Search the Community

I have been taking care of my sisters kids for about 9 months while she has been in Rehab.. I am living at my mothers house during this time. My mother is a savage beast and an alcoholic. She takes no responsibility whatsoever for my sister being in Rehab. If I stay here much longer I am going to lose my mind. I want to help these poor kids who have been born into chaos. I have made the case over and over with my mother about the practicality of using time outs and yelling and the fact that it just makes things worse in the long run. I have sent her multiple links to articles and books explaining this. If I talk to her in person she just laughs at me saying something like "they need to learn they can't always have their way" She accuses me of "just letting them do whatever they want". The reality is she wants the kids to be broken so she can force them to do whatever she wants. She literally just a few moments ago put the little girl in time out because she wanted to wear her recital dress. My mother tricked her into giving her the dress by saying she was helping her take off the dress so she could go to the bathroom. But afterwards my Mother wouldn't give it back. So of course the little girl started crying and asking for it back. Because this behavior bothers my mother she picks up the little girl while she is still screaming and puts her in her room and locks the door. The little girl sobs and cries pressed up the door begging to be let out.. I am living in a nightmare. Not only am I stuck with this fucking beast of a person but I am powerless to protect the children from her. If I try to intervene she will go psychotic screaming and yelling at me threaten me insult me, she is capable of anything. I want them to have a chance in life and I am worried that I am just sealing their fate by being a part of all this. I am 100% committed to virtue and of course peaceful parenting, my mother is the exact opposite she just wants to get her way at any cost(so long as she can't get in trouble for it) I have recently come to accept the definition of the word sociopath to describe her, I could write a whole book on the horrors she has forced me to endure in childhood. The children have a strong bond with her and I worried that I am just making it stronger by tending to their wounds so she can rip them open again.. I want these kids to be able to identify monsters like this and avoid them not "love" them. I plan on moving out with the next 6 months but what then? I don't see any way of getting her out of my life so long as I am in the kids life. And when my mother is in my life I don't exist I am a just a chew toy for her insatiably sadistic appetite. Right now I am easily startled by noises, if I see my mom moving fast out of the corner of my eye I tense up and prepare for an attack. I am stressed to the point where its effecting my health. I am exhausted all the time. Anytime I am around her I feel nauseous. Its extremely difficult for me to be vulnerable and connected with the children around my mother, I can't be myself with them when she is lurking over my shoulder. Am I doing more harm then good by giving them this model even tho I am relatively able to give them the model I want when she is away Mon-Fri 6am-5pm?

I have been the primary Caregiver of two children now 2 and 3 years old for about 9 months, since I arranged an intervention for their mother(my sister) and she went to Rehab(for prescription pill addiction). I have been living at my mother's who has temporary custody of the children. Basically I have given up my entire life just to give these children some sort of hope. Mon-Friday I watch them from around 7am-5pm while my mother is at work. My mother is also an alcoholic however in my family that is the acceptable, so no way for me to arrange an intervention for her. My sister has been kicked out of one treatment center already although she has been clean for maybe 4 or 5 months now but even off the drugs she is a horrible mother just like my mother. Lots of information being left out to get to the question. My sister and mother have just been telling the children that she "has to work" however she is actually in a drug treatment center in California(we live in Maryland) the only contact they have is over the phone and recently sometimes skype. I am honest when the 3 year old asks me questions but I am not sure how to explain to a 3 year old that her mom is in Rehab and that we have no idea when if ever she will be coming back. Just telling her that she is at work is not acceptable. I am thinking of saying something like she is in California she made allot of bad decisions and is not able to take care of you etc... but the reality is my sister could be making allot more effort to be closer to her kids but she just likes being in California I want to be completely honest even if that means explaining that her mom basically doesn't care about her. What am I supposed to do I really don't know how to handle this especially considering that my mom and sister are not going to agree with me talking about being honest. When I says they won't agree with me that means they will possibly yell and scream at me accuse me of being selfish along with who knows what sort of evil shit. You never really know how my mom is going to react she is always ready to unleash the beast and will never take responsibility for her actions. I am good at deflecting their attacks so I know I will be able to take whatever they try to do to me. I just want to know what is the best way to talk to the 3 year old about this regardless of what the evil people in her life will think about it. I would like to be able to come up with something we can all agree on so that the children aren't getting conflicting stories . I can't outright say your mom and grandmother are evil people who only care about how they look on Facebook that would get me kicked out of their lives. I would appreciate any sort of feedback or advice on how to approach this. Please feel free to ask any question you may have, Clark P.S, -Just for the record my plan is to try to convince my sister to give me custody but everyone in my family is either an alcoholic or on antidepressants so I have no help or support from them whatsoever. I am completely broke because of this and its going to be awhile before I can afford to take care of them on my own. I decided it was best to plant myself in their lives for their most critical developmental years, eventually I will have to move out and be less of a figure in their life in order to build a proper environment for them to come live in.

