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Things that suck about your family
I'm sorry to make a negative counterpart to an existing thread, but I'm just going RAARRGH right now.
I love my family. They're great. My mother is the best mom in the world (in my opinon, k?) who loves us all unconditionally and my sister is an intelligent and creative young woman that I can have great talks with. When we're all together, we can have a really good time.
My brother is an idiot.
I have two brothers, but the youngest is the one who's the idiot right now. He's going through his "rebellious teenage bullshit" phase now to a degree that's just plain inhuman to my mother. He (possibly intentionally) failed out of high school so that he could be placed in the "special" high school where the rest of his punk idiot friends go. He doesn't go to class unless he feels like it. He's had the cops over at our house multiple times for shooting out our windows with his all-too-realistic replica guns. He treats my mother like the scum on the bottom of his pretentious army boots. He has the most retarded arguments with her, usually started over a misplaced word in a sentence on her part. He condescends her down to the very tone of his voice. He's physically assaulted her at least twice, most recently slamming her against a wall, being too righteously furious to care about her healing broken ribs, arm, and knee from a car accident earlier in the year. (When asked later by her if he thought he was justified in assaulting his own mother, he paused to think about it for a moment before answering "Under the circumstances, yes." The circumstances were "Your friends need to go home and you can't go with them.")
He disappears for hours and refuses to let her know what he's doing. He nearly gave himself alcohol poisoning the other night, coming home in such a stupor that he could no longer stand or form coherent sentences. The other night, while my mom was actually taking an evening away from home with friends, he decided to "practice" swordfighting with one of his friends USING REAL SWORDS, and slashed his face open with his own sword. He missed slashing through his eye by about a millimeter. No, he has no fencing or sword experience. He just thinks he's that awesome.
The best part is that he plans to join the military after school. He thinks that it will magically "straighten him out". I guess every day before military discipline is asshole Mardi Gras then. At this point I would actually love to see a drill sergeant kick his ass.
tl;dr I can't stand what my brother does to my mother's life. I love my mother so much and I hate to see her suffer. No lecture from any of us will change what he does, no amount of stress or pain that he causes her will get him to see beyond himself. I feel like there's so little that I can do to help her, that one of these days he's going to do something terrible to himself or her and there's nothing I can do about it.
So does anyone else have a particularly shitty family member that they wanna vent about?
I love my family. They're great. My mother is the best mom in the world (in my opinon, k?) who loves us all unconditionally and my sister is an intelligent and creative young woman that I can have great talks with. When we're all together, we can have a really good time.
My brother is an idiot.
I have two brothers, but the youngest is the one who's the idiot right now. He's going through his "rebellious teenage bullshit" phase now to a degree that's just plain inhuman to my mother. He (possibly intentionally) failed out of high school so that he could be placed in the "special" high school where the rest of his punk idiot friends go. He doesn't go to class unless he feels like it. He's had the cops over at our house multiple times for shooting out our windows with his all-too-realistic replica guns. He treats my mother like the scum on the bottom of his pretentious army boots. He has the most retarded arguments with her, usually started over a misplaced word in a sentence on her part. He condescends her down to the very tone of his voice. He's physically assaulted her at least twice, most recently slamming her against a wall, being too righteously furious to care about her healing broken ribs, arm, and knee from a car accident earlier in the year. (When asked later by her if he thought he was justified in assaulting his own mother, he paused to think about it for a moment before answering "Under the circumstances, yes." The circumstances were "Your friends need to go home and you can't go with them.")
He disappears for hours and refuses to let her know what he's doing. He nearly gave himself alcohol poisoning the other night, coming home in such a stupor that he could no longer stand or form coherent sentences. The other night, while my mom was actually taking an evening away from home with friends, he decided to "practice" swordfighting with one of his friends USING REAL SWORDS, and slashed his face open with his own sword. He missed slashing through his eye by about a millimeter. No, he has no fencing or sword experience. He just thinks he's that awesome.
The best part is that he plans to join the military after school. He thinks that it will magically "straighten him out". I guess every day before military discipline is asshole Mardi Gras then. At this point I would actually love to see a drill sergeant kick his ass.
tl;dr I can't stand what my brother does to my mother's life. I love my mother so much and I hate to see her suffer. No lecture from any of us will change what he does, no amount of stress or pain that he causes her will get him to see beyond himself. I feel like there's so little that I can do to help her, that one of these days he's going to do something terrible to himself or her and there's nothing I can do about it.
So does anyone else have a particularly shitty family member that they wanna vent about?
Comments
Her Senior year of high school, she randomly decided to stop trying, taking like, 2-3 classes and getting horrendous grades. This blew her chances to go to Film School, like she wanted, so she went to Community College. While at community college, she repeatedly failed classes and drove up massive overcharge debts on her credit card. She was irresponsible, bought stuff with money she didn't have from the jobs she didn't have. Ultimately, she decided to drop out of community college and continue bumming off of my mom and stepdad.
Then she got pregnant, and had an abortion. Which my parents still never told my older brother about...
My stepsister's rich mom paid for her abortion in order to keep it quiet, and keep her status, because she's the County Executive. She finally gets a job, then decides she wants to move out, even though she has a very low income. Her mom, wanting her to become independent, puts down the lease on her apartment, where my stepsister (and as far as I can tell her boyfriend who got her pregnant) live to this day. Now she's trying to get back into film school, even though the chances they'll accept someone like her are low, and she has almost no money to pay for it. She has straightened out a little, but up until that point, she was treating my mom and stepdad like crap all the time and being a terrible person.
I love her, but I swear she's such a spoiled brat. Always has been, always will be.
My dad died in 2004. That sucks. Just a bit.
Otherwise, things are pretty good. I don't have a ton of family, so the drama is minimal.
