| profile entries archives refresh |
 �what is Man? a miserable little pile of secrets.� - andr� malraux "i desire to live in peace and to continue the life i have begun under the motto, to live well you must live unseen." - rene descartes note random entry image credit design by : ilazarn ikmal powered by : diaryland |
so i'm trying.
2012-06-29 @ 10:07 a.m.
there was all this nonsense going on with my brother again, concerning the rent and the house and a general level of respect that has been absent. it's annoying and he wasn't talking to boy and i for a few days (i'll explain later). so on wednesday, when best friend was over, he finally emerged from the basement to tell us that the other day my dad took off on his birthday and instead of going to work, went to the chiropractor. he came home to find a uhaul truck in the street outside of his house, and upon walking down the hallway to his bedroom, runs into brother's ex! he said she had a look of utter shock and surprise on her face, but said nothing to him, so he said, "just for the record, i never said what your mom (my stepmom, remember) said i said, that you had to get your stuff out and leave the house. i love you like my own daughter and i didn't want any of this." she refused to say a word to him and went outside and stayed there. why was she there? because both she and her mother are shady fucking bitches, and waited until they thought my dad would be at work all day (he doesn't usually get home until 7pm) to rent a uhaul and move all of stepmom's stuff out before he got home. on his birthday!! what the fuck! and stepmom never said anything about it, even the day before. she was just walking around acting like everything was completely normal. as far as i'm concerned, both she and her daughter can eat shit and die. they're such horrible, horrible people. oh and just for fun, stepmom (who does not work at all and has no income whatsoever) pocketed my dad's income tax check, never told him about it, and used it to get her apartment or whatever the fuck she's doing. ugh. so disgusting and despicable. i feel so bad for my dad, almost 60 now and single again, all alone now in that house. life is just awful sometimes. so yesterday, i get a call from my mom, and i don't know why, but i actually answered it right away. usually i screen her calls because as i've said in the past, she's verbally and emotionally abusive (to me in particular) and i just can't have that in my life. like i'm already depressed, some days especially i feel like i'm just barely hanging on. and now i've got this kid here, and it's an experience i'm really not enjoying at all. so avoiding unnecessary bullshit and stress is my MO, otherwise i won't be able to motivate myself to get out of bed in the morning. so she calls to say that she wants to get together next week to discuss my finances, but it wasn't in her usual bull-headed steamroller way, it was actually in a kind, calm, relaxed way. i actually said okay, and then we proceeded to discuss my the situation with my brother. here's the problem with my brother: prior to him moving in, we discussed how much rent he would pay, and i said $400 a month. i said this number several times, and he even sat down, calculated out how much he would make every month if he was working full time as planned, and said to me, "yes. this number is reasonable, because i will be making $1300 a month, and my car payment is only $300 a month, so i can afford $400. that's only $100 a week." he sat right in front of me and did these calculations on a piece of paper that he asked me to print from my computer. i don't forget things like this easily. so he comes up here and when i say, okay, so your only two rules are to not have anyone over the house and pay me rent, somehow the dollar amount of rent became only $100 a month. but at the time, he was having trouble getting his paycheck from work (he did a transfer within his company and the payroll works differently here), so i didn't say anything about it, because he had no money at all and was borrowing it from me. i figured we would renegotiate later. flash forward to last week, when boy found out about this huge bill that needed to be paid asap. two days before brother got paid i told him we needed the money, and he said, "well i need to buy groceries." i told him that groceries were not a priority, because we needed the money. (ps, the month before he said he didn't have enough money to pay his rent either, and only gave me $60 out of the $100 he owed, then a week later, he borrowed $10 from me.) so a few days go by, he gets paid, and again i say, hey, don't forget we need that money, and he said, oh well only a small amount was direct deposited and the rest has to clear. so okay. so then sunday rolls around, the huge bill is due on monday, and boy works overtime on a SUNDAY for the cash so he can pay it, and comes home and asks me if brother gave me the money yet, and i said no. so brother comes home in the middle of boy texting him an angry text about how he needs to honor his responsibilities, and boy instead just says, hey. give us the money right now. and brother's just sitting there ignoring him, and when boy is like, "hello, our money, dude!" my brother, so rudely, says, "yeah i heard you. i'm going to sit here and finish this beer, then i'll go get it." boy was livid, and just removed himself from the situation and took a shower. i told brother, we're in a tight spot and you know it, you also know that you were supposed to be paying $400 instead of $100 but i know you don't have any money so i didn't say anything, but you're not even paying us that. you're either going to stop eating our food and using our stuff and you can keep paying $100, or you can pay us $200 and continue doing what you're doing. but you eat more than $100 worth of food a week, and at this point we're paying for you to live here. so he got all mad and left, and hasn't said anything to us in days. turns out he went up to my mom's house and told her that we were being unreasonable, told him he can't live here anymore, and said suddenly that he needed to pay $400 instead of $100, and that boy sent him this rude ass text (which it wasn't - on his way to work on monday, boy just said hey. man up and pay us the rest of the money you owe, because you will never find a place to live with a personal chef, laundry service, and a fucking gym in the basement all for $100 a month. he also said, i'm going to work now to provide for YOU.) so all my mom hears is my brother's side of story, and she says she thinks it's a little inappropriate for boy to be saying these things to him. and i said, no it's not because boy is 50% of the head of this household, pays half of the bills, and can thus say whatever the fuck he wants, especially because brother hasn't been paying us. and my mom says, well i think $400 is a little much for him, and i said, well you would have a totally valid point if he wasn't only paying $100, but he hasn't