I was born to drug addicts, crack for mom, heroin for dad. Dad was in and out (so to speak) for the early years of my life, he didn't become a concrete fixture until I was probably 5. One of my earliest memories was being sent with money into a crackhouse across the street from our apartment (we lived in subsidized housing aka Da projects) to get my moms drugs for her. "dont tell dad and dont look inside the package he gives you." It seems ridiculous to even try to defend that kind of a situation but I knew the house, my friend TJ lived there with his dad and his dads girlfriend. His dad was a crack dealer. My father as I said was strung out most of the time, he worked as a carpenter and also he beat people up for a small time loan shark. Another lovely childhood memory was sitting in my mothers lap in my dads car while he went to collect and the guy he was collecting from pulled a gun and traced it on my mother and I in the car. It was the 1st time I ever saw my father beat someone into the ground and take his wallet and gun. Then my brother Ricky was born, roughly around 6 or 7 months premature. Open heart surgery, collapsed lungs, messed up eardrums, so on and so forth, I was 4 or 5. All I knew was that my mother was dying, my new brother was sure to die, and my dad just dropped my off at random relatives homes. They tried to push religion on me at that time and even back then I could tell how incredibly bullshit it was. If there was a god, he would not be murdering my mom and my brother. Even now I think back on this stuff and I am overwhelmed with grief, christ help me when I hear the song "Over the rainbow" Which played in its awful 8bit glory on some crappy windup toy my Memere bought for Ricky. So much pain, so much misery. It was like I was collecting the interest off of the misery my parents bore. They both grew up in broken homes without fathers. My mothers father an alcoholic womanizer left the family when she was barely 8 and my fathers father an alcoholic WW2 veteran who bombed his mothers home city in Germany committed suicide by putting his head in a gas oven when my father was 10. My father and his brother my Uncle Dan, found him there dead. And these things of course terminally stained my parents minds. That is no excuse, just some background info. Ricky and mom did survive just barely, but we still all bear the scars. I feel traumatized by these things. Even now just nearly 33 years old. I feel helpless in the dark in the broken silent moments of night as I lay awake. Swimming in these memories and thoughts, love, anger, hatred and then guilt. SO much guilt. Guilt for the things I suffered, guilt for the things I have done in response. Guilt for being cold and hard towards my fellow man and my family after I survived such insane fucking reality. I could probably reduce most people along with myself to tears, there is so much of this shit. I recall vividly still being molested by a neighbor who lived next door. Another sadistic fucked up depraved drug addict. These are the kind of people our culture produced. I held that in for 30 years before I told anybody, by the time I told my mother she cried... she cried and cried and I stood there, cool and indifferent. Feeling guilty that this data would make her cry. Its why I didn't ever want to tell anybody, but the secret was literally tearing my mind apart after holding it for 20+ years. And in heated angry moments, shouting at my mother as she stared at me, eyes aghast in denial and incredulity all she could mutter was that life didn't come with instructions. Which is of course true, and also part manipulation. She is incapable of being responsible, and that only enrages me further. To the point where I will be standing over her berating her like her own mother should have been back then. Mom was stuck on illegal drugs at least until she began doctor shopping, and it is my belief that she had been on prescription drugs for the majority of my life. Dad got clean, I remember when it happened. I don't know what sparked it, no one ever told me. But one day I was sent off to live with my insane aunt Cindy in another ghetto, Ricky was sent off to stay with my aunt Sally and Colby our younger brother was sent off to stay with our fathers best friend and the only "Uncle" i ever knew Chuck. I dont remember how long it took but during this time I got really into my 1st real addiction. Nintendo. Well living in the ghetto is bad, not to a childs mind. There was certainly a lot of other kids to play with and being the 80s crack epidemic there was no shortage of skinny teenagers with pillow sacks filled with 5 dollar NES carts. I plunged head 1st into the 8 bit realities Miyamoto had constructed for me and it was there that I found some sort of semblance of normalcy. Mom and dad are fighting? Mario Brothers, Mom tried to stab dad with a kitchen knife? Legend of Zelda, Ricky nearly dead? Metroid. It was then I believe that I learned to pacify myself with fantasy and imagination. There wasnt much else to do. **** At this point I am very well aware dear readers how much jumping around I am doing, and I will try to bring this to a head in a bit, but I apologize in advance for the jittery nature... there is SO SO much dysfunction that its hard to just lay it all out in order, especially when much of this stuff happened to me before the age of 10. I was cursed / blessed with a very deep and vivid memory. All my life people have called me an information sponge. Anyway... Folks ended up getting clean, well sort of. Dad was and is still an Alcoholic and mom has been on narcotic prescriptions. They never got rid of the addictions, just the illegal aspect of