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Aug. 19th, 2012 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupYou know, every time I tell a story about Bernard I feel obligated to give the Australian Disaster Backstory, and then I think better of it because he's out there, somewhere, and so is my mother.
Anyway, it's time to tell the lolsob story. This is the latest installment in my life as a sitcom; it was clearly the big Nielsens rating arc.
The upshot of our previous interactions, for those that weren't there, is that a few years ago my brother decided to leave school, illegally immigrate to Australia, and marry a woman he met online. This woman is dire, and her family are losers. The one time I spoke to her, the first words out of her mouth over the phone (which she grabbed from my mother on her one visit to America) were, "Do you think your brother would make a good husband?"
"No," I said. She gave the phone back to mum.
My brother has many issues, not the least of which are health problems which require certain medical processes that his wife's faith, the Jehova's Witnesses, frown upon. He also has Asperger's Syndrome, and his version manifests predonimantly in being totally unable to read social cues or tell when he's being manipulated. We were concerned that this woman was using him, and that he wouldn't be able to get the medical help he needed.
So there was a family drama, and I spent a few days over Christmas that year involved in an actualfacts Intervention, with a professional Interventionist and everything. I thought it was stupid, but I can understand our mother's motivation: when your child is in danger you have to do everything possible to try and protect them because if you don't, and they're hurt, you'll always wonder. Bernard spent the entire few days so confrontational that at one point we had a physical altercation. We haven't spoken since he left, except for a couple of times they've emailed me to either ask for money or attempt to convince me to get Mum to send them money. I have repeatedly told them to rot and die. They tended to respond by telling me I needed to come to God.
Mum and Bernard still keep in touch regularly, but I don't hear much about it since I told her I wasn't interested in hearing about Bernard, and didn't want to talk about him unless it was unavoidable. To her credit, she took this surprisingly well.
Bernard, as part of his "run away from all responsibilities" plan, also isn't paying his student loans, leaving my parents to pay them. When they can't, as sometimes happens, the student loan companies harass Mama Tickey, my stepfather's mother, who is cosigner on some of the loans. This has gone on for a couple of years now.
So all this brings us up to the present day.
In April, my brother and his odious wife began planning a trip to America, because when you don't pay your student loans apparently you get to do things like fly home to visit friends. But they weren't coming to Texas, they were going elsewhere.
Mum, who hasn't got the money for a ticket to Australia, not to mention she's sixty and that's a pretty long journey, sensed an opportunity to reconnect with him while he was in America. Bernard said he would be happy to have a visit with them, but his stipulation was that they had to come to him, he wouldn't go to Texas, and they had to pay for a hotel room for him and his wife. (This is just as well; Mum has sworn never to have that woman in her house again.)
Mum called me and asked if I could pay for this. All told, between airline, hotel rooms, and car rental, it would be about three grand.
If I had three grand just hanging around, I would do it no problem. I wouldn't even be bitter. But I don't. On the other hand, what was I going to do, say no, I won't pay for the one chance you may ever have to see your son face-to-face again? I get it. He's her child. So I told her I had fifteen hundred in savings and on credit, but that was all I could offer. She asked me to open a second credit card.
God help me, I tried; both a credit card and a personal loan. But I'm carrying debt already, so that was mostly an exercise in humiliation. Eventually she managed to get the money for plane fare, and they decided not to rent a car, which meant that with the money I sent them they could afford to go. Mum promised she'd pay me back out of her paycheck, a few hundred a month, and I said just pay when you can, don't go hungry because of this. We also knew that she might lose her job because of this trip; her employer said they had the right to refuse her vacation time. I didn't think this would happen because what kind of dick refuses to let a woman see her son for the first time in five years?
That all happened in June, and I spent a lot of June and July being very, very broke and very, very angry. It wasn't that I was angry about giving her the money or even about my brother's massive presumption. What I wrote at the time was:
Even if she doesn't pay me back, which she has said she'll do, I make a good wage. I've been in worse financial situations before. I've lived much harder than this, and people live harder than this every day without an end in sight. I'm covering my bills and I have plenty of food to eat.
What makes me angry all the time is that every time I go to spend some money, to buy a Coke from the cafeteria or get a haircut, I have to stop and not buy it, and I remember the reason I have to not buy it, and that brings up the entire mess all over again. I'm not mad I can't have a Coke. I'm mad that I can't have a Coke because my brother is a jerk, was a jerk five years ago, has been taking my mother's attention and affection and money in an unfair balance from me since he was born and from our younger sister her entire life.
