Moar venting funtimes!

[IamLEAM1983]

So, to make a long and painful story pretty short, we pretty much showed Grandma the door, yesterday. Or, to be more precise, Mom did, and Dad and I both know Grandma's too pig-headed and prideful to realize this was a one-time outburst.

We've been helping my aunt Doris out for the past seven or eight months, inviting her at the table on a daily basis and usually letting her have the run of the fridge. In return, she helps us around with basic chores and generally does her best in order to not be in anyone's way. That's fine. What isn't is the way she's been manipulating Grandma in order to essentially live off her cash reserves.

Grandma came to live with us with a retirement package that was raking in cash and that more or less guaranteed that she'd be able to be fairly comfortable while we took care of her basic needs. Doris came along, and Grandma offered to pay her new apartment's rent for the first few months, at least until she found a job or started earning Social Welfare checks. It's been eight months, she says she's earned some government money, but Grandma's funds are still being bled dry. To make matters worse, Doris keeps swiping her reserves of petty cash; what Grandma usually keeps around to pay for her medicine deliveries.

Again, we don't mind helping Doris out food-wise, and even in cases of needed shelter, such as when the summer pelted us with a couple hardcore storms and made it pretty much inadvisable for anyone to walk home on their own. What we do mind is seeing her siphon Grandma's funds. Dad says he's only waiting for Welfare to kick in before he starts egging her on about finding jobs, and Doris herself says she'd rather wait until later (probably October...) since "all the students took the good jobs".

Yeah, right. "The students" work from May to August and then usually shuffle back in class or shift to part-time schedules. She's got plenty of openings now, she just doesn't want to look. I'm here, busting my ass trying to deliver weekly progress reports to the folks and letting them know that I'm not just being a textbook dweller, and she just sits there and sucks in the family's cash!

Mom tried to confront her sister about that, yesterday. The tone got fairly heated, and Grandma did as Grandma does, which is take the supposedly weak and disenfranchised daughter's side. My mother's the textbook Successful One in the family, see, while Doris has more or less spent the last forty years hanging onto others for support. She's always needed a financial crutch, and can't hold down a job for more than a year or two. To top it off, Doris has the handy excuse of showing up every day at 8 AM to "entertain" Grandma. That's great, and she does happen to visit a house with two laptops, one desktop computer and three freaking iPads, plus a working phone line. That means that theoretically, she could use our resources to do her own spot of job-hunting. We've even gone so far as to authorize her to use our phone number as a reference point for her potential employers!

What has she done, so far, in the last eight months? Jack shit. Well, jack shit, outside of just sitting by Grandma's side while she plays Bejeweled all fucking day. "It's her only leisure," Doris says. That just - It drives me up the fucking wall. Then Grandma wonders why her iPad's battery won't charge. Gee whiz, maybe it's because you've practically surgically grafted it to your freaking hands, Grandma?!

Call a cab and head to the mall! Take a walk outside! Go see a movie! Cross the bridge and check out the Old Port! Find yourselves books to read and dig in, for God's sake! Nobody's forcing anyone to keep Grandma hooked on Candy Crush Saga!

Of course, touchscreen-fiddling is still more appreciable than their other pastime, which happens to be "Happy Hour Starts at 1 PM and lasts until 6", which means that by the time supper's ready, they're both fucking soused and impossible to talk to.

So. Petty thievery, manipulation, plus Grandma's total absence of rational judgment and complete and utter devotion to the Sacrosanct Ideals of Maternal Sacrifice means we had a blowout, last night. Mom had a few choice words with her sister, Grandma retorted with her typical El Cheapo card, which happens to be "Everything bad that happens here is my fault, so I'm going to find an apartment with Doris and stop bothering anyone!", and, well, Mom lost it. After a couple months spent hearing this, she snapped.

"Well, fucking leave if you want to!" she shouted back at her.

The end result is even as I'm writing this, Grandma's looking up apartments and seems to be so inset on shacking up with Doris that she's considering one-bedroom apartments and not minding the idea of sleeping with her 56 year-old daughter.

We've tried putting her in front of all the evidence: the receipts for the cigarettes and booze Doris sneaks on her credit card, the stolen cash, the diminishing returns in her investment packages that are a direct corollary to her shouldering our symbolic rent, her daughter's own rent and her own expenses, and the fact that she's basically excluding my mother from her social activities and focusing on Doris to a fairly worrying level. My other aunts and uncles share in my mother's concern, too.

What's Grandma's response? "Doris is my daughter, I have to help her."

It's like a pre-programmed response. Stolen credit card? "She's my daughter." Excessive wine purchases? "She's my daughter." Downright insulting forms of abuse of her trust in her, and in public? Honest psychological abuse? "She's my daughter."

