “I shouldn’t
have even called…” to try and make me feel bad, and she has no ideas whatsoever about what she can do about it. If she doesn’t get it paid, she immediately
gets knocked out the program with her mortgage company and goes back to instant
foreclosure, I guess? She was supposed
to call them first thing this morning and find out, but I haven’t heard back yet, and the
place has been open since 8am EST, so…
Apparently, her assurances that if we get the current
situation stabilized, she does have enough money to keep the two households afloat
just aren’t true. I asked her months ago
to make me a spreadsheet of all of her bills so we could really take a look at
it and figure things out. She said she did, she said she would be fine, but she’s
not going to be fine. One of the houses HAS
TO GO, and that either means moving my sister over to grandma’s house, or
moving my mom and grandma back to mom’s house, and she just refuses to face
that. Her plan to avoid that was
apparently to just not pay the utility bills while she was making the extra
mortgage payments. That’s all I can figure. The numbers don't add up otherwise.
A bunch more things came up after that, and yesterday when I
finally got in touch with my sister, well, here are some of the exasperating highlights. My mom has been paying full coverage car
insurance on her SUV that broke down and hasn’t been drivable since last
July. She also pays insurance on grandma’s
car, which has been mechanically disabled and parked for like 6 years. (Because grandma lost her license, but kept
going off and trying to drive.) So that’s
crazy-making, I bet that's at least $500 in the last 3 months right there. But there’s lots more,
more important stuff, that’s just the kind of everyday stupid shit that helps
explain how a person can burn through as much money as she has in such a short
amount of time.
Here’s the big stuff: My mom owns a professional-grade sewing
machine she bought about a year and a half ago for around $8000. She could, it turns out, sell that quickly
for at least $4000, but refuses to even think about that possibility, or tell
me that it was an option. I did kind of
new about this expensive sewing machine of legend, and asked her a couple of
times She told me she called around
about selling it and got some much
lower numbers, but it turns out she was talking about her older sewing machine
that she IS willing to part with, and pretending like the other one didn’t
exist.
Moreover, my sister drives around in nearly brand-new car
that my mom paid off completely for her in July (at the same point she stopped
making her mortgage payments; the two are related but it’s a book in and of
itself. Just so much of this is about a crazy tantrum fight/power struggle my
mom and sister have been having with each other forever.) Carmax will give my sister $11,000 for it on
the spot (she recently checked,) more than enough money to catch up on the mortgage
AND buy a reliable used car to get to her doctor’s appointments, but she won’t even
consider doing that and has a big hysterical breakdown every time it comes up,
but she will run around telling everyone who will listen how she’s about to be homeless, is going to die in her car, how none of her kids have food and stuff, and, but, she's driving around in this goddamn car, and I just can’t… NONE OF THIS HAS TO BE
THIS WAY.
There is so much more--I wrote it out, but then deleted it--because it gets into the secrets and lies and illegal activity department, where I KNOW stuff is up, but I never know exactly what, because every time I ask to see actual numbers or bank statements or documents, it becomes the conversation equivalent of a room full of cockroaches scurrying for cover when you turn the kitchen light on. There are lies and fraud and manipulation happening basically all time right now, and I basically can't take anything that my mom says to me at face value. That's as much detail as I'll write here, I guess. But the point is, there have been numerous other ways that they could have helped themselves and didn't, and did stupid, stupid, reckless stuff with money instead, just in the last several months. Plus the sewing machine, and the car, and the dinosaurs, and the cake...
Just all of that, and so much more, is why I REFUSE to open a gofundme account for them, or anything like that. They don't need charity. They don't need bailed out. If they want to do that for themselves, there is nothing stopping them, but I'm not participating. They HAVE the assets in the sewing machine and the car, and the turning off extraneous services, and the power to help themselves. They could do it quickly and neatly and get the current mess stabilized, and then work on creating a more feasible long-term plan. I know they might need help executing the transactions and finding a new car quickly and that kind of stuff, and I’d be more than willing to help with that…
But they won’t do it.
They won’t help themselves. They,
my mom in particular, are fine with us running around killing ourselves,
worrying, spending all of our waking hours trying to figure out how we can
possibly help, putting in time, manual labor, making phone calls, running
errands, etc., all with no thanks, (which I never actually expect from my mom,
but still, it makes it even harder). She
just straight-up EXPECTS me to bail her out.
She expects me to fix it all, and to do it in a way that won’t deprive
her of anything she actually cares about, and I’m done.
Back in February, after my earliest attempts to help made me feel like there was more to
what she was saying, but I wasn’t sure what, I tried to be very stern with
her. I told her that if I was going to
help her, I needed a bunch of documentation from her, I needed her to do XYZ
steps on her own, and I needed her to be honest with me, or I was just done and
they were all on their own. I put it all
in writing, I sent her a checklist. She
didn’t do any of the things, she continues to be dishonest with me, maybe
because she is dishonest with herself, and I feel like I need to just say no, I’m
out, but I’m so scared of what happens to everyone if I do that.
But I’m also scared of what happens if I don’t. This is already killing my ability to do my
job, and the stress of it almost made me miss deadlines to get back into
school. It’s stressing me out more than
anything has ever stressed me out in my life, and if you know anything about my
life, that’s saying something. On top of
that, the addiction and gambling and compulsive shopping things that are
plaguing them don’t magically go away even if I did find a genie, and shake him
down for the money.
And I was thinking
about it a few weeks ago: How much money would it actually take to completely
fix this and make it all OK? $50k to fix
the mortgage and pay off the fines and fees.
$80k (approx., she won’t tell me the whole amount) to fix the tax debt,
plus interest and penalties on that. And
then something like $2000 a month forever to make up the shortage between what
they spend and what comes in. But even that wouldn’t be ENOUGH. No amount of money will ever be enough,
because they are capable of spending literally infinite amounts of money,
without even thinking about it, on garbage and nonsense and restaurant food,
and phone games, and QVC, and medications, and so on, and so on. (I know I lumped in an essential with the
nonessentials, but that is literally the order that my mom prioritizes things
in, so why not?)
They are vampires, my mom in particular, but she has created
a whole brood of vampire minions, and I can’t fix that. And I don’t want to try anymore. I just
don’t. I don’t want to help them sell
their stuff, I don’t want to help them pack and haul things to the dump (and
pay the dump fees myself) or get her a tax lawyer (that I have to pay for) or
anything else, I don’t want to spend more mental energy making a Plan and Doing
Research and Trying to Help while they are doing nothing, and continuing to lie,
and so on.
I almost certainly still will end up doing it in the long
run, because I’ve been so thoroughly conditioned to play this game that the
thought of not doing it almost exactly AS distressing than the thought of doing
it—it’s like a teeter-totter of guilt/anger/obligation/exhaustion that keeps rocking
back and forth and ripping my brain to shreds every day—but I don’t want to,
and I shouldn’t have to, and if I don’t…
If/when this all goes to hell and they do end up on the
streets, or in some kind of state-run care facility or whatever, this is 100% on
them. They have the power right now—TODAY—to
stop this crisis, and they know it. All they
have to do is follow through.
UPDATE: OMFG. I just got a text from my mom, and when confronted with selling her sewing machine as the only way out, she suddenly found more money that she could withdraw from her account to pay this month's bill, but she still wants me to figure out how she's going to make the June payment with selling the little stuff off, etc. Do I even believe any that? I have no idea. Just fuck it all.
Oh, Nikki, I am so sorry for all of you. Much Love.
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