Getting past Bernard leaving wasn't that difficult for me. Getting Mum past it was a lot harder. Now he's back and once again, as I have been doing for twenty-five years, I have to give something up because he's a narcissist who uses people without remorse, and I love my mother more than I hate my brother. Yes, I am angry she asked, but I get it, so that's not even registering on the scale of anger I feel right now.
(As a note -- please don't think I am equating AS with narcissism. My brother has AS and is a narcissist; the two aren't causal. I have many friends with AS who are charming, kind, thoughtful people, so I don't want to give the impression that I think otherwise.)
Anyway, in July I got a raise, and I've just finished paying off my laptop, so I am not broke anymore, or at least not as broke as I was. The visit happened and went off well, I guess, because I didn't hear much about it. Mum just said it was fine. She didn't offer anything else and I didn't ask.
She did, however, lose her job. We knew this might happen, and I knew it might mean she couldn't pay me back immediately if at all, and I told her it was fine, that I understood. I do. She's got two leads on good jobs now, and that job was going to end in two months anyway, and she hated it passionately. So that's a non-issue.
Except, and here's where the hilarious punchline comes in, she was talking about the job with me on the phone when she said, "Well, when you're a parent, you make sacrifices."
And all I could think, though thank god I didn't say it out loud, was, "I guess in this case that was me."
Ba-dum-ching.
After we got off the phone I spent half an hour being furious at everything and everyone and then I got the hell over it.
Because what this means is that I am done. I am done even resenting being the second parent to a special needs child when I was a child myself, I am done understanding his needs, I am done interrupting my visits to my parents so Mum can skype with him, I am done paying for anything to do with him, I am done making sacrifices for him. I gave my family fifteen hundred dollars for him, I spent two months being constantly angry because of him, and I am done.
I am a self-sustaining adult and I get to say no, and if that means fighting with my family, then it's just going to have to happen. I have nothing left to give this kid and if I did, I wouldn't, because I get to make that call now. It's a hard call to make, but that's part of being a grown-up, making hard calls.
So that is why I spent July broke and angry, and probably why I am exhausted now. It's not just two months of rage, it's twenty-five years of resentment I'm recovering from. But it's over, at least.
Anyway, it's time to tell the lolsob story. This is the latest installment in my life as a sitcom; it was clearly the big Nielsens rating arc.
The upshot of our previous interactions, for those that weren't there, is that a few years ago my brother decided to leave school, illegally immigrate to Australia, and marry a woman he met online. This woman is dire, and her family are losers. The one time I spoke to her, the first words out of her mouth over the phone (which she grabbed from my mother on her one visit to America) were, "Do you think your brother would make a good husband?"
"No," I said. She gave the phone back to mum.
My brother has many issues, not the least of which are health problems which require certain medical processes that his wife's faith, the Jehova's Witnesses, frown upon. He also has Asperger's Syndrome, and his version manifests predonimantly in being totally unable to read social cues or tell when he's being manipulated. We were concerned that this woman was using him, and that he wouldn't be able to get the medical help he needed.
So there was a family drama, and I spent a few days over Christmas that year involved in an actualfacts Intervention, with a professional Interventionist and everything. I thought it was stupid, but I can understand our mother's motivation: when your child is in danger you have to do everything possible to try and protect them because if you don't, and they're hurt, you'll always wonder. Bernard spent the entire few days so confrontational that at one point we had a physical altercation. We haven't spoken since he left, except for a couple of times they've emailed me to either ask for money or attempt to convince me to get Mum to send them money. I have repeatedly told them to rot and die. They tended to respond by telling me I needed to come to God.
Mum and Bernard still keep in touch regularly, but I don't hear much about it since I told her I wasn't interested in hearing about Bernard, and didn't want to talk about him unless it was unavoidable. To her credit, she took this surprisingly well.
Bernard, as part of his "run away from all responsibilities" plan, also isn't paying his student loans, leaving my parents to pay them. When they can't, as sometimes happens, the student loan companies harass Mama Tickey, my stepfather's mother, who is cosigner on some of the loans. This has gone on for a couple of years now.
So all this brings us up to the present day.
In April, my brother and his odious wife began planning a trip to America, because when you don't pay your student loans apparently you get to do things like fly home to visit friends. But they weren't coming to Texas, they were going elsewhere.
