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When do you give up your [Family]?
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
"Family is the most important thing."
- some tacky homespun platitude lacquered onto a piece of driftwood sold at your local Cracker Barrel
Can you break from your family? If so, when? How much is too much burden to bear? Is there an amount?
Let me tell you a story. My dad grew up poor in a bad part of town of what is now an even worse part of town. His parents grew up even poorer. They all lived, his two parents and his younger sister with him, in a three-room house on a street that wasn't exactly even paved in a town in a poor part of the South. A nice car would cost more than this house, pier-and-beam held together by thin drywall and siding. They never had more than one car between them, and it was never nice or new. My grandfather being a mechanic would occasionally buy totaled cars he could fix up into a serviceable state, but you could almost always count on them being at least a decade old as well as beat to shit. My granddad worked long hours at low pay to keep their meagre standard of living, and my grandmother stayed at home with the kids. They saved whatever little they had left for their kids' college funds.
My dad did well in school. He was popular and a jock, but also excelled in his studies and was accepted out of high school to the University of Texas' pre-med program, which he attended and put himself through by working with his dad in a garage in the summers, with help from his college fund. And then right at the end of his first year, he got a phone call from his younger sister. His parents were getting a divorce, and his dad was having a nervous breakdown. His mom had moved out and had not been heard from, and his dad wouldn't get out of bed. There was no money coming into the house, and the mortgage was still due, plus someone still had to feed his dad and his sister. My dad finished his exams, and moved back home.
He spent that summer finding work and getting his family back on its feet. His grades and high school diploma qualified him for clerical positions that paid more than working in a garage, and he eventually found work as junior accountant at a local metallurgy wholesaler, after attempts at manual labor in building mobile homes and working in a steel mill didn't pan out. The job paid well enough to keep his family afloat, and he eventually took over the mortgage for his dad, who was finally back at work. My dad was looking at going back to college, but those plans hit a snag; one day, my father went to his bank to withdraw tuition money from his college fund . . . only to find the fund completely empty. After inquiries, he found the truth: his mother had accessed the account, emptied it, and moved into a nice hotel in Chicago. My dad would never return to the University.
During this period of instability, his younger sister deprived of legitimate authority figures at home, began to run with a bad crowd and eventually fell in with guy 10 years her senior with the defining characteristics of smoking a lot of pot, driving a yellow Pontiac Firebird, and maintaining a 70s-porn 'stache (at that time, however, they just called them "mustaches"). They would be married within a year of her graduation from high school, pregnant a year later, and divorced two years after that.
This was also a time in which, as my grandfather's mental state improved, he allowed his brother to live in the house with them, with his three young children. His brother had just become a widower, his wife succumbing to ovarian cancer, and was in the middle of a nervous breakdown himself, though this one assisted by more than a little alcohol. It was during the end of this era, when my dad's uncle moved out of the house and started his own butchery, that my grandmother moved back to town. She was penniless after her time in Chicago and was still without much in the way of job prospects. She came back from her trip bearing gifts of expensive jewelry for both my dad and his sister. My dad has never worn anything more than a wedding ring his entire life. The jewelry was sold immediately. Not long after this, my grandmother was rumored to be seen around town with some unsavory (but wealthy) folks of a less-than-reputable nature. My grandfather asked his brother to give her a job at his butchery wrapping meat and working the till so she wouldn't have to mooch off these types to get by, and he did. About fifteen years later, as he lay on his deathbed dying from liver cirrhosis, my grandfather's brother (now married again) would tearfully confess that he slept with my grandmother after she began working for him. The explanation was fairly simple and needed no embellishment; my uncle was a drunk and in a vulnerable state, and my grandmother was a bad person and looked like Ava Gabor. The math checked out.
After she quit the butchery, she returned to those unsavory neer-do-wells, eventually marrying the wealthiest one. He was a short, mean-spirited man who recently became a widower himself under mysterious circumstances. His wife had died in their home at the hand of their oldest son in what the police would describe as an "accidental shooting." In the coming years, his father would die at the company of his daughter in what police would describe as an "accidental drowning." Years after that, his daughter-in-law would be found dead from an "accidental homicide," and his youngest son would serve life in Huntsville in reparation. Two years after that, his daughter would be found dead of an "accidental overdose."
Nobody questioned the legitimacy of that last one.
