Monday, November 29, 2004
Relationships 210
It’s amazing how just a few words can freeze your heart. Between inhaling and exhaling life will never be quite the same.
Do I have trust issues?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Maybe we could blame it on the holidays. Holidays don’t always bring out the best in people. It’s the traditional time of year for dysfunctional families to lose it.
Lillie was so looking forward to this Thanksgiving, the first in our own home for two years, surrounded by loving family.
Insert commercial here.
Fast forward to reality.
Here’s the backstory:
Sarah’s boyfriend broke up with her a few weeks ago, soon after she moved in with us. She’d lived with her grandparents for the previous two years finishing high school. Now she was going to cosmetology school near our home.
Her boyfriend treated her disrespectfully. A typical redneckjerk he was boorish and disrespectful to other family members too. Sarah was on the verge of dumping him when he broke up with her. We all rejoiced except Sarah. She cried for days.
She started dating other guys but she showed an alarming propensity for picking losers who might eventually escalate to domestic violence. Trust me, I know the symptoms. Her mother tried to talk with her to no avail. Owl was especially upset over her choices. He tried talking with her too.
The redneckjerk called after a couple weeks. She decided to have him over for the evening. She did all that telltale girl stuff, bubble bath, makeup, curled her hair and waited for him to arrive. And waited for him to arrive. And waited…. You get the picture.
This did nothing to further endear him to any of us. Owl and Thunder went into full-blown big brother mode. They wanted to hunt him down and explain how things ought to be. I don’t think they planned on using words to explain. I called them off. Barely.
Two days before the holiday redneckjerk calls and invites Sarah to dinner with his family. She accepts. Now this would be the first holiday Sarah could have spent with her mother since she was seven years old. Eyvonne was looking forward to it. Having Sarah here was like a dream come true for her. Because it meant so much to her, it did to all of us, Owl and Thunder included. When Sarah announced she and redneckjerk would be gone all day but back in time for dinner with us, I could see mayhem in the making.
“If he’s disrespectful in any way I’m telling him to leave,” I told Eyvonne. She assured me she’d already made Sarah aware redneckjerk better behave.
The only other stipulation I made was that he was not to spend the night. Not that night, nor any night in the future. I was done harboring abusers under my roof. Eyvonne agreed.
Sarah left before dawn with redneckjerk. Owl and Thunder left mid-morning for their first round of turkey at their grandmother’s house with their dad’s family. It was peaceful and mellow. Tantalizing turkey smells filled the house. Owl and Thunder arrived home by midafternoon. Their first question was “When will supper be ready?” It wasn’t Thanksgiving until they had turkey here.
Eyvonne was at the kitchen table making a sign for the wigheads on poles in the yard she and Sarah had rigged up to prank Ian. “PILGRIMS, What we should have done” it said.
The subject of redneckjerk came up.
“Why do we have to have him here? None of us wants him to be here,” Thunder said.
“Sarah wants him here,” Eyvonne said.
“If he says or does anything we don’t like he’s leaving,” I pointed out.
“We need to respect Sarah’s decision to invite him,” Eyvonne said.
“I’m tired of respecting Sarah’s decisions,” Owl snapped.
Everyone froze.
Eyvonne barely looked up from her sign making.
“Then Sarah and I will look for our own place,” she said.
Some people are born Aztecs. My daughter’s one. She ripped my heart out when she was sixteen and never looked back. But that’s another golden moment of dysfunction.
That was then and this is now, as Eyvonne is so fond of pointing out.
Now I was standing in the kitchen trying not to faint or puke. My blood burned. My vision distorted. If I moved I’d keel over.
This was not the first time Eyvonne threatened to leave. The last time blindsided me too. We were still living in the dumpy trailer in western Pennsylvania, four hours from any of our family except Owl. Eyvonne announced one morning that if her mom became ill she planned to move in with her parents to care for her. Her mom is diabetic, eats what she wants, smokes and doesn’t exercise. This is inevitable.
Just like that. No ‘we need to come up with a plan, or ‘how can we work this out’. Definitely no ‘how do you feel about this?’ or ‘will you be all right if I do this’. No ‘this would be a temporary solution’.
Just ‘if mom gets sick I’m moving out’.
Good morning to you too. Are we still together? Do you care?
The fallout from this was I learned I could get through a crisis without falling back into destructive behavior patterns. There was no cutting. I kept eating. I just felt like shit for days and spawned a new alter. Does that count as destructive behavior? I couldn’t help it, it was an automatic response. Welcome to the Q Flinch. Happy birthday. (He’s extremely ticklish flinching when anyone touches him.)