I'll update, just need to percolate about my family for a bit.
The rest of my whole family, I can't really speak for, since they all live far enough away that I only see them on holidays. As far as I know, though there have been plenty of squabbles among my extended family, the people who are around are generally good people. And for the families that did have a lot of issues, they have been able to resolve them over time.
The only real drama that my immediate family has really faced was just in the last few months. I had mentioned on another thread a while back that one of my sister's best friends was kicked out of her house because neither of her parents wanted to care for her. Her mother absolutely hates her, so she was sent to her father's to live, who willingly did so until she turned 18, at which point she got the "you're old enough to fend for yourself" excuse for sending her back to WA. She tried to live with her mother again, but she was too busy with her new man and refused to take her back. So my sister and parents agreed to let her stay in our house until she was able to get back on her feet.
She worked for the spring and summer of last year, and then enrolled in community college for the fall quarter. Unfortunately, with the new year my sister had to go back to college too, leaving her friend very much alone from a friendship standpoint. I don't think my sister realized how dependent her friend was on her presence, and it only took a few weeks for her to resort to drugs to get by. It slowly became an addiction and my parents were forced to give her the ultimatum of either sobering up or finding somewhere else to stay (mostly because she was compromising my family's safety).
I don't know all the details, but she did end up going to rehab, and is currently living with her mother again. Hopefully she will be able to become more independent and find a goal to strive for. So, in this case, it sucks that we weren't able to help her as much as she needed.
Now that I'm an adult I don't have to deal with certain members that berate me. The only other thing that sucks is my sister sometimes, but she's a mentally challenged schizophrenic on a good drug at the moment. Can't say it sucks since she can't help it. Or I think it's a good drug. Depends on the day.
Also, Pete, you made me cry. I love you, my dear friend.
The worst we have to deal with is one of my mom's cousins, who is a crazy Orthodox Jew. He's an OK guy, but he cares more about observing religious laws than spending time with relatives he rarely sees. It's kind of funny because his sisters are liberal hippy-ish types. One is a geologist in California, the other is a librarian in Maine. They're smart, cool, and hardly religious at all. To make it a little more weird, the father of those three children, my mother's mother's brother, was one of the greatest human beings I have ever known personally.
My first aunt is an alcoholic. She married a much older, relatively wealthy man who soon fell ill and lived for several painful years with his leg amputated. My uncle was not a man whom I remember fondly, he was never a terribly nice person. That's when her drinking and smoking took over. Her face is perpetually bright red because of it.
My second is probably the most naive, gullible, and poorly educated people I know. To give you an idea of how clueless she is, she recently tried to read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to my four-year-old cousin Kate, straight from the Bible and complete with her explanation of what everything meant. Her mother, my third aunt, was absolutely furious at her. If you didn't make the assumption already, my second aunt converted to Evangelical Christianity when she met her husband.
My third aunt, the one with the kids, is obsessive and worrisome to point of insanity. She buys into everything she can that she thinks will make her kids more intelligent. Everything from Baby Einstein to playing Mozart as they sleep to starting them on piano lessons and foreign languages by the age of two.
Needless to say, I don't enjoy the quarterly family gatherings. It's one thing I will be avoiding as soon as I no longer am living at home.
Other than that, maybe my 4 month old niece and nephew who are as 4-month-olds are: Screaming at the top of their lungs half the time. But that isn't their fault, its nature's, and I still love them
Extended family wise, my dad's side lives in Michigan and is small, white bread, and somewhat conservative (which is fail, but while I argue with them, they are not crazy-crazy conservative types, merely typical suburban Republicans.)
My mom's side is a huge family of eight kids and many extended friends and relations. Most of them are artists in some form or another. I love going to family gatherings, sitting around the big table, with dogs, loud talking, and wine. The problem is, despite them all being talented, every one of them seems to have hit some sort of stumbling block. Take my uncle. He was a graphic artist/comic artist in Chicago for many years, big into the punk scene and theater. He was the one who bought me my first manga, and we geek out over animation and comic stuff together all the time. His stories of urban life kind of inspired me as a kid to want to be an artist in a big city. However, around the time he was 40, he burnt out and moved to Rochester to live in my Grandad's attic. He had broken both wrists falling on some ice at a baseball game in Chicago, and since then he hasn't done a lot. Almost every one of my relatives on that side has a similar story of missed potential. It is like some sort of cautionary tale for me, writ large in my DNA. That is the fail of my family. Too much wasted talent.
My parents are fairly freshly separated.
Daddy has a lot of problems and I worry about him.
The middle sister has a lot of issues with responsibility and anger management. I worry about her but I'm also still mad about an incident that happened recently. I don't know if she can be my maid of honor anymore. Some of you know about this.
My two littlest sisters are GREAT, even though they're teenagers. I think they're keeping Mama afloat.
They all love me, and I love them. Unfortunately, most of them are at least a little bit broken right now, and I don't know if Daddy or middle sister will ever be truly ok...
And there's absolutely nothing I can do about it except call now and then. Sometimes I feel guilty about accepting so much money for gradschool tuition when I can hardly do anything to help make things better. I feel bad about being the only one in my family that is free. I offered to take leave from school for a while to help out, but Mama said she just wants me to live my life and do the best I can; that my success will be her success as a parent.
@Judith.
That sword story was shocking, initially. I mean, it's good he didn't get his eye, but it's still worrisome what he might do in the future. But then you got to this detail, "Yeah, he redrew his own sword back too far and cut his face open." Maybe I shouldn't have, but I laughed. I mean, that's so idiotic it's comical. That was similar to the guy who set his face on fire by failing at drinking a flaming shot.
I'm so sorry for your mom. We should go visit her again this week.