He was a cruel man that would scream at my grandmother often and beat her occasionally. Her marriage to him lasted 4 years longer than her marriage to my grandfather, and that was only due to her husband's death at age 80. She inherited a largess worth over a million dollars in cash and assets, which she immediately began to burn through, paying cash for two new cars and a house within the first year alone. The rest she pissed away at a slower rate, spending about $5000 a week at the local casinos. It was during this time that she adopted the young daughter of her late husband's deceased daughter; without a shred of propriety or irony, she deposited a large sum of cash into a college trust for the girl. Later, she would give this child up for adoption at the age of 11, and the kid would bounce around foster homes and spend time at her biological father's trailer-house until the state would forcibly remove her after rumors of physical and sexual abuse and truancy. The good news is that she is now in a stable family dynamic with good people who fully adopted her, and she's entering college next year to study social work; she wants to help exploited and abused children.
She also kept up with her remaining step-children, taking monthly trips to vist her stepson in prison. It was here that she fell in love with his cellmate, a man who plead guilty to a double-murder that he carried out with an axe on a elderly couple during a robbery gone awry. Despite the protests of her family and friends, she decided to marry this axe-murderer 30 years her junior; she asked her teenage grandson to stand as his proxy, since sharing a physical space with this man was impossible, and will be until the day he dies. She divorced him two years later, no worse for wear, other than spending $50,000 on lawyers to try to fight the conviction of a confessed murderer/burglar, and having the prison board call my family repeatedly to report my grandmother for "lewd and inappropriate" behavior and correspondence. She's now engaged in a similar relationship with her stepson's new cellmate, a cholo doing time for drug trafficking that is younger in age than her youngest grandchild.
My grandfather died of a stroke almost fifteen years ago, and other than my aunt (who is, at best, unreliable) my father has no family left, and to this day refuses to disavow his mother. It's his only tie to his past, and he can't shake it, and I don't really think he wants to. He loves her, and the saddest part is that after talking with him, I know that he doesn't feel like his mother loves him. I don't know that she loves anyone, other than herself. My brother just had the family's first baby of that generation, and it took my grandmother two months to see the child despite the fact she lives 5 miles from my brother's house, and even that only happened because it was a holiday party.
TL;DR - My grandmother is a monster. Sure, she has her reasons; nothing happens in a vacuum. But when do you cut ties? Can it be done?
- some tacky homespun platitude lacquered onto a piece of driftwood sold at your local Cracker Barrel
Can you break from your family? If so, when? How much is too much burden to bear? Is there an amount?
Let me tell you a story. My dad grew up poor in a bad part of town of what is now an even worse part of town. His parents grew up even poorer. They all lived, his two parents and his younger sister with him, in a three-room house on a street that wasn't exactly even paved in a town in a poor part of the South. A nice car would cost more than this house, pier-and-beam held together by thin drywall and siding. They never had more than one car between them, and it was never nice or new. My grandfather being a mechanic would occasionally buy totaled cars he could fix up into a serviceable state, but you could almost always count on them being at least a decade old as well as beat to shit. My granddad worked long hours at low pay to keep their meagre standard of living, and my grandmother stayed at home with the kids. They saved whatever little they had left for their kids' college funds.
My dad did well in school. He was popular and a jock, but also excelled in his studies and was accepted out of high school to the University of Texas' pre-med program, which he attended and put himself through by working with his dad in a garage in the summers, with help from his college fund. And then right at the end of his first year, he got a phone call from his younger sister. His parents were getting a divorce, and his dad was having a nervous breakdown. His mom had moved out and had not been heard from, and his dad wouldn't get out of bed. There was no money coming into the house, and the mortgage was still due, plus someone still had to feed his dad and his sister. My dad finished his exams, and moved back home.
He spent that summer finding work and getting his family back on its feet. His grades and high school diploma qualified him for clerical positions that paid more than working in a garage, and he eventually found work as junior accountant at a local metallurgy wholesaler, after attempts at manual labor in building mobile homes and working in a steel mill didn't pan out. The job paid well enough to keep his family afloat, and he eventually took over the mortgage for his dad, who was finally back at work. My dad was looking at going back to college, but those plans hit a snag; one day, my father went to his bank to withdraw tuition money from his college fund . . . only to find the fund completely empty. After inquiries, he found the truth: his mother had accessed the account, emptied it, and moved into a nice hotel in Chicago. My dad would never return to the University.