Later Eyvonne said that wasn’t what she meant at all. Leaving us. I’d misinterpreted. I’d over reacted. Who’s dissociative?
We are. We want things back to normal so badly we let it go. There was a lot of talk which didn’t really change our understanding that our relationship was conditional, secondary to her mom’s health.
Now our relationship was secondary to hers with Sarah too. Again, no discussion first.
Later she said it was an automatic response to protect her daughter. A misunderstanding. She’d heard Owl say he was tired of respecting Sarah. In reality he said he was tired of respecting Sarah’s decisions, meaning they were bad ones. Eyvonne couldn’t argue that. It was true.
All of that was moot to us. What mattered to us was that she would trash our relationship because our kids were having an issue. Any issue. I thought of all the kids as ‘our’ kids. Not Owl and Thunder as mine and Sarah as hers. I thought if we had problems we worked them out, whether it was a parent’s health or our kid’s conflicts.
Were we a family? Or is her presence here just inertia until some crisis forces her to move on?
Adjusting to Sarah moving in hasn’t been easy for any of us. Eyvonne hasn’t been the end receiver parent in over ten years. She stood beside us as we parented Owl and Thunder, many times clearly not in agreement with our parenting style. Now faced with the bewildering aspects of parenting a teen she saw more wisdom in our approach. Owl and Thunder weren’t turning out so bad.
Having another family member meant a lot more work for us Qs too. By some horrible twist of fate or bad karma we like things neat and clean, the laundry done up, food cooked on a semi-regular basis.
To Eyvonne none of that is a priority. In the nine years we’ve been together she’s run the vacuum cleaner maybe a dozen times. That was more frequently than anyone else we’d ever had a relationship with so maybe we shouldn’t be complaining. Or maybe we should be looking at reasons why that happens. I figure it’s some adolescent stage she’s stuck in and our obsessive behavior feeds it.
If the empty wood box or a sink full of dishes doesn’t speak to anyone else it speaks to me. To be exact, it speaks to el. He hates a mess. He can barely abide clutter. If someone leaves a glass or a Pepsi can lying around he is compelled to it clean up. I tried ignoring housework once to see how long it would take other family members to pick up the slack. They didn’t even pick up the trash which overflowed onto the kitchen floor. Ammonia from the catpan burned your eyes and no one cleaned it. We folded. But we protested too.
Fortunately this came to a head just before Sarah moved in. Eyvonne has been doing a bit more housework, at least sporadically. So has Owl.
Enter Sarah stage right.
She shows no more inclination to pick up after herself than most teenagers. I still don’t feel the way to teach is to yell, cajole, bribe or scream. However setting a good example hasn’t worked real well either.
Maybe it’s finally begun to pay off. Owl keeps the wood box filled without my ever mentioning it. I’ve never had anyone keep the wood box filled before this. He shows other signs of adulthood too, doing chores before I max out, actually finishing a job. He even cooks. He said he understands working at home means just that: working. He said it isn’t fair we should have to do all the housework just because we’re home. He carefully avoided pointing out that Eyvonne and now Sarah are home most of the time too.
We Qs have never had a relationship where we didn’t do most of the housework, childcare, and yard work besides running a business and writing. During our peak insanity in this regard we ran a retail antique shop, developed a computer business, worked part time in the school system and as a stringer/feature writer for several newspapers.
OK, this is starting to sound like just another a bitch session. Maybe it is. It’s better than crying. It beats cutting. And it’s accomplished something else. It’s making us take a good hard look at our goals.
And I can almost hear Pleiades. It’s not a mindtouch. It’s more like just knowing. I know what he’s feeling. And it isn’t good. He’s feeling crappy. Not surprising. If I have trust issues he’s got bigger ones. He’d started coming in to see what love is all about. No worries about him swiping ops for a while. He’s back in ‘watch and wary’ mode. So am I.
The only stand I took on redneckjerk coming to dinner was that he was not to stay overnight. Eyvonne agreed to make that clear.
But, oh dear, neither Sarah or redneckjerk had gas money, all the gas stations were closed, and he couldn’t cash his paycheck because it was a holiday. So he couldn’t possibly go home.
“He had no choice,” Eyvonne said defensively. “They didn’t know the gas stations would be closed and he wouldn’t be able to cash his check. Besides, he’d been up for over 24 hours straight. What did you want him to do?”
“Leave.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know if you’ve packed your jammies you plan to sleep over. If I had known about the feeble excuse Owl and I would have sacrificed our snow blower gas and given him ten bucks to leave. I’m inclined not to call Owl and Thunder off the next time he pisses them off. I might even throw the first punch myself.
