Homecoming, Memorials, Turning 40

Next weekend is my freshman daughter's first homecoming!  She and one other freshman were invited to a formal dinner by a senior in the school to attend before homecoming (catered by her family's restaurant I would imagine).  These two girls were the only freshman invited so my daughter got a thrill out of that.  This senior is a very nice girl and has been nice to my daughter, despite the age difference the last few years.  Then she'll attend her first homecoming with a group of her friends (no dating yet).  This weekend is dress shopping so she's very excited.

Next weekend is also the weekend of my grandmother's memorial that I am not going to attend.  I won't ask my daughter to give up her first homecoming to attend a memorial in another state for somebody she didn't know (I hadn't seen her in years - we had a falling out due to the very strained - antagonistic, angry - relationship I've had with my father (her son) from the time I was a child (total dysfunction in the family...rotten).  Anyway, my father tried to lay a guilt trip on me about not attending the memorial but after the childhood he gave me and the fact that he moved to the other side of the country from his own kids, grandkids and mother with my most recent stepmother (not one of the women he cheated on my mother with...this was three girlfriends later...or four, I don't know - lost count), pfft. I'm sure he knows where I think he should put his guilt trip!

No matter how old you get (and I'm staring at 40 next month), the family dysfunction never really goes away.

Speaking of 40 - I received a compliment last night.  I overheard one of my son's friends say, "That's your mom?  She looks like a teenager!"  hee hee  40 isn't looking too shabby to me at the moment! Maybe I won't cry as hard as I think I will.

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Stepson Strikes Again

Obviously, the ex's talk about what is and is not appropriate with my stepson and his week's grounding from his computer worked - NOT (read this and then this if you have no clue what I'm talking about)!  So what did he do now? 

My 11-year-old son has a picture on his fb of he and his girlfriend that I took at their band concert last week.  My stepson posted the comment: "Get some *insert lil brother's name here* under the photo on facebook.

Get some?

• My son is 11 YEARS OLD!!  He is a sweet, shy, innocent boy (totally unlike his older half-brother).
• His girlfriend, also on facebook, is a sweetheart who doesn't need to see that. 
• Her parents are nice people, church-going people, and don't need to see that.
• None of his friends on facebook need to see that.
• I don't need to be fielding phone calls from angry parents because of something my stepson did from his mother's house because she won't supervise him!

So, I just blocked my stepson from my son's facebook.  I didn't want to have to do it and I gave the ex's wimpy consequences last week a chance.  Obviously, that was my mistake.  I won't make it again.

Oh yeah - that obscene song he sang and recorded and posted online for all to see that his mother supposedly talked to him about and grounded him for over a week ago?  It just came off his facebook yesterday!  Wouldn't any normal mother whose child had posted an obscene song online for a couple hundred other kids to see take that song down ASAP instead of waiting over a week?  Seriously?!?

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Family Dysfunction for Christmas

Has anybody noticed how family dysfunction becomes 100 times worse during the holidays?

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What happens after you expect respect

Not surprisingly, people don't like it when you stand up for yourself against their disrespectful behavior. They get angry that they no longer have you there to intimidate or use anymore. Imagine that.

My ex made a lot of promises that I knew he wouldn't keep that I didn't fall for. He'd stop drinking. He'd come home more. We'd do things together. He didn't mention the bruises he used to leave or the windshield he bashed my head into so I'm not sure if his abuse was still going to be part of the equation. You know, if he'd respected me to begin with, he should never have had to make those kinds of promises because of his past behavior. I was done. I knew I didn't deserve his treatment but I thought if I could get him to stop drinking, things would get better. I finally realized that nobody else could help him. He had to help himself and I left. A good indicator of future behavior is past behavior.

For some, like my husband, when he left his ex, she thought she could continue to dictate to him how things were going to be. She may have used intimidation while he was with her and he just gave in because it was easier than fighting with her around the clock when they had a child, but when she lost control over him, oh boy! When you treat a person in a way that makes them feel badly about themselves or your relationship with them, it shouldn't be a surprise when the other person gets tired of it and wants out. When they get tired of it and say, "No more!"

A person who is well-adjusted will acknowledge that their own behavior contributed to the downfall of the relationship, but if a person remarries, usually the new spouse gets the blame instead. Ex's tend to think that if their ex hadn't remarried or moved on, then they'd still be able to lead them around by the nose. It's easier to blame somebody else than take a good, hard look at yourself. Maybe some of them would be right. Some, not all. Personally, I wouldn't have married my husband if his ex had still been leading him around, using kids to do it. When he stood up to her, and set his boundaries, I finally said, "yes" to his marriage proposal. I wouldn't say "yes" a