During this period of instability, his younger sister deprived of legitimate authority figures at home, began to run with a bad crowd and eventually fell in with guy 10 years her senior with the defining characteristics of smoking a lot of pot, driving a yellow Pontiac Firebird, and maintaining a 70s-porn 'stache (at that time, however, they just called them "mustaches"). They would be married within a year of her graduation from high school, pregnant a year later, and divorced two years after that.
This was also a time in which, as my grandfather's mental state improved, he allowed his brother to live in the house with them, with his three young children. His brother had just become a widower, his wife succumbing to ovarian cancer, and was in the middle of a nervous breakdown himself, though this one assisted by more than a little alcohol. It was during the end of this era, when my dad's uncle moved out of the house and started his own butchery, that my grandmother moved back to town. She was penniless after her time in Chicago and was still without much in the way of job prospects. She came back from her trip bearing gifts of expensive jewelry for both my dad and his sister. My dad has never worn anything more than a wedding ring his entire life. The jewelry was sold immediately. Not long after this, my grandmother was rumored to be seen around town with some unsavory (but wealthy) folks of a less-than-reputable nature. My grandfather asked his brother to give her a job at his butchery wrapping meat and working the till so she wouldn't have to mooch off these types to get by, and he did. About fifteen years later, as he lay on his deathbed dying from liver cirrhosis, my grandfather's brother (now married again) would tearfully confess that he slept with my grandmother after she began working for him. The explanation was fairly simple and needed no embellishment; my uncle was a drunk and in a vulnerable state, and my grandmother was a bad person and looked like Ava Gabor. The math checked out.
After she quit the butchery, she returned to those unsavory neer-do-wells, eventually marrying the wealthiest one. He was a short, mean-spirited man who recently became a widower himself under mysterious circumstances. His wife had died in their home at the hand of their oldest son in what the police would describe as an "accidental shooting." In the coming years, his father would die at the company of his daughter in what police would describe as an "accidental drowning." Years after that, his daughter-in-law would be found dead from an "accidental homicide," and his youngest son would serve life in Huntsville in reparation. Two years after that, his daughter would be found dead of an "accidental overdose."
Nobody questioned the legitimacy of that last one.
He was a cruel man that would scream at my grandmother often and beat her occasionally. Her marriage to him lasted 4 years longer than her marriage to my grandfather, and that was only due to her husband's death at age 80. She inherited a largess worth over a million dollars in cash and assets, which she immediately began to burn through, paying cash for two new cars and a house within the first year alone. The rest she pissed away at a slower rate, spending about $5000 a week at the local casinos. It was during this time that she adopted the young daughter of her late husband's deceased daughter; without a shred of propriety or irony, she deposited a large sum of cash into a college trust for the girl. Later, she would give this child up for adoption at the age of 11, and the kid would bounce around foster homes and spend time at her biological father's trailer-house until the state would forcibly remove her after rumors of physical and sexual abuse and truancy. The good news is that she is now in a stable family dynamic with good people who fully adopted her, and she's entering college next year to study social work; she wants to help exploited and abused children.
She also kept up with her remaining step-children, taking monthly trips to vist her stepson in prison. It was here that she fell in love with his cellmate, a man who plead guilty to a double-murder that he carried out with an axe on a elderly couple during a robbery gone awry. Despite the protests of her family and friends, she decided to marry this axe-murderer 30 years her junior; she asked her teenage grandson to stand as his proxy, since sharing a physical space with this man was impossible, and will be until the day he dies. She divorced him two years later, no worse for wear, other than spending $50,000 on lawyers to try to fight the conviction of a confessed murderer/burglar, and having the prison board call my family repeatedly to report my grandmother for "lewd and inappropriate" behavior and correspondence. She's now engaged in a similar relationship with her stepson's new cellmate, a cholo doing time for drug trafficking that is younger in age than her youngest grandchild.
My grandfather died of a stroke almost fifteen years ago, and other than my aunt (who is, at best, unreliable) my father has no family left, and to this day refuses to disavow his mother. It's his only tie to his past, and he can't shake it, and I don't really think he wants to. He loves her, and the saddest part is that after talking with him, I know that he doesn't feel like his mother loves him. I don't know that she loves anyone, other than herself. My brother just had the family's first baby of that generation, and it took my grandmother two months to see the child despite the fact she lives 5 miles from my brother's house, and even that only happened because it was a holiday party.
TL;DR - My grandmother is a monster. Sure, she has her reasons; nothing happens in a vacuum. But when do you cut ties? Can it be done?
Atomika on
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i don't even know.
