**Mother Maven ** sent me an email saying that **Mouse_Bro ** is in the hospital with cardiomyopathy. He had an episode of this illness two years ago.
I am not close to my brother. We never had a falling out, we’re just very different people. **Mouse_Bro ** is very out-going. He has a large circle of friends. They get together to drink, smoke pot and shoot the shit. My brother is also a big music lover. He idolizes the Beatles and goes to several concerts every year. I’m shy. Working full-time and going to school part-time consumes most of my energy. **Mouse_Bro ** is a chef. I’m a research assistant in an immunology lab. Whenever we get together, we have nothing to talk about. shrug
I called **Mouse_Bro’s ** girl friend to get more information. She told me that Bro is leaving the hospital tomorrow and will have to take some time off of work. Just before I could ask when was a good time for me to visit, she added “Your Nana is flying in to see him on Friday.”
My heart sunk. I haven’t seen Nana, our paternal grandmother, in over ten years. **Mouse_Bro ** kept in touch, but I couldn’t. The Uncle (Father’s brother-in-law) sexually abused me for years. When I was a sophomore in college, the guilt and depression over came me and I attempted suicide. I needed help, but my father’s side of the family shunned me. (Mother’s side of the family didn’t have anything to do with us either. Father was a Mormon from a blue-collar family. Mother was a Methodist from a white-collar background. This apparently meant a lot in 1970’s Louisiana.) After getting out of the hospital, I left Louisiana and my family.
A couple of years ago, **Mouse_Bro ** visited our father’s family. He gleefully told me that The Uncle, who is a corrections officer, was badly injured by an inmate.
“How did you find out?” I asked.
“He’s still married to Aunt K.”
This fucking destroyed me inside. I was abused and abandoned and the man who caused all this pain was still with the family. I know that **Mouse_Bro ** was trying to make me feel better, but it just poured salt on an old wound. Part of me wished he would join me in exile. Our extended family wasn’t pleased when he became a father at 17, but I guess that’s better than being a “whore.”
Mousie, I am sorry to hear of your troubles. People are remarkably blind to the failings of their spouses, even when the failings are as bad as they could possibly get. If it helps even a little, I rarely post in your threads because I have nothing to say but I always, always read them. I find the lab stories funny and fascinating and I get :mad: with you at your family. Life’s a bitch, you know, but it’s better than the alternative, as they say.
Mouse, you don’t need this stress. MouseSpouse needs you sexy, remember? You can’t choose your family, all you can do is choose whether or not they are worth spending time with.
I have started to look for a therapist. Everything that has been happening - work insanity, academic eunni, family crap - has been wearing on me and my loved ones.
One of these days I’ll post some funny stories about my Jerry-Springer-Family: running into one of Father’s one-night-wonders on the way to the bathroom. Our paternal grandfather being to cheap to buy chickens, so he took the hens and culled roosters from a friend who bred fighting cocks. (We had the meanest fucking chickens in the parish! :eek: Gathering eggs was a challenge.) The time Mouse_Bro and his friends broke up a date-from-hell I was having.
They’re a bunch of cold superficial people, but they’re good for a few laughs.
Nope. Not looking back. As painful as it is, my family chose “honor” :rolleyes: over me. They’re not worth having around.
Got an email from Mouse_Bro. He’s out of the hospital He’ll have to take medication for the rest of his life. Maybe he’ll clean up his lifestyle. ::crossing fingers::
Sadly, I won’t go to see him until our grandmother is out of town.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: Honor my fucking ass. This really, really chaps my hide, coming from a family of which certain members have chosen the same route. GAH!
BTW, I really, really want to hear about the chicken story. It sounds hilarious.
As I said further up thread, my paternal grandfather, Pop, was cheap. He would get mad at my grandmother if she didn’t re-use garbage bags. (Rural Louisiana, we had a burn barrel instead of trash pick-up.)
Pop was a hobby farmer. He farmed a small plot of land and kept ducks and chickens. Since he was so frugal, he avoided buying new birds. Some came to us as Easter refugees (out grew the fluffy-cute stage). Others came from a friend of his that bred fighting game cocks. (Yes, this “sport” is practiced in some parts of Louisiana.) A handful of roosters made the “cut” as fighters and only a few hens were needed for breeding. Pop took in the excess hens and culled cocks.
