Toxic parents will continue leeching off you as long as you let them. I too had similar experiences to niblet_head - I can say no??? Just recently I posted about my recently widowed dad expecting me to find a house for him. People posted, why don’t you just get a realtor? And I was stunned…I hadn’t even thought of that.
I will go so far and no further. I have to live, too, and they didn’t do much for me. If my dad needed financial help that might be something, since I never wanted for anything material in my life, but he has lots of money. What I didn’t get - love, acceptance, and understanding - they don’t deserve from me, either.
If 400-lb. little brother is living in a group home, then mental health professionals have judged him capable of a certain minimal level of competence. At the very least, this should include the ability to get himself to his appointments and do his shopping and cleaning himself. It may be difficult, even painful, but you need to make it plain to him that he needs to do at least some things for himself. Is he this way because of your mother’s overindulgence? Have you talked with his caregivers about what can and can’t reasonably be expected of him? I can’t imagine that any adult would enjoy such infantile dependency.
Oh really? I didn’t know anyone cared that much! Suffice it to say, I turned him over heartlessly to the real estate agent, who was more than happy to help out. He still has to go to India and wash my mother’s ashes away in the Ganga before he can think of moving into a place, so that is planned for next month - so I’m guessing he’ll move in sometime before the end of the year.
He wanted to move into my basement. I laughed my fool head off. My basement looks rather like the basement in Blair Witch Project - it’s just meant for the furnace, not for people to live in, or even to put stuff in.
Oh, if only a good stern talking to would do that! I do believe he (I’ll refer to this brother as ‘P’ from now on) isn’t taking his medication. The group home doles it out twice a day, but I don’t know if he’s actually swallowing it! When he takes his meds, he’s pretty good - talkative, takes an interest in life, wants to go here or there. ‘P’ was living in an apartment for 15 years on his own and this summer decompensated. The place was filthy (though not Hoarders territory) and he just let everything go.
My (rich younger) brother ‘M’ did do a lot. He flew up here for a week, got the police to break in and take ‘P’ to the psychiatric hospital (where he stayed locked in without his precious cigarettes for 3 months), cleaned out the apartment, and it was arranged ‘P’ would go live in a nice new group home. ‘M’ is not unwilling to help, he helps financially if needed, but he’s on the road travelling for his new job all the time, 2,000 miles away. So, disappointing as our family is, I am willing to do what I can. It’s up to me. And Mom and I are getting along great at this stage of life, I really don’t mind doing stuff for her. She’s still able to get around, she’s funny and bright and even pays me for gas to get over there. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself otherwise, I CAN’T tell her f’ off and die! I just can’t. OK , that’s one thing.
But poor old ‘P’ is another. He’s breaking rules there, not making any effort (though he has some money and the first day he cashed a check and bought a carton of cigarettes!). You can’t talk to him. The answer to every question is “I don’t know.” ‘where is the store you went to?’ IDK. ‘who were those people in the dining room with you?’ IDK. ‘they said you went out and got lost, who brought you back?’ IDK. Tell him things - ‘call you mom, don’t smoke in your room, do your laundry, take your medicine’ - and the answer is ‘uh-huh. uh-huh.’ Can’t get on a bus to go to appointments, he’s too ‘afraid’ and would either cause a scene, get lost, or just ride till the bus went to the garage for the night.
So I went down today, to clean, to bring him warm clothes, and take him to a doctor’s appointment. He was in the shower, for 40 minutes. I waited some more. The supervisor and I let ourselves in, and he was dressed, lying on his bed, totally out of it, mumbling to himself. Tried to get through to him for another half our. Called in other workers. I said, ‘don’t look like it’s gonna happen today’. So. I left. What else could I do? I told the supervisor to call me later. Haven’t heard anything, he’s probably going to have to go back to the psychiatric hospital. And then what? I don’t know if they’re going to save him a room for another three months. I just don’t know.
I feel terrible about the whole thing. I want to help, and I will as much as I’m able. In spite of the past, I can’t just say ‘NO’, and I’ve got my mother to worrry about. I can’t just stop worrying. I can’t, it would eat me up alive (I KNOW this, I’ve been through ‘don’t call me’ before).