Edit: it sounds like your dad will never cut his ties with your grandmother, and I think it would be better to please him than caring about her. I knew a guy who had an addict, fuck-up brother who kept on being forgiven by his mom and that shit only got somewhat resolved after the mom started having enough. in this case I think you're gonna have to stick with what your dad wants, sucky though it is.
Granted, cutting ties with family is likely more emotionally difficult than cutting ties with other people, but that's rather beside the point.
I agree with Jeffe.
The best thing you can really do is just be supportive of your father. because it sounds like he's going to need it.
I'm sorry, Ross.
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That's kind of the thing. I can't imagine my own parents doing anything like that to me, and I've got shit I resent about my parents (just like probably everyone). But if they did just a fraction of that shit my grandmother pulled, I'd have told them, "so long, don't write." The choice would actually have come really easy, and that's considering people who were pretty good parents.
My mom's parents are kind of fucked up, too, but not nearly as awful as my dad's mom, and my mom had a huge fight with them and didn't speak for almost a decade, when they finally apologized and made amends for some of the shit they pulled. My mom's parents kept setting my mom up on dates after she became engaged to my dad; they would invite her out for dinner when she visited and some random guy would be there with them. "Oh, this is Ted So-and-So, he's a junior manager over at the oil refinery and is on his way to a promotion!" They also gutted my mom's college fund (which my mom funded by working summers during high school at a sheet-metal factory), but out of spite: she decided to go to college for nursing instead of pre-med like her parents wanted (the same people that had exactly 4 years of college between them), and my grandfather told her, "well, if you're just going to be some doctor's whore, I'm not paying for it."
My mom is now the director of a medical college.
Oh, and they also destroyed a joint business venture with my dad when they liquidized the collateral on a line of credit to pave their driveway. My grandfather's line of reasoning was, "Young people like yourselves don't work hard enough to earn your money these days."
With the assets no longer collateralizing those lines of credits, my father's business was forced to close and put about 50 people (including both he and my mother) out of work.
Meh, don't be. It's unfortunately very old-hat with me. I feel sorry for my dad is all, but it's his choice.
You know, my dad actually was diagnosed with cancer about 8 years ago, and has since made a full recovery, but I don't think he ever told his mother about having it. Not because he didn't want her to worry, but because I don't think he could handle her NOT worrying.
Personally I think it's fine to cut ties with parents, grandparents and siblings for no reason other than that you just can't stand them. It's probably better if you can at least pull of a short visit or polite phone call on their birthday or something. But if not, well then that's just the way things are. I don't extend the same easy way out concerning your children. Even after they are grown up. I only condone cutting ties with your own children if they are a serious threat to your safety.
I like that she cares, and want to honor that and give her some kind of image of a son that she can project her own feelings onto, even if it's not 100% authentic because I know that the type of "deep self-sacrificing boundless love" people are supposed to feel for their biological relatives is something I'll never feel for mine and I don't really want to hurt anyone either, just minimize my dealings with them. They were largely absent either physically or emotionally during my childhood until I had a nervous breakdown in the 6th grade and even then only my mother tried to be a part of my life and her idea of doing that was religious education, and authoritarian discipline to "Save my Soul." I had two cousins that really cared (out of nine), one seemed to care a lot and we used to be good friends until he got older, then turned into a racist conservative I never saw; the other cousin I didn't know cared at all until he died (car accident) and my mom told me how he'd actually taken her aside in the past and tried to explain to her that her religious programming was harming me (not sure how much of it she listened to since she never really said when he had.)
Her attempts to "protect me" from bullying and other kids only ended up making my condition worse and cut my chances for regular, healthy social development off at the knees and it was this same lack of social development which kept me from realizing I was in an isolated, abusive relationship with a certain person I thought was a very close friend until just recently. I actually had a much harder time cutting ties with her than I did with my biological relatives because as manipulative and cunning as she was she still showed more recognizable care in a way I was able to appreciate than my own mother. It's funny to think about because my mom tries far harder, but her religion will prevent her and I from ever being able to function together, while the abusive relationship I was in, entirely because it was devoid of that religious authoritarianism, despite being far worse on me emotionally, seemed more worthwhile and enriching than anything ever offered by a relative and it was very hard to shake.
I'm really fortunate that I've made it this far in life and I'm starting to finally find a few worthwhile people. I've always believed very firmly "Family is what's in your heart, not your blood." I see too many people abusing biological relations to pull all sorts of abuse for me to ever give blood any second thought as being worth any kind of special consideration. I trust and show care to anyone who puts themselves in my life and who seems to be honest and friendly towards me, but I don't have time or money to waste maintaining some list of arbitrary associations because they happen to have been my gene donors.