Do I have trust issues?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Maybe we could blame it on the holidays. Holidays don’t always bring out the best in people. It’s the traditional time of year for dysfunctional families to lose it.
Lillie was so looking forward to this Thanksgiving, the first in our own home for two years, surrounded by loving family.
Insert commercial here.
Fast forward to reality.
Here’s the backstory:
Sarah’s boyfriend broke up with her a few weeks ago, soon after she moved in with us. She’d lived with her grandparents for the previous two years finishing high school. Now she was going to cosmetology school near our home.
Her boyfriend treated her disrespectfully. A typical redneckjerk he was boorish and disrespectful to other family members too. Sarah was on the verge of dumping him when he broke up with her. We all rejoiced except Sarah. She cried for days.
She started dating other guys but she showed an alarming propensity for picking losers who might eventually escalate to domestic violence. Trust me, I know the symptoms. Her mother tried to talk with her to no avail. Owl was especially upset over her choices. He tried talking with her too.
The redneckjerk called after a couple weeks. She decided to have him over for the evening. She did all that telltale girl stuff, bubble bath, makeup, curled her hair and waited for him to arrive. And waited for him to arrive. And waited…. You get the picture.
This did nothing to further endear him to any of us. Owl and Thunder went into full-blown big brother mode. They wanted to hunt him down and explain how things ought to be. I don’t think they planned on using words to explain. I called them off. Barely.
Two days before the holiday redneckjerk calls and invites Sarah to dinner with his family. She accepts. Now this would be the first holiday Sarah could have spent with her mother since she was seven years old. Eyvonne was looking forward to it. Having Sarah here was like a dream come true for her. Because it meant so much to her, it did to all of us, Owl and Thunder included. When Sarah announced she and redneckjerk would be gone all day but back in time for dinner with us, I could see mayhem in the making.
“If he’s disrespectful in any way I’m telling him to leave,” I told Eyvonne. She assured me she’d already made Sarah aware redneckjerk better behave.
The only other stipulation I made was that he was not to spend the night. Not that night, nor any night in the future. I was done harboring abusers under my roof. Eyvonne agreed.
Sarah left before dawn with redneckjerk. Owl and Thunder left mid-morning for their first round of turkey at their grandmother’s house with their dad’s family. It was peaceful and mellow. Tantalizing turkey smells filled the house. Owl and Thunder arrived home by midafternoon. Their first question was “When will supper be ready?” It wasn’t Thanksgiving until they had turkey here.
Eyvonne was at the kitchen table making a sign for the wigheads on poles in the yard she and Sarah had rigged up to prank Ian. “PILGRIMS, What we should have done” it said.
The subject of redneckjerk came up.
“Why do we have to have him here? None of us wants him to be here,” Thunder said.
“Sarah wants him here,” Eyvonne said.
“If he says or does anything we don’t like he’s leaving,” I pointed out.
“We need to respect Sarah’s decision to invite him,” Eyvonne said.
“I’m tired of respecting Sarah’s decisions,” Owl snapped.
Everyone froze.
Eyvonne barely looked up from her sign making.
“Then Sarah and I will look for our own place,” she said.
Some people are born Aztecs. My daughter’s one. She ripped my heart out when she was sixteen and never looked back. But that’s another golden moment of dysfunction.
That was then and this is now, as Eyvonne is so fond of pointing out.
Now I was standing in the kitchen trying not to faint or puke. My blood burned. My vision distorted. If I moved I’d keel over.
This was not the first time Eyvonne threatened to leave. The last time blindsided me too. We were still living in the dumpy trailer in western Pennsylvania, four hours from any of our family except Owl. Eyvonne announced one morning that if her mom became ill she planned to move in with her parents to care for her. Her mom is diabetic, eats what she wants, smokes and doesn’t exercise. This is inevitable.
Just like that. No ‘we need to come up with a plan, or ‘how can we work this out’. Definitely no ‘how do you feel about this?’ or ‘will you be all right if I do this’. No ‘this would be a temporary solution’.
Just ‘if mom gets sick I’m moving out’.
Good morning to you too. Are we still together? Do you care?
The fallout from this was I learned I could get through a crisis without falling back into destructive behavior patterns. There was no cutting. I kept eating. I just felt like shit for days and spawned a new alter. Does that count as destructive behavior? I couldn’t help it, it was an automatic response. Welcome to the Q Flinch. Happy birthday. (He’s extremely ticklish flinching when anyone touches him.)