It’s the worry, the stress. Every time the phone rings, I’m afraid something awful has happened to Mom or ‘P’. Winter’s coming, I’m afraid of driving in the snow. What then?
Well, I e-mailed ‘M’ with all this and am expecting a call soon. ‘M’ hasn’t washed his hands of us, not at all, but he can’t drop everything and keep flying up here. He’s very good with morale support, financial if needed, and getting on the phone to the proper people. I know he’ll come here if something bad happens (though it would have to be catastrophic).
Yup, just got off the phone with ‘M’ who is going to get on the phone next week with the doctors and find out what they’re going to do (he’s better at asking questions, they listen to his more forceful voice, I guess). We are both very discouraged over this turn of events because we went to a lot of work and trouble to set up ‘P’ in a new place, and it ain’t working out).
This is what I mean about having a bitterly disappointing family. They treat you like a black sheep all your life, but when things go downhill…you just can’t say ‘no, don’t bother me with your problems’. So I’m trying to be a good, helpful person.
But why did I get stuck with the defective brother, and the great brother had to leave town all those years ago and become a big success? I missed out on spending time with ‘M’ and his family, my nephews and niece, I could have been happy. but compared to the lousy lives ‘P’ and sometimes mom have now, it’s like my feelings are just so ‘petty’, ‘that’s the way life goes’. It’s unfair!
With due respect, you CAN say no. Worst case scenario: what happens if you just stop dealing with P? He is not a problem you can solve, so your choices are:
Put up with this for years until one of you dies of stress-induced natural causes.
Say no.
Which sounds harder?
It’s not a package deal. You don’t have to take on the responsibility for everyone or no one. You are not P’s parent, and P is not your responsibility. Repeat it until you believe it.
You are not sentenced to a life of misery just because you were born to a fucked up family. I hope I’m not tragically wrong on this, but do people have any legal responsibility to take care of their parents or siblings?
Perhaps it was too clean in my case, but the understanding in my family was that we would be dumped at an orphanage the day we pissed off my mother too much. We believed it, having been told it from our earliest days. The moment we turned 18, we’d be out on the street, and so my sister left home at 14 to go through many years of misery, whereas I accelerated myself & got into college at 16, as far from home as possible in Los Angeles. I broke off contact with my mother, as per the rules I’d grown up with.
I think it’s cute when people make moronic statements such as, “Well, you always love your parents.” Really? After my parents divorced (when I was one, which was about 17 months after my father beat her up when she chickened out of my abortion), I spent perhaps 20-30 hours with him. Could I say I “love” this guy? Who are we kidding? I spent much more time in the presence of my mother, but if you only count waking time during which she was not screaming at me or my sister, it might be down in the low hundreds of hours, and those were spent simmering in anger.
“Blood” relations – I say, dump them if you don’t have a positive emotional connection with them.
Oh gosh, that is a terrible terrible way to grow up, talk about Toxic Parents! You indeed have every right to DTMFs, as Dan Savage would say, that’s beyond the pale.
How is your sister’s life now, having lit out at age 14? (I’m curious, because I had a chance to take off with some friends when I was about 15 but just didn’t have the nerve, being a beaten down sort, no outward rage or rebellion, all inside. Wish now I’d done it!) And I know exactly what you mean when you talk about hours spent simmering in anger. Going out for a beautiful day at the beach was spoiled, knowing I had to go back to Dysfunction Junction later on.
My brother ‘M’ is actually younger (as is ‘P’). (And yes, ‘M’ is the coolest guy on the planet. And trustworthy. He has been up here like a shot when things got bad in the past and I know he will be here for me again.) That’s what’s so hard, he’s lived so far away. Not only have we missed out on a lot of loving family togetherness, he is the brains of the family, which is why I’m letting him know Plan A isn’t working out and we will probably have to go to Plan B.
I wonder if there are any happy families out there at all. Bad things happen in life, of course, but some people just seem to sail through death, illness, divorce, bad kids, just another bump in the road. I guess you had to have grown up in a happy family to be able to deal with stuff. I did not, and so it seems doubly hard - I want to be helpful, I want to do the right thing, but there’s always that resentment underneath.