My Grandparents? I really did like them, and they did their best with what they had. But I've already lost 3/4 of them and the remaining one is several states away and as much as I'd like to see her again I know that she's probably not going to be around by the time I have both the time and money to pay for a trip to Oklahoma. For the record Ross? Your Grandmother sounds a bit like a less intense version of the same "friend/GF" I ended up having to distance myself from just recently. Cutting yourself off from people like that can be hard if they're skilled in manipulation, it takes a lot of support from people who care and time to break ties. I almost bankrupted myself on her a number of times and gave her practically everything I've owned. It's harder though with relatives because society loves to reinforce bloodline based connections as having some strong inherent worth, so I don't know if it's something you really can do anything about. I'm sorry to hear about the situation though, because I can only imagine how much incredibly worse that must've been than anything I've ever had to deal with.
All I can say in consolation is that if you're willing to cut ties with the people who make your life hell, you leave a space for good people to come into it, even if it takes time.
I'm sorry for your dad. Sounds like mom's still hitting those buttons she installed.
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Well, like I said, nothing happens in a vacuum.
She rarely talks about it, but my grandmother (my dad's mom) grew up incredibly poor. She was born in old farmhouse in Arkansas during the Depression. Her mother ran a boarding house to make ends meet while her husband was away, and when he came back from serving in the military for a few years, he found his wife pregnant with her fifth child. If you'll do some quick math, you'll see what a problem that is. It didn't take long for anyone else to figure it out either, for while my grandmother's siblings all bore a similar likeness to each other in having short, stocky statures and coarse, dark features, my grandmother bore the blonde hair, green eyes, lithe figure, and fair complexion only shared by a Swedish immigrant who was known to frequent the old boarding house before its return to farmhouse status.
My grandmother's father took out his increasing public humiliation in the form of routine beatings and, was rumored, sexual abuse. Most people in my family believe that my grandmother's life-long deafness didn't actually occur until after she received a pretty strong blow to the head as a young child. She ran away from the homestead at age 14 and bounced around for a few years until she reconnected with family and moved into a old house in Shreveport, Louisiana, that shared a lot with the Louisiana Hayride. Look it up. It was awesome. Naturally, my floozy of a grandmother caught the eye of several famous stars of that age, and not to name names, but there's a very real chance that my dad was this shy of being the actual Bocephus.
Then she moved back in with her mother (her "father" was dead of a heart attack by now) in Texas, started high school, and got pregnant immediately after hooking up with my grandfather (who had a full-time job despite being just 17, since he had quit school around age 13). The two of them married one afternoon at the local courthouse, which after the ceremony my grandfather changed back into his blues and went back to work at the garage.
The moment family behaves in a manner that makes you dislike your time with them, stop bothering to spend time with them.
I know too many good people to spend Christmas/any time at all with a bunch of mostly strangers who I don't really enjoy.
I'm lucky my immediate family is great, but if they weren't I wouldn't speak to them.
But in short I have this to say:
Familial relationships, once the dependency stage has ended (and sometimes before), can be extremely unhealthy and a zealous possession that "family is the most important thing" can be the biggest factor in people never improving their lives.
In short, it is perfectly acceptable to sever familial ties, provided the relationship is unhealthy enough to warrant it, the same as you would with any other relationship.
I don't accept that you should treat your family any different than other people just because they share some of the same genetic material as you. Too often people assume a level of respect in family relationship that was never earned in the first place.
I am kind of rambling....I think family ties can and should be cut if necessary.
I know I did.
EDIT: and am healthier for it.
But I can say as much as you try, breaking emotional ties is almost impossible. You may never see these people who drive you so nuts again as long as you live but the drive to is powerful strong. I've been trying for a decade and I keep falling to guilt and go running back if someone starts screaming loud enough.
There is nothing physically preventing you from not answering the phone when relatives call, or not going to their birthday parties.
You might feel a duty to persons whose genetics are similar to your own, but duty is a very silly thing.
The only bonds you have to relatives are "emotional" or "societal" bonds. The existence of these bonds is highly questionable, and at best they occur as some kind of relation posited by particular individuals.
You may stop positing / acknowledging those bonds whenever you like.
It was fairly easy to cut ties.
