Monday, August 15, 2011

Rather More Thorough

Fuck.  I think I'm having a relapse.  I'm incredibly hesitant to admit this because it means that I have to admit that the depression is real, which is something I've been trying so hard to ignore.  I think that I wanted so badly to be able to break away from it and experience a normal life, and I wanted the real opportunity to be able to apply for OCS with a clear conscience.  I wanted to be able to say, truthfully, that I am okay.  That I'll never fall into the pit of darkness and unhappiness and pessimism and fear again.

Unfortunately, it looks like that is not the case.  I've been thinking a lot about what it will take for me to apply for the OCS program with the Navy, and what it will take for me to be accepted despite the diagnoses I've been given.  They're going to require my medical records.  I could simply just lie and say that I have none.  That won't work, though, because I have to be on medication for my thyroid for the rest of my life.  I can't just hand over the complete medical records, though, either because those have information pertaining to my mental illnesses as well.  So if I really want it badly enough, I will have to request all of my medical records from all of my various doctors and go through them, page by page, and take out every reference to mental illness.  Which will be a lot of work.  And it indicates a level of dishonesty that I am not certain I want to reach.  Even writing about it is a bad idea, honestly, because the information that I am trying to refrain from giving the government is totally available to them through the internet.

That's a whole other thing for another day, though.

I realize that I never wrote about the actual incident between my sister and I last week.  It was last Tuesday evening.  Because I was so exhausted from not getting home until after 1:30am, I took the day off work (by lying, no less).  When I finally got up, I went to my parents house to return the camera and the iPhone cord I'd borrowed, and to pick up the rest of Phoenix's stuff that I hadn't grabbed when I picked him up the night before.  I figured I'd stay, hang out with the kids, talk to my parents, and just relax for awhile.  As my sister had broken the truck while I was gone, she was trying to get it working again on Tuesday while I was there.  Her ex-husband had taken a look at it and suggested that she try running new oil all through it, since the problem clearly had something to do with the fact that the truck already had a slow oil leak and needed more oil put in every couple of weeks or so, which she hadn't done.  Anyway, she was outside trying to get the truck running again, and my mom and I were out on the deck.  My mom had said she wanted to hear about my trip.  My sister came through and asked my mom to watch the kids while she tried driving the truck around the block, which my mom did.  But when she got back, my mom came right back outside to sit with me.  That pissed my sister off.  She came back out, yelling about how my mom felt that talking to me was "more important" than her getting to work the next day.  For whatever reason, she thought that she'd be able to get the truck working well enough to get to Boulder and back the very next day.  Which was completely delusional.  The truck needs to be professionally worked on.  It's going to take a couple thousand dollars of work, I'm guessing.  Not just an easy "let's run some brand-new oil through it and it's good as new!" fix.  Anyway, she was all shades of pissed off, so she started in on her usual rant about how big of a loser I am, and how if she had to live my life she'd want to kill herself, blah, blah, blah.  For whatever reason, I just couldn't sit and take it so I asked her why the hell she didn't clean up the damn house and clean up after her kids and make something for dinner when she had all fucking day to do these things.  I told her I thought she was lazy and a terrible parent (both of which I really do think), and that just pissed her off even more.  I honestly can't even remember what came out of her mouth after that, but I know that I shut up but rolled my eyes and whatever she was saying, which somehow upset her even more, and then I stuck my tongue out at her and she lost her shit and attacked me, hitting and kicking me.  I just sat there.  She was walking away and I just stared at her, but I must have had a hint of a smirk on my face or something because she kept asking me why I thought anything was funny, and saying that she was going to wipe the smile off my face.  I'm pretty sure I had my hand over my mouth, and I know I wasn't laughing because I was shaking so badly from her physical affront.  My mom stepped in at this point and pretty much just shoved her in the house, and told her to stop screaming because she was upsetting the baby - which she was, the baby was crying by this point.

As far as I know I didn't do anything to really warrant her being so incredibly upset with me.  Earlier in the day, before my parents had made it home from Boulder (my dad had to pick my mom up), I asked my sister if she was going to do anything about dinner, because I knew my mom would be upset if there was no dinner when she came home, especially when two adults had been home with the kids all day long.  She blew up on me for that.  Basically, she's a ticking time bomb, and when my mom chose to sit and talk to me instead of watching the kids while her dumb ass tried to "fix" the truck, it set the bomb off, and I just happened to be in the blast radius.  She centered her attack on me because she thought I was telling my mom not to help, which I wasn't at all.  In any way.