Mum, who hasn't got the money for a ticket to Australia, not to mention she's sixty and that's a pretty long journey, sensed an opportunity to reconnect with him while he was in America. Bernard said he would be happy to have a visit with them, but his stipulation was that they had to come to him, he wouldn't go to Texas, and they had to pay for a hotel room for him and his wife. (This is just as well; Mum has sworn never to have that woman in her house again.)
Mum called me and asked if I could pay for this. All told, between airline, hotel rooms, and car rental, it would be about three grand.
If I had three grand just hanging around, I would do it no problem. I wouldn't even be bitter. But I don't. On the other hand, what was I going to do, say no, I won't pay for the one chance you may ever have to see your son face-to-face again? I get it. He's her child. So I told her I had fifteen hundred in savings and on credit, but that was all I could offer. She asked me to open a second credit card.
God help me, I tried; both a credit card and a personal loan. But I'm carrying debt already, so that was mostly an exercise in humiliation. Eventually she managed to get the money for plane fare, and they decided not to rent a car, which meant that with the money I sent them they could afford to go. Mum promised she'd pay me back out of her paycheck, a few hundred a month, and I said just pay when you can, don't go hungry because of this. We also knew that she might lose her job because of this trip; her employer said they had the right to refuse her vacation time. I didn't think this would happen because what kind of dick refuses to let a woman see her son for the first time in five years?
That all happened in June, and I spent a lot of June and July being very, very broke and very, very angry. It wasn't that I was angry about giving her the money or even about my brother's massive presumption. What I wrote at the time was:
Even if she doesn't pay me back, which she has said she'll do, I make a good wage. I've been in worse financial situations before. I've lived much harder than this, and people live harder than this every day without an end in sight. I'm covering my bills and I have plenty of food to eat.
What makes me angry all the time is that every time I go to spend some money, to buy a Coke from the cafeteria or get a haircut, I have to stop and not buy it, and I remember the reason I have to not buy it, and that brings up the entire mess all over again. I'm not mad I can't have a Coke. I'm mad that I can't have a Coke because my brother is a jerk, was a jerk five years ago, has been taking my mother's attention and affection and money in an unfair balance from me since he was born and from our younger sister her entire life.
Getting past Bernard leaving wasn't that difficult for me. Getting Mum past it was a lot harder. Now he's back and once again, as I have been doing for twenty-five years, I have to give something up because he's a narcissist who uses people without remorse, and I love my mother more than I hate my brother. Yes, I am angry she asked, but I get it, so that's not even registering on the scale of anger I feel right now.
(As a note -- please don't think I am equating AS with narcissism. My brother has AS and is a narcissist; the two aren't causal. I have many friends with AS who are charming, kind, thoughtful people, so I don't want to give the impression that I think otherwise.)
Anyway, in July I got a raise, and I've just finished paying off my laptop, so I am not broke anymore, or at least not as broke as I was. The visit happened and went off well, I guess, because I didn't hear much about it. Mum just said it was fine. She didn't offer anything else and I didn't ask.
She did, however, lose her job. We knew this might happen, and I knew it might mean she couldn't pay me back immediately if at all, and I told her it was fine, that I understood. I do. She's got two leads on good jobs now, and that job was going to end in two months anyway, and she hated it passionately. So that's a non-issue.
Except, and here's where the hilarious punchline comes in, she was talking about the job with me on the phone when she said, "Well, when you're a parent, you make sacrifices."
And all I could think, though thank god I didn't say it out loud, was, "I guess in this case that was me."
Ba-dum-ching.
After we got off the phone I spent half an hour being furious at everything and everyone and then I got the hell over it.
Because what this means is that I am done. I am done even resenting being the second parent to a special needs child when I was a child myself, I am done understanding his needs, I am done interrupting my visits to my parents so Mum can skype with him, I am done paying for anything to do with him, I am done making sacrifices for him. I gave my family fifteen hundred dollars for him, I spent two months being constantly angry because of him, and I am done.
I am a self-sustaining adult and I get to say no, and if that means fighting with my family, then it's just going to have to happen. I have nothing left to give this kid and if I did, I wouldn't, because I get to make that call now. It's a hard call to make, but that's part of being a grown-up, making hard calls.
So that is why I spent July broke and angry, and probably why I am exhausted now. It's not just two months of rage, it's twenty-five years of resentment I'm recovering from. But it's over, at least.