It's true that some people do not have the ability to cut ties, but this is an individual thing. If a relative is making your life worse, I would certainly at least try to set them aside and move on. Blood relations are meaningless outside of biology and government nonsense.
I wouldn't necessarily burn the bridge, but I would wire it up with TNT.
Can you cut ties by choice, even if they aren't a horrible person and would that in turn make you one?
It just seems like a lot of people use those connections as leverage in weird psychological dynamics to enforce their will upon others. This can be as simple as a family member who is constantly putting themselves in the hospital for attention (I have a great-aunt who would do this), or much more complex.
I have an in-law who is constantly being guilted by her family for moving away from the town they live in, so much so that she's actually planning on moving back to just shut them up, giving up a brand new house and a great job in the process. Her family always goes on and on about how great her sisters are doing (one is on welfare and raising three kids with her now-disabled drug-dealing husband, and the other severely suffers from Asperger's and is a public school girls' coach) and how they all miss her and how terrible life is without her. So yeah, she's giving up everything and getting nothing in return so her family won't bother her anymore and she'll be "happy."
So fuck her, and fuck her family twice again.
I guess the only advice I can give on the subject is that when confronted with these heavy situations you have to keep a calm head and ask yourself what's more important, being right or being together? There isn't really a wrong answer to this, it depends on what is best for you and what you're willing to deal with in the long run. If it's an issue or a personality clash that people agree to work on for the benefit of the family, then I swallow my pride and get past it. However, if someone in my family has a personality that continually harms myself and those I love, and show no signs that they are willing to get better, then I cut them off. I've done it before, and I can tell you, it is a freeing thing not to have to worry about those people.
I disagree with this pretty strongly.
I have family that behaves "in a manner that makes me dislike my time with them" every so often, but those people also have been by me through alot of things and accept me for who I am. There is no way I am going to stop bothering to spend time with them just because I have issues with them every so often.
I don't see why. I have a hard enough time finding the time and money to be with people i chose to associate with due to them actually being cool. I dont understand the impulse to waive all these considerations for more time with uncle drunk and aunt jackass. On their best days, they pale in comparison to people I actually know and love.
Give respect, ask for it, and don't have any expectations for how your family will act. For a lot of people, it's hard to break out of their dysfunctional roles and to have healthy communication. My mother and I came to a crossroads where I was ready to stop talking to her, but she reached out and made an effort to change. Not everyone will do that, and you know when you've reached that point where it is doing more harm than good being around certain people.
I'm not talking about Uncle Drunk and aunt jackass, though. I am talking about parents and brothers and sisters and any other family that was there for you while you were growing up.
My mom gave me 18 years of her life letting me live in her home, feeding me, supporting me, loving me and taking care of me. Are you saying that the moment she "behaves in a manner that makes [me] dislike [my] time with [her], I should stop bothering to spend time with [her]"? Really?
If that is the case, then I should just stop spending time with my beautiful amazing 2 year old daughter, because you bet there are plenty of times "she behaves in a manner that makes me dislike my time with her".
All I'm saying is that your initial statement was WAAAY too broad and shows a great amount of disrespect for people that have spent a large chunk of their lives taking care of you.
But as for family, me, I've said for years upon years that "blood is thicker than water," or similar phrases, are total loads of shit. Family is grossly overrated, and the idea that you have to pretend to be best friends with people you see once every year is ridiculous and borderline psychotic. I, however, don't have the best family situation. It's not the worst, but it's unique compared to what a lot of other people go through.
My parents are each immigrants - one from Mexico, one from Portugal. So they ascribe to very archaic culturally irrelevant views on life. They also divorced pretty much immediately after I was born. My mother won custody of us children. She arranged to work at home from her job so she can be there always, which is probably the one altruistic, purely good aspect to her. Everything is else is vile. Let me explain. For starters, she smokes indoors. I don't doubt the possibility that she smoked during her pregnancy with me (fun fact: a couple of years ago, she told me that the doctors diagnosed me with asthma when I was a child, but because she hates doctors she never sought treatment for me, which explains a lot of shit). School officials would regularly question our wellbeing, or if we ourselves were smoking (my one full-blood brother and I). But no, we just stunk like cigarettes because my mother is shit. My mother also has a habit of constantly moving. But she doesn't just rent out homes. She attempts to buy them. The longest we stayed in one home was when I was in 2nd grade, lasting part way into 6th - then she wanted to move into the mountains of California. We stayed with our grandmother for the rest of the school year, and we fought tooth and nail against moving with her to the mountains. Then we moved in with our father, who'd just gotten a new home literally across the street from his sister.