These birds were bred to fight. They were very, very aggressive. The hens would peck and squawk whenever you took their eggs. One of the roosters jumped on my back on spurred me when I was five!! Another rooster jumped Nana. She beat him to death with a stick! :eek: Then we had him for dinner.
Mean nasty fucking birds! I’ve fallen off the vegetarian wagon, but when I was stricter, I would occasionally eat chicken as an act of revenge.
There’s the family you’re born with. If you’re lucky, they’re decent people (and even the most decent have twitches and hang ups they inflict on their loved ones). If you’re unlucky, they’re neither healthy nor loving.
Then, there’s the family you choose. Your dearest friends, your SO/spouse, sometimes colleagues, and other people you collect during your life.
You got a raw deal on the first kind. Not your fault. Sounds like you have a good start on the second kind, and that is very much to your credit.
Oh sweet Jesus on a beribonned wheelchair with sports franchises flags a-flyin’, HE abuses you and it’s YOU who’s the whore?
Oh wait.
That sounds familiar.
Ah, yes, it’s Grandma’s reaction to her grandchildren’s complaints of “Gramps grabbed my ass”, “Gramps wants to take me whoring” (Lilbro was 10 at the time), “Gramps tried to grab my dick”… riiiiiiiiiight…
There oughta be a way to divorce one’s family, but even more, there oughta be a way to forget the pain they caused you while keeping the memories of important things. Addition and substraction, say. And how to tie your own shoelaces, that’s important!
Apologies for the double post. The quote is absolutely not exact but the books are at home and I’m at work.
Viceroy Admiral Vorkosigan, as reported by Lois McMaster Bujold:
“reputation is how others see you. Honor is how you see yourself. It is much, much worse to have your reputation intact and your honor broken than the other way 'round.”
Mouse_Maven–I’m glad to hear that your brother’s out of the hospital! I hope he lives a long, happy, and as-healthy-as-possible life.
You’ve got my empathy on feeling your heart sink when you know you’re going to have to see your uncle. I haven’t spoken to or seen my father in 5 years. That’s because my father’s a royal asshole. It took me a while to understand, fully and without malice, that there really is no part of him that loves me or is glad to have had me in his life at all. He sees me as property–difficult, expensive property that there’s no advantage in owning.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you see it), this puts a real strain on what little relationship I have with my relatives on my father’s side.
The last time I saw my father was in 2001. My paternal grandmother had gotten very, very ill, and everyone–including me–went to see her. My father had already arrived when I got there. Even being in the same room as him made me feel physically ill. The thought of having to see him now makes me feel a little physically sick.
I got through the visit OK, though, and at least I don’t feel horribly guilty for not having seen my grandmother when we all thought she might not make it. (As it turns out, she’s alive, well, and doesn’t speak to me anymore. But that’s another story.)
I guess I’m telling you all this to let you know that someone knows, at least a little, how you feel. This is going to pass, and you’re going to be OK.
Thank you. I am very sorry that you have to suffer familial ostracism as well.
My father had a similar view of my brother and I. We were property. He used us to hurt our mother, and in all fairness, she used us to get to him. Once Mouse_Bro and I were old enough to look after ourselves, when I was 13 and Bro was 12, he moved on with his life. We all lived in the same house, but that was it. (BTW, Mother Maven gave up custody when I was 11.) It was tough being a kid, knowing that my mother chose to give me up and watching my father lavish attention on other women and drink himself into a stupor. The rub is that my Father can be extremely charming; he’s witty and intellegent - he has a phd in American history. No one has any idea what an asshole he can be.
Both sides of my biological family don’t like Mouse_Bro and I much. Our parents married young. They had us really quickly, and then had a nasty breakup. We were unapproved, unwanted and unwelcome.
The irony is that our father was an only son. Mouse_Bro is his only son. I think the parternal side of the family tolerates Mouse_Bro more than me because the family “name” carries on through him. :rolleyes: I hope that Bro does better by his son.
(Mouse_Spouse was surprized that I was willing to change my last name when we married. “Honey, I’ll be a ‘Springer.’ I think the Universe is trying to tell me something.” )