So my mom and I continued to sit outside and talk while my sister dramatically went around closing and locking all the doors and windows of the house, locking me out.  I think that she thinks that the way she reacts is totally normal, and so she expects everyone to react the same way.  I think she thought I would try to get into the house all batshit crazy the way she did that one time.  My mom eventually had to go around the house to the front to get in, and yelled at her to stop being such a fucking nutcase.  After a little while, she came out, saying that she'd thrown my purse down the stairs and broken the glass that was in it.  The glass was a little souvenir from my trip that I'd been thinking about giving my parents.  It was a glass from the brewery where we'd had the rehearsal dinner and where we'd gone after the wedding.  One of Kate's friends had taken the glass after I finished my beer and smuggled it out in his suit coat and then given it to me.  I really liked it, and I really wanted to keep it.  It had sentimental value.  Upon throwing my purse down the stairs and realizing she'd broken the glass, she had gone through everything in my purse, including the little notebook I carry around with me that contains important information about my thousands of logins and passwords, and random ideas I come up with, and contact information for people I need to stay in contact with, and it also contains a list of all the guys I've slept with.  She brought it outside and read it off to my mom, making a big deal about how she thought I lost my virginity to Brian, when really he was my fifth.  I fucking lost it.  I slapped her across the face as hard as I could.  It was all I could do not to punch her in the face.  Between breaking the glass and reading something that she had no business reading, I can't remember the last time I was so mad at her.  I started gathering my things up to leave, when I discovered that my wallet wasn't in my purse.  She'd moved it to the bag that had all of Phoenix's stuff in it, and pretended not to know anything about it. 

I don't think I can actually make this shit up.  She really does act like she's 12 years old.  Throwing things, breaking things, reading my private stuff, and hiding my stuff and lying about it.  She kept yelling at me to get out of her house and to leave her house and not come back, and that's the point at which my mom couldn't stay quiet anymore.  She started yelling about how it isn't my sister's house, that she's paid the mortgage for twenty years, and it's her house, and my sister has no right to tell me to get out when it's her own delusions that are upsetting her anyway.  My sister went to pick up the bag in which she'd put all the piece of glass, and I pushed her down the stairs.  I sincerely hoped that she'd fall and get hurt, but she caught herself and then went all cry-baby and tattle-tale, telling my mom I'd pushed her.  That's when I went outside.  The boys were playing out there with the neighbor kid (who is an entity all unto himself, and a ridiculously badly-behaved and annoying one, at that), and my sister and mom could be heard screaming at each other for at least another 5 minutes.  The boys were all wide-eyed, asking me what was happening, and why I'd pushed mommy, and telling me they were scared.  They asked me to stay until the yelling stopped, and so I did.  I tried to explain to them that their mommy and I had had a fight, and that their mommy had done something very inappropriate and so I got mad and hit her.  And that it was wrong.  I had to go back inside to get my stupid phone, and by then the yelling had stopped and my mom had gone back outside.

Even now, I am furious.  I'm mad about the glass, I'm even more mad and embarrassed about the notebook, and I'm perplexed as to how she has been married, had three kids and gotten divorced when she has the mentality of a 12 year-old.  It just doesn't make sense.

I'm also furious with myself for allowing her to push my buttons to the point of striking her.  I have no excuses to make aside from that she is able to elicit in me such rage that it can only be compounded by physical violence towards her.  It's like watching a child have a temper tantrum, the way she acts.  It isn't "like," it is.  Watching her throw a temper tantrum when she doesn't get what she wants.  Her wants and needs absolutely come first, above all others, including her kids.  And that is reason #1 why she should not a.) have kids to begin with and 2.) have any custody of her kids, because any time spent with her is time she's spending fucking them up emotionally and mentally. 

I had to pick my dad up this morning, and take him to work with me.  Then he was driving my car to his doctor's appointment, and then driving it back to Boulder to leave with my mom, who will be coming to pick me up with it at 5pm, and then taking the Suburban back home so he will have it for errands during the day.  When I got there, Z ran right for me and gave me a big hug.  He wanted to tell me about how "Mommy scared H when he went down to wake her up" yesterday morning.  He didn't give me all the details, but I asked my dad, and I guess yesterday morning, when H went down to wake her up, she yelled at him to "get the fuck out" of the room.  What kind of a mother does that??  There is no reason for that kind of language used on a four year-old.  He came upstairs crying, saying he was scared, and my mom went straight downstairs and told her to get the fuck up out of her bed.  Apparently they had it out.  My sister kept saying she didn't get enough sleep, she'd gone to bed at 4am.  And whose fault is that?  Did the kids or the baby keep her up?  No!  She stayed up because she is a selfish, irresponsible person.  During the day when she is home with the kids, does she spend all her time with them, entertaining them, finding projects for them, and cleaning up after they leave a room, or a mess?  Nope.  She sits out in the garage, smoking, and texting, or playing games on her phone (which my parents discovered cost $5 a pop, and yet don't make her pay for).  Then my mom comes home from work and gets to clean up the dishes in the sink, and pick all the toys up off the floor.  It's beyond ridiculous, and it seems as though there is not a goddamn thing anyone can do about it.  She's not going to miraculously change.  She's just going to continue to put herself and her needs first above everyone else.  If it doesn't benefit her in any way, it's not worth her time. 