I know I said I'd talk more about my mother's vileness, but I'll get to that later since this post is now chronological.
Now, up until then, my father was a bi-weekly visit over the weekend. Friday night he'd get us, Sunday night he'd drop us back off. Dad, back then, was cool as shit. Baseball games, toys, watching movies together, barbecues - it was picture perfect. Plus, he never harangued us about our school work. And he would actually take us in for regular doctor and dentist appointments. This was the allure that made my brother and I decide to move in with him. We figured that he was actually playing by the rules in how to raise children in America. We were wrong - like my mother said, that would all change the moment we were under his roof full-time. No more baseball games, no more gifts. No more hanging out together. Suddenly we were burdens to him, from the first night forward. And it was unwarranted. We worked hard in school, my brother and I. I was learning film and computers, my brother was getting involved in acting. But we were always failures and burdens to our father, and never praised for what we were doing. The message was always clear to us - "You better get a good job from that." It was just money. Get a job, and get the fuck out ASAP. It didn't help that my brother didn't graduate from highschool. Then I was met with the burden of how I was going to do the same thing. Meanwhile, I'm not the one who was sneaking out at night, smoking, or drinking. I stayed at home for the most part, I tapped at the computer. I wasn't the best of students mind you, but I wasn't a corrupted youth. I got a summer job during highschool, and offered to help my dad pay bills and such. He declined, but I thought it would leave an impression that I had honest intents to that degree. Instead, he saw it as an opportunity to stop giving me money for lunch every day. So that's where all my money from that job went, over a long period of time. I even bluffed him once and he didn't give me the $2.50 necessary for lunch, and I knew I was fucked. When tax season came up the next year, I asked my dad for help on how to do that stuff. He didn't even refer me to who does his taxes - "Ask your friends," he said. I cried and panicked the last night to mail in taxes, which the post office was staying on 'til midnight to account for people like me. Thankfully, a friend of a friend drove over, got me and my papers, and his mom showed me everything I needed to know. Needless to say, my jaw hit the floor over how easy it was.
I forgot to mention that, prior to getting that job, I was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer. This was also the last time my father would ever take me to the doctor. I got my meds, things were working, they tried new meds and it was backfiring, and instead of going in to get the meds replaced my father just stopped. He even took me off his insurance when I hit 18, despite me going to college after.
My dad's "you're a failure, I'm not helping you learn shit" extended to a lot of things. When I wanted to open up my own bank account, he didn't lift a finger. He insisted that he cash my checks for me, and would always make a point of how it was a burden. I'd ask why he didn't just tell me about how to open an account, and he'd yell at me and scare me out of the idea. I asked him to learn how to drive, and made a point that I wasn't interested in using the car or anything, it was just a means of being able to. "Ask your friends." But the key with my father was the concept of 'never enough.' No matter what good I did in my life, he never had a praise for it. Not even back-handed praises. I flunked 6th grade and wanted to start over, but my mother convinced the school I was starting at to put me in 7th. I turned myself around to a near straight-A student. And that was my father's take. "It's not straight A's." I got straight A's the next card. "Couldn't you have gotten some sort of extra credit?" At that point, I gave up on doing homework and shit. He obviously wasn't pleased with with my good performance, so it may as well be bad performance. Then there was graduation. As I said, he thought I was going to not graduate just because of my brother. But I fought it somehow, and did. My father had to go to a funeral out of state the week of graduation, however. Now under those circumstances, I definitely excused it. It was my step-mother's mom. In my father's place was suppose to be my aunt across the street. I gave her the passes, she said she knew how to get there... I return home from the ceremony - with my mother, step-father, an older brother, and grandma waiting in the car - and see something taped to the door. It was the pass to attend the graduation. With a note written on the back yelling at me about how I didn't tell my aunt about it. What.
My father returned from Virginia, and I showed him the highschool diploma thing. "OH LOOK AT YOU, A BIG MAN NOW. So what, you still don't have a job." I pointed out that I was starting college THE NEXT FUCKING WEEK, a goddamn business college, which was the correct path for becoming that computer technician guy I was planning on being. "So what?" he said, and left the room. I ran away. Ran to my then-girlfriend's house (or really, she was an ex by this point but we were still friends barely), and just cried forever. Or a couple hours. But it wrecked my goddamn life. I was going into this school to show him I wasn't a piece of shit, that I had direction, and it wasn't good enough still.