No, I wouldn’t say you had to grow up in a happy family to be able to deal with stuff; I would say that you need to be able to deal with life in a healthy, realistic way. I had a huge revelation a few years ago; almost no one gets everything they need from their parents, and it’s an insanely high expectation that you will; what you don’t get from them, you need to find for yourself.
For the most part life so most fair. We all make decisions that effect our future. You have decided to be a slave to these people. Either change it or stop your bitching.
She went out into the world way too young, so her life was sort of a train wreck until her early 30s, and it’s always been a bit rocky. Part of her survival mechanism was to be fairly antagonistic to everyone, and that’s a difficult mind-set to give up. I seem to be quite the opposite of her, and turned inward, so whereas she has rather pronounced problems with rage, I have problems with depression. When I reconnected with her about midway through college, we became much closer than we’d been when we were as children, and we generally refer to ourselves as “miracle kids” – just being alive and mostly functional is a victory.
I can’t put my finger on exactly what caused it, but in her late 20s, she got some very destructive people out of her life, got her GED and got a job as a receptionist in a boring office supply company. That company gave her a stable structure she could rely on as she gradually got her shit together. She’d spent years dating rather macho men who were also quite abusive, but in her early 30s, I started hearing reference to the “pony tail guy,” who was unlike anyone she’d ever been involved with. He was a big part of many good things that followed. (However, after 14 years of marriage, things are a bit tense with them at the moment; I’m keeping my fingers crossed.)
You see your own worry and anguish over these situations. You don’t always see it when it’s happening to other people. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Some people hide or bury their emotions more than others. The family I come from is mostly WASP and Scandinavian, and they do that. It’s not better or healthier (if anything, it’s the opposite), it’s just different.
Don’t try to compare yourself to how you think others handle things like this (I sympathize, I struggle with this, too). You don’t see how they handle it emotionally and mentally, so there’s no way to make a fair comparison. Even if there were, it’s not a useful thing to do. It’s not accomplishing anything concrete, and it’s not making you feel better. You don’t handle things the way some other person does, you handle them the way you do. Wishing you had someone else’s coping abilities isn’t going to help, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. Wishing your family were something other than what it is, or wishing you’d grown up differently than you did, isn’t going to solve anything.
There may be some sexism going on here. They may be listening to him better because he is male and acts in more stereotypically male ways than you do. This kind of thing has been (thankfully) driven underground in the past 30 years or so, but don’t think it doesn’t still exist. The problem may be the doctor, not you.
Don’t think that the problem is always that you’re doing something wrong. That’s not the cause of all the world’s problems, or even of all your family’s problems. Sometimes shit happens, even to people who did everything right. A lot of people would like to think this isn’t so, that you could keep shit from happening by doing everything right. It’s a scary thought that there is nothing you can do (or not do) that will guarantee that shit will not happen to you.
Going to a lot of work and trouble is not a guarantee that things will turn out right. The world would be a rather different place than it is if it were.
Thank you, Anne Neville, you are saying exactly what I need to hear. It’s so true there are no guarantees and life can be so random. We all want to live happily ever after, and some of us end up spluttering, “but - but - it’s so unfair, wahhh!” I wish I could handle it better. I have a fearful mixture roiling inside me and it comes out as anger. But - one day at a time, one step at a time, do what you can, put on the big girl panties and deal with it, do unto others etc. etc.
My family is disappointing in a different way. They pretty much have everything they want, yet they are still spiteful, small people so often.
The other day, I was talking to my mom about my future plans and I mentioned I had a non-profit I was hoping to do some work for–a non-profit that helps low-income people get access to health care.
She said, “Oh, you’ll be exposed to the dregs of society. It will ruin your faith in humanity.”
No, Mom. Having a rich, entitled woman call the less fortunate “the dregs of society” is what ruined my faith in humanity. You have everything… except compassion.
It doesn’t help that 10 years ago I was among the low-income needing help (that I didn’t get, unfortunately) with health care access. I guess I am the dregs of society, too.
Suffice it to say, I turned him over heartlessly to the real estate agent, who was more than happy to help out. He still has to go to India and wash my mother’s ashes away in the Ganga before he can think of moving into a place, so that is planned for next month - so I’m guessing he’ll move in sometime before the end of the year.
because we went to a lot of work and trouble to set up ‘P’ in a new place, and it ain’t working out).