She should be institutionalized.  I swear to the sweet baby Jesus, the next incident that occurs, the next time I have to pull her off one of her kids, or she attacks me unnecessarily, I am going to call the police.  I have said it and said it, and that is pretty much the only threat we have that will scare her into behaving in any human way, but I'm tired of using it as a threat.  I've talked about it with my parents, and told them that the only reason I haven't done it already is because I worry about alienation from them for being the reason they don't get to see the kids anymore, and gotten their "permission" to do whatever I think is necessary the next time something happens.  As an adult, I don't do much in terms of making "adult" decisions.  Mostly I look to my parents to be the ones to make the difficult decisions.  It's time for that to stop. 

The bottom line is that I think it will be less destructive for the kids to be raised by their dad and his side of the family, than to be verbally and physically abused by their fucked-up mother.  She has no business being in any kind of position of authority when she can't act like an adult.  If it weren't for the fact that she's living with my parents, and under a microscope, I'd have already tried to get the kids taken away from her.  It seems to me that her medication is not working.  Every person I have discussed any of this with responds with, "those poor kids," and they're absolutely right.  Those poor kids have a mother who will fuck them up in any way, shape or form that she can, simply because she is too selfish and irresponsible to care for their needs above hers.  She thinks that she is doing the right things by over-disciplining them and screaming at them and treating them as though they are animals (and by her standards, animals are okay to abuse), but all she is doing is creating connections in their tiny sponge-brains between violence, anger and ways to get what you want.  It is absolutely terrifying to observe.  I'm pretty much completely convinced that she's setting them all up for lives of violence. 

When they do inevitably get taken away from her, I'm hoping that I've kept a decent enough relationship with their dad, been kind and compassionate enough with him (despite all the ways in which he has fucked us all over) that he will let me, if no one else, have a relationship with the kids.  They love me a lot.  I have worked really hard to nurture a kind and compassionate and normal relationship with them so that they can see me both as a friend and as an authority figure.  They respond to me in instances where I have to discipline them, but I don't discipline them unless I absolutely have to.  I heard my sister yelling, last Tuesday, at H because he had pooped in his pants.  Instead of being soothing and comforting, she yelled.  That's the kind of shit that straight-up causes problems like wetting the bed later into life. 

I don't know whether or not I should place any blame on my parents.  It's so hard to figure out whether or not my sister turned out to be a sociopath because of how she and I were disciplined by my dad, or if she was just destined to be this way.  I wish I could pinpoint one event in her life that may have been the turning point.  Am I genetically enough like her to have become a sociopath given the right circumstances and events?  Or is it something about how we were raised that shaped her and I into people that were more likely to become sociopathic?  And if so, why didn't I turn out that way?  Why do I have depression instead?

Kate and I have sort of talked about creating an unofficial study about nature vs. nurture on the ultimate emergence of sociopathic behavior.  Her kiddo's dad is a sociopath - he behaves the exact same way my sister does.  He believes that the rules don't apply to him, he believes that his behavior doesn't need to abide my the same laws as the rest of us, he is manipulative and dishonest and overall just a terrible human being.  Selfish and irresponsible.  But Kate's kiddo gets to grow up with minimal influence from his dad's perception of correct behavior, so if he turns out to have characteristics of antisocial personality disorder, we will know that the weight of such an outcome lies within genetics.  With my sister's kids, if they all three exhibit sociopathic behavior, we'll know that a lot of it is due to the fact that they were born to a sociopath and had a 50% chance of turning out exactly like her, but the fact that the kids will spend their normative years only with my sister 50% of the time, it will be interesting to see what happens.  I'm not saying their dad is a saint by any means, but when it comes to some of the more important aspects of life, like putting the needs of your children before your own, I think he's got his head on straight.  We just want to see how much the influence of being raised by someone with an antisocial personality affects the chances of having it on a child.  It's in no way a formal study because we don't really have a control group, and neither of us knows much about how to structure a study like this, and neither of us is by any means a social or psychological scientist.  But we have unique perspectives on the whole thing, in that neither of us has antisocial personalities, but we are both in close proximity both to people who are and to their offspring.

Shitballs, I wrote a lot today.  Maybe that will make up for the lack of writing I've done over the last week.  I have more in me, too.  I just don't feel like writing anymore.

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