Some childhoods are difficult; there's no getting around it. Sometimes a parent, for one reason or another, just doesn't cut it and their children suffer for it. The drunks, the narcissists, the losers, the abusers, they raise their children in their own image and, as those children grow into adult failures of their very own, the parent is often cited as the source of bad behavior. Most will agree on this, parents and offspring alike, as it is widely believed that there is always a good explanation for the way things come to be. However, this is only true for so long.
In every troubled life there comes a point where childhood ends. We become independent of our mothers, free from our fathers, and the direction of our lives falls squarely into our own hands. We have been raised, for better or for worse, and are now culpable for own own actions. As the years go by, life learns us the things our parents left out, painfully picking and choosing the lessons we deem valuable enough to retain. We grow, we grow up, and we become grown-ups. This all happens so quickly that many people miss it entirely, but it always happens. There comes a day when our lives no longer belong to our parents.
And so the blame shifts.
The very second we become aware of the difference between right and wrong, the act of partaking in either becomes a choice. If we choose the later then we have willingly partook in crimes punishable by consequence. If our life feels 'wrong' in any way, we made it feel that way. We are adults. We know better. It's nobody's fault but ours.
My sister Mary's life has been her own for quite some time. Conservatively speaking, it's been her own for at least twenty years now. Where is Mary, you ask? Mary doesn't know, but if she did she'd probably lie to spare her ego the shame.
Mary is living with her parents. Mary is 41. Mary is changing careers. Mary is a waitress. Mary cannot put a roof over her children's heads. Yes, Mary doesn't have a pot to piss in, but Mary is drunk in the kitchen. Her parents, her siblings, her three kids, we are all drowning with her while she blows money she doesn't have on booze and there's no excuse good enough, Mary, no excuse at all.
At 2:00 AM tonight when the bars closed, Mary DUI-ed home and stumbled through the house wreaking of her expensive smoking habit. Right now she is drunkenly feeding her disobedient dog fistfuls of treats while talking to it about being disciplined and slobbing down a piece of cold pizza while talking to her fat ass about the same thing. Mary's inebriated, intelligible, internal dialogue proves to me that she knows exactly how self-destruction works. It's as willful and deliberate as a controlled demolition.
And I am helping her do it.
Her friends, her family, her parents, her siblings everyone who's ever picked up Mary's slack, we've all done our part to make her the steaming hot mess that she is. We facilitated it; we enabled it; we nurtured her descent, straining beneath the weight of Mary's 'mistakes,' picking up the pieces while Mary gets smashed. My sister may the bulldozer, but this family is the wrecking crew.
My poor parents are actually too good for people. You might wonder, how can this be so? How can someone be so good that they become "too" good? Isn't the point to be as good as is humanly possible? In fact, no, that is not the point.
People who are "too good" don't turn their back on a child even as she spits in their face. Too good people pick up serial killing hitch hikers because, "It's the Christian thing to do." Too good people go bankrupt for donating to scam charities or get squashed like insects, dying with their arms outstretched, trying to catch a jumper falling from a twenty-story building. If that's what it takes to be a "good" person "saving the day," then perhaps people are better off just being "okay" innocent observers. I say let those suicidal assholes hit pavement.
It may sound callous, it may sound cruel, it may sound like I think family support is bad idea, but this is not the case. The fact of the matter is, Mary has gotten so used to her familial safety net that she has come to rely on it, count on it, ask for it, require it, manipulate it, abuse it, and deny it was ever there. Among all the wonderful things that she is in our affection (generous, talented, funny, smart, able, warm) she's also become a spoiled, ungrateful bitch. By holding her up, we are actually holding her back; so again I say let her fall, let her fail, let her splatter all over the goddamn sidewalk and if she survives, maybe she will learn how to stand on her own.
My dad has just reached the sixty-year milestone in his life; his father came up short by two years. My father doesn't have ten years to waste on my waste of a sister. I think my parents deserve to live another hundred years, dying fat, happy, and retired on some Key West beach resort, but at this rate they too will come up short. They'll die under the mountain of debt they accumulate as they try to save hopeless children from their own misery.
I hope to God this is Mary's last get-out-of-jail-free card. If Mary can't support her children, then Cole, Miles, and Mary's other daughter, Kay, will always have a home in my parent's house. This family does not throw children out on the street. But Mary? The grace period of her childhood is long since expired. It's time this family deflates her life raft in the hope that she'll finally learn how to swim.
Tomorrow morning, I'm going to ask my parents to set a hard deadline for kicking me out of their house. I'm an adult, too, and shouldn't enable either.
Day 28 is heavy, sad, and sadly overdue.
TFR. SYT.
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