fulfilling them. Thanks government! We ended up moving when I was in 3rd grade to a very nice town. They still live there to this day. It was a move I dont think I ever recovered from. I recall in the old hood having more friends than I could count. And while yes most of them are now dead or in jail i at least had people to talk to. In our new town I had a very very difficult time making friends. They just didn't get me. They all had cold lunches packed with care, and cute fluffy dogs and parents without drug addictions and solid jobs, they sat around and talked about the future and how their days went. Their moms and dads did their homework with them, they reminded me of everything I never had. Although I learned how to lie quite well about those things. How to deny to myself and others how horrible broken my family was. I even had people convinced that my life was better. but I secretly hated them, I despised them. I thought they were weak, and self centered. They wished their mothers and fathers dead for not buying them gameboys or for taking them on long boring trips to Florida to the beach... I have still never been to Florida. I became isolated. Obsessed with dark things, horror movies, monsters, demons, guns, and death. I projected myself into dark antihero roles like the Punisher, Blade or Ghost Rider. Because Superman was a bitch, when the hell did superman ever suffer? He was not a real hero. Its not hard to be a hero when you're indestructible. I liked antiheroes. Dark heroes. People who were broken like me who didn't just want to save the innocents like children from dark forces but who wanted to take those dark forces and torture them. Not jail them. Torture them. Cut their skin off piece by piece, give them an IV so they wouldn't die so I could prolong the torture. I realized I was sick. I kept myself, to myself. Even today, if I ever came across that guy who molested me as a kid. I would kidnap him and torture him until he begged me to end his life, and then I would prolong it even longer. This is the result of holding in anger like poison for an entire life. You stare into the void and eventually the void stares back into you. I cannot deny this part of myself. It is a stain that has lasted all my life. And it has spilled into every facet of that life. People know me as dark minded, maybe evil. But not chaotic evil, more of a lawful evil. Its not true of course, in fact I don't want to hurt anybody and it was those feelings that made me cling to rationality. Like benchmarks of land in a sea of molten fiery emotions that I could navigate from. Bless Marcus Aurelius for introducing me to Stoicism. If I hadn't figured out how to get my feelings in check, I would have turned mass murderer long ago. It didn't help that talking was just something we didn't do at home. To my parents talking meant they talked and I did what they said. Which lead me to my 1st survival instinct in life. Never tell mom or dad anything. I still abide by this. ***** Now to the crux of this screed, I am fully aware now of how broken my emotional background is. I haven't even let but a drip of the hellish soul crushing damnation of my life out here... in fact I don't even know how I could. We would need 33 years worth of text to get a scope of my life. But I come to the conclusion that my feelings are out of control. Which is why I so tightly clamp down on them. But the clampage manifests in other ways, anxiety, rage, random crying etc. And hatred... so much hatred, the wounded broken heart of a small boy who was failed by every institution that was supposed to protect him. How do you square with the toxic cocktail of hatred and love? The love of consciousness, the love of what little family I had, the longing for a time when things were simpler, when were were broken but together. Now that we are all older and rarely see one and other it weighs heavily on me. We all love each other but cannot say it, we hate each other but wont say it... I don't know how I should feel anymore. Once I broke free from the mind mold of my control freak parents especially Dad, I felt adrift in an ocean of confusion. Is this just adulthood? Why do I hate and love everything? Why do I want to see everything burn but fight these feelings back in the name of reason? I feel like a collapsing star being held up by that last bastion of nuclear forces as the gravity of reality crushes me in all directions. I am paralyzed with thoughts and indecision. Thanks for reading.

I'm in college and I'm seeing this very sweet girl, that's unfortunately (for both herself and for me) hooked on the sorority life of excessive drinking, partying and even drug abuse. I have only known her for a short period of time, so our relationship is not that serious yet, but I would like it to be if she could straighten herself out. She has self-esteem issues and it seems like she is constantly afraid of being rejected because of her issues. So she has a history of resorting to casual sex and rejecting commitment preemptively just to avoid the risk of being dumped first. She finds a life without alcohol and drugs appealing (she hates drinking), but she's afraid of what's going to happen with her relationship with her sorority friends if she abandons even parts of this destructive lifestyle. She also seems a lot more comfortable expressing attachment when she is drunk, but gets really reluctant whenever we speak of commitment. Should I intervene? If so, how!? Should I leave her and let her figure it out herself? oh and she has some daddy issues (I THINK the daddy might be absent) and I think she feels like her mother is not really proud of who she is and her accomplishments..