even been paying that. and at that, my mom was like, OH. i didn't know all that. so i said, let me tell you the real story. and i did, and she actually just listened to me. and again, she said that she felt it was a little inappropriate for boy to be involved because he was in the same situation as my brother when we got together - having no money and nothing and having someone else (me) support him (meaning, when i let him move in, i didn't ask him to split the bills with me because he was in such dire straits). i said that is true, but #1, that was my decision to make, and #2, he's my boyfriend. i understand that my brother is my family, but my brother had clear expectations for living here. my mom said we'd have to agree to disagree on that one - A FIRST!! usually i'm just bulldozed into the ground - but that she still believes this should be an issue between brother and i, and that boy's text was a little heavy-handed. and i told her the only reason he sent that text worded the way it was was because brother was so RUDE and flippant when we asked him for the money, seeing as we only asked him for $100 instead of the almost $200 he owed if we were going to count last month's balance and all of the money he's borrowed. it wasn't an issue of the $100, it was an issue of respect for us and our home. and then i told my mom about when brother had the random girl over, and he never apologized or acknowledged that he was wrong. i said to my mom that boy and i both don't even care about the money really, it's just a formality. we both love my brother and enjoy having him around, but it's the principle of the thing, and that he walks around like he owns the place when he contributes nothing. boy found this especially disrespectful and it was just the straw that broke the camel's back when he had to go to work "on the lord's day" and come home to a guy living in his house, shitting in his toilet, and pretty much telling him to go fuck himself when he asks him for the nominal fee for living here. all we want from my brother is for him to acknowledge that he is wrong, and to apologize. that's it. somehow, somehow. my mom actually listened to me telling her all of this, and said that she agreed with me now that she knows all of the details, and would talk to my brother. because the real problem is, where is all of his money going that he can't afford $100 a month? last time we noticed this trend of great quantities of missing cash, he was doing heroin. but let's not go there now. so during this conversation my mom actually started talking about how great she thinks boy is, too. and i said this to him not to make him feel better, but because it's true: my mother never says anything nice about anyone. anyone! she was saying that he came to me with nothing, and ended up finding the perfect job, repairing his credit, and getting his life back on track. she can tell that he's trying to hard to rise above the horrors of his childhood. that he loves his son and is a great father because you can bet that 90% of men who would have to deal with crazytown regularly would just pay the child support and fucking run for the hills. and then, as difficult and challenging as this child is, he stepped right up when that psycho literally went to crazytown. he's there, he's involved, he's patient. he clearly wants little A to have the life and the opportunities that he never got to have. i was tearing up listening to my mom say these things about this man that i love so dearly. because that means that she finally understands this really important part of me, that she was able to see all of these things in him. all of the same things i see. and she can understand why i sacrificed so much that i had for him - because she understands that he will do the same thing for me, and that he IS doing it. for us (little A, too). my mom and i haven't talked in so long. like really talked. so after she said all of these things, i said thank you, mom, for talking to me today. we just had a nice conversation with no yelling. and she said, well you always get all offended when i tell you something you don't want to hear, so that's why we're always yelling. and i said, no mom, actually? we can agree to disagree on things. we just did. but you talk to people like shit. and of course she's like, "no i don't, i just tell you the truth. i'm straightforward." and i said, again, no. when people disagree with you, at the end of the conversation they feel like "wow, i'm a stupid idiot who does everything wrong." and she says, "i've never said that!" and i said it doesn't matter if you literally said that. when the way you say things makes someone feel like that, it's the same thing. i told her that i know she is a straightforward woman and that she wants to help, but there's "BOSS [mother]*" and "MOM [mother]," and i want to talk to mom [mother]. i'm already stressed out enough; i just want to talk to her and not fight about the things that i'm already stressed out about. so she said she just wanted the best for me, and for us, and she just wants to help. and i said to her, not only because i know it made her so happy but because for the first time, i genuinely meant it, "okay mom. i want you to help me." after the conversation, i felt like it was such a breakthrough in our relationship. i hope it was. i always always wish i had a mom, like other people do. so many well-meaning people always say, "you'll miss your mom when she's gone!" and so much of my heart aches. because while i know i will, and i don't want anything to happen to her, she hurts me so much. so there's the conflicting message inside you that you know you're never supposed to let people treat you that way. you've been taught that since you were little, right? boy just said it the other day to little A, when one of his friends pushed him off his bike at his mom's and he got hurt pretty bad. boy asked who did it and little A said, "my friend," and boy said, why would you want to be friends with someone who's mean to you and makes you sad? so it's just guilt and this longing for this essential relationship that's missing from my life. i don't know how to reconcile it in my mind. i think that i'm going to ask my mom if she'd be willing to pay for therapist visits for me, because it is way out of our budget. normally i would never even consider this, and those sentences that i wrote would be like, laughable. but the past couple times she and i have spoken seriously, she's inquired as to my mental health. it seems that only recently she's acknowledged that it was real, but i appreciate that so much too, because it's another huge part of me that has always been an issue. and it's so hard to be told that it doesn't exist. i don't know. the cynic in me is like, yeah right, but i remember i'm not supposed to listen to it anymore. assume the best and that's what you'll get. so i'm trying. * i've been calling my mother by her first name since i was maybe 10-12 years old, so here i omitted it. |