I mean, yeah, sure, Celine Dion was right and love can basically move mountains - but Jesus fucking Christ, when are you gonna start minding your own P's and Q's if all you do is fall back on motherly love as an excuse for passivity? Fuck, call me a heartless bastard - but if she loves Doris that much, she'd throw her out and tell her to get herself out of her damned slump. People who love others push them into finding success or prosperity. Even if it hurts, even if it makes you feel like an absolute monster. Independence needs to come at a cost, or at least, that's how I was raised.

My mother's her daughter too, now that you think about it. Why does the admittedly ugly duckling get all the waivers and the special permissions at an age where you'd expect her to be actually fucking mature?

What infuriates me is that I can't do anything. I've tried to rattle Grandma's cage and I've gotten her pre-programmed response time and time again. I've tried to rattle Doris and she throws my own problems back at me, by way of deflection. I don't want to goad Mom any further, the last blowout we had already ended as I've said. I've started writing this around 11 AM and finished half an hour past midnight, having been away from home. I have no clue if there's been any progress on the "Grandma moving out'" front, and I still don't know if this is the result of passing animosity. I'll know tomorrow, I guess.

As for me, I'm pissed off at the involved parties, especially at Doris and Grandma. The first one manipulates the second and the second threatens to leave as soon as something wrenches us away from our most recent bout of Stepfordian agreement. I can't start constructive debates on any topic without the both of them leaving, and I'm treated as though I have no say in anything that goes on.

The result is that I've had my first anxiety bout in months, last night, Friday.

I want out. I want out now, but the bank account still says otherwise for the foreseeable future. I want to leave this freaking nuthouse behind me and leave the saprophyte to siphon Grandma's cash, if it's what they both desire. I want her to choke on the money that should be my grandmother's to administer, and I want my grandmother to stew in it, to more or less sink into that pit of obviously conflicting emotions she's got and that she refuses to confront. You love your daughter so much you're fine with her drowning you with her?! Fine, then! Go fucking rot in a cheap-ass apartment where you'll spend your day re-watching the same goddamn Vin Diesel movies over and over with someone who won't so much as care if you end up fused to a chair and die of a heart attack as soon as you decide to stand up!

I want to escape the sight of my own mother's perennial dissatisfaction, more or less claw my way out of these three women's reach. I want fresh emotional air. I want space enough for my thoughts to roam free. I want to be myself without feeling that I've got two pairs of clueless post-Baby Boom eyes looking at me and wondering what the fuck I'm doing on the Internet in the small hours of the night! If I were alone, I wouldn't even need to be around so late, and I'd be available at decent hours! I wouldn't need to hide under my own covers and wait until everyone's zonked out enough or sufficiently tired to avoid asking me questions!

I swear to God, if nothing changes by the time December rolls around, I'm booking other sessions with the therapist. It's either that or I find shit to wreck.

[TennyoCeres84]

*hugs* I know you're going through some rough shit, and as always, you've got us to be your listening ears, Leam.

[IamLEAM1983]

I left the three adults together after supper, knowing they'd all want to have a Talk, about forty-eight hours after the blowout.

Status report: zero progress. Grandma won't listen, and she assumes that my mother told her to leave before anything substantial was said. Dad called me upstairs, knowing I'd heard the whole thing. I recounted my version of the facts, which is that Grandma was actually the first to bring up leaving the house as an ultimatum, and that Mom snapped after hearing that for months on end. I was there, and this is absolutely what I witnessed.

Grandma rejected my point of view. Textbook Knucklehead Defense No. 2: "I don't want to hear about it!", followed by her stomping back inside and isolating herself in her room.

Golly gee whiz, Batman; isn't denial comfortable?!

I'll try and approach her privately, tomorrow. I'll ask her what she remembers, and then tell her what I saw.

As of tonight, Grandma says she's leaving tomorrow. Yeah, right. No apartment, no fall-back plan, nothing except Doris' shitty apartment. Like I'm gonna believe that. I've heard that one line at least three times this week. Three times already, she told us she was leaving "tomorrow". I didn't see any sort of packing get done, and I didn't see her or Doris look up new flats.

I'm starting to wonder if denial isn't a Fifties' Housewife thing. Your children are being freaking embarrassing or have proved to be absolute failures? You have no right to criticize them. You must love them and support them and cherish them, and tough love is out of the question. Pushing their buttons is not Christian, young Betty! Even if it kills you or lands you in a position of indigence, you must suffer and bleed for your children, as this is the Good Housewife's Creed. Bleed like a stuck pig.

I'm morbidly curious to know what Doris is going to be left with, in the unavoidable outcome of Grandma's death and of her exanguinated retirement package amounting to pretty much nothing per household. My guess is she'll be too stupid to realize she worked her way through her share with all her surreptitiously purchased cigarettes, all the wine she drinks and the RV she needlessly purchased. Then what? "Take pity on me, my sisters, for I am poor and still jobless!"

I mean, she has to hit a brick wall at some point, right?