Later Eyvonne said that wasn’t what she meant at all. Leaving us. I’d misinterpreted. I’d over reacted. Who’s dissociative?
We are. We want things back to normal so badly we let it go. There was a lot of talk which didn’t really change our understanding that our relationship was conditional, secondary to her mom’s health.
Now our relationship was secondary to hers with Sarah too. Again, no discussion first.
Later she said it was an automatic response to protect her daughter. A misunderstanding. She’d heard Owl say he was tired of respecting Sarah. In reality he said he was tired of respecting Sarah’s decisions, meaning they were bad ones. Eyvonne couldn’t argue that. It was true.
All of that was moot to us. What mattered to us was that she would trash our relationship because our kids were having an issue. Any issue. I thought of all the kids as ‘our’ kids. Not Owl and Thunder as mine and Sarah as hers. I thought if we had problems we worked them out, whether it was a parent’s health or our kid’s conflicts.
Were we a family? Or is her presence here just inertia until some crisis forces her to move on?
Adjusting to Sarah moving in hasn’t been easy for any of us. Eyvonne hasn’t been the end receiver parent in over ten years. She stood beside us as we parented Owl and Thunder, many times clearly not in agreement with our parenting style. Now faced with the bewildering aspects of parenting a teen she saw more wisdom in our approach. Owl and Thunder weren’t turning out so bad.
Having another family member meant a lot more work for us Qs too. By some horrible twist of fate or bad karma we like things neat and clean, the laundry done up, food cooked on a semi-regular basis.
To Eyvonne none of that is a priority. In the nine years we’ve been together she’s run the vacuum cleaner maybe a dozen times. That was more frequently than anyone else we’d ever had a relationship with so maybe we shouldn’t be complaining. Or maybe we should be looking at reasons why that happens. I figure it’s some adolescent stage she’s stuck in and our obsessive behavior feeds it.
If the empty wood box or a sink full of dishes doesn’t speak to anyone else it speaks to me. To be exact, it speaks to el. He hates a mess. He can barely abide clutter. If someone leaves a glass or a Pepsi can lying around he is compelled to it clean up. I tried ignoring housework once to see how long it would take other family members to pick up the slack. They didn’t even pick up the trash which overflowed onto the kitchen floor. Ammonia from the catpan burned your eyes and no one cleaned it. We folded. But we protested too.
Fortunately this came to a head just before Sarah moved in. Eyvonne has been doing a bit more housework, at least sporadically. So has Owl.
Enter Sarah stage right.
She shows no more inclination to pick up after herself than most teenagers. I still don’t feel the way to teach is to yell, cajole, bribe or scream. However setting a good example hasn’t worked real well either.
Maybe it’s finally begun to pay off. Owl keeps the wood box filled without my ever mentioning it. I’ve never had anyone keep the wood box filled before this. He shows other signs of adulthood too, doing chores before I max out, actually finishing a job. He even cooks. He said he understands working at home means just that: working. He said it isn’t fair we should have to do all the housework just because we’re home. He carefully avoided pointing out that Eyvonne and now Sarah are home most of the time too.
We Qs have never had a relationship where we didn’t do most of the housework, childcare, and yard work besides running a business and writing. During our peak insanity in this regard we ran a retail antique shop, developed a computer business, worked part time in the school system and as a stringer/feature writer for several newspapers.
OK, this is starting to sound like just another a bitch session. Maybe it is. It’s better than crying. It beats cutting. And it’s accomplished something else. It’s making us take a good hard look at our goals.
And I can almost hear Pleiades. It’s not a mindtouch. It’s more like just knowing. I know what he’s feeling. And it isn’t good. He’s feeling crappy. Not surprising. If I have trust issues he’s got bigger ones. He’d started coming in to see what love is all about. No worries about him swiping ops for a while. He’s back in ‘watch and wary’ mode. So am I.
The only stand I took on redneckjerk coming to dinner was that he was not to stay overnight. Eyvonne agreed to make that clear.
But, oh dear, neither Sarah or redneckjerk had gas money, all the gas stations were closed, and he couldn’t cash his paycheck because it was a holiday. So he couldn’t possibly go home.
“He had no choice,” Eyvonne said defensively. “They didn’t know the gas stations would be closed and he wouldn’t be able to cash his check. Besides, he’d been up for over 24 hours straight. What did you want him to do?”
“Leave.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know if you’ve packed your jammies you plan to sleep over. If I had known about the feeble excuse Owl and I would have sacrificed our snow blower gas and given him ten bucks to leave. I’m inclined not to call Owl and Thunder off the next time he pisses them off. I might even throw the first punch myself.