Uh, I need a break from writing to compose myself. Not done with my father, need to get to my mother and other family. brb
My mom's parents put her through the same shit. They just about disowned her when she, the valedictorian, decided to go to nursing school instead of medical school, despite the fact both my grandparents have almost zero post-high school education.
I still get shit from them about my life from time to time, "Oh, you're so smart, why aren't you going to medical school? You know, so-and-so's grandson just got his PhD from seminary and he's a DOCTOR now!"
I think they have no real idea what the word "Doctor" means. My mom is the director of a medical college and her parents still trust the advice of doctors on TV commercials and brochures over her.
Although yeah your familial situation with those things is kind of head-scratching
I can see where you're coming from. My parents were each abused by their parents. Cutting ties with the extended family has been the best decision either of them ever made, and the lesson I took was that blood is not thicker than anything in particular. Parents and siblings are not sacred.
I'm not certain I can imagine a person who was both a loving and dedicated parent but also impossible to enjoy being near. I love my mother, I loved my father, and I love my sister. They are great people. But if they were not great people, I would not love them simply due to proximity.
Edit: And I don't mean to sound too cold. I think the mutual agreement that we were a family because we liked being a family and not because we were stuck with each other is part of what made my immediate family so wonderful to grow up with. It didn't change all that much about how things were organized, but it was a running undercurrent: we could split up if we wanted, but we won't because we really like being here.
A lack of blood ties didn't make us any worse off, and changed our lives for the better frequently. I don't see why I should call my mom an ungrateful child for not allowing a fat old harridan of a mother to participate in her life.
My grandparents on that side have always aspired to be snobs. They don't really care what you do as long as the title is culturally prestigious and carries a certain amount of assumed authority. It's not about the accomplishment or the earning potential or the lifestyle, it's all about them having something to brag about to their friends in the bridge club. I could spend about $15k dollars right now and finish my Ph.D. in linguistics or economics and they'd shit their pants; I'd be $15k in debt (plus whatever deficit I took from taking time off work) and increased my earning potential by about 5%. In 25 years, I might just break even.
It's a crazy (and shitty) way to gauge how you will pressure your progeny into professional life.
I'd say family is just some people you know, and if they're terrible, stop knowing them.
As a result now I feel like a bad person for making that post.
My parents refusing to speak to their parents and siblings for the most part made my life, my sister's life, and their lives better. Bad people are bad people no matter whether or not they raised you or grew up with you.
Yeah it's hella unhealthy to push that stuff on children. You don't need an MD or JD or even PhD to have a fulfilling career, or even something that pays the bills and the things that actually make your life enjoyable. Also as you point out it can make your earning/career potential/overall income decrease unless you plan/time it well. Committing a decade to schooling is only going to end in disaster unless there's a field you know requires it, or you're incredibly passionate about the subject (hopefully with the caveat that you pay next to nothing while taking it).
This, so much this. I had this same sort of line pulled on me as to why I had to be responsible for someone else's car payments and other articles of financial well being. She wouldn't demand it but there'd be this heavy guilt trip laden with emotional stories about how her parents were suffering, brother was suffering, and then sometimes for good measure there'd be a "Mother/Father asked me in tears to ask you for help..." It is out and out emotional manipulation, it is dangerous and it is one of the most horrible things you can do to a person who legitimately cares. Here's what I would recommend, if you see someone doing this and want to see about them changing their minds, read to them about the pathology of psychopaths and how they manipulate emotions. Do it in an indirect way so they don't catch the association at first, and then make the case as to why the family is doing is the same as a psychopath basically looking to chew up someone for resources.
It was reading about psychopaths in relationships (inspired by Occupy's talk of political/economic psychopathy) that helped me figure out my own situation and take the first real steps to permanently sever it. Once you are able to associate within someone's mind that yes, even someone you think are your relatives can be just as abusive as a psychopath looking to use you for cash, excitement, an emotional punching bag, or whatever else, then you can begin to actually permanently cut ties. It destroys the delusion that these people are going to ever change how they treat you regardless of circumstance and therefore frees you of the guilt felt thinking that you have a responsibility to "save" them because you care and don't want to be so cruel as to leave them "high and dry without a friend in the world" (which was how I felt about my own relationship at the time.)
They're wrong. You had rational criticisms. So what if it could have been worse? That doesn't excuse what you had to put up with.
That is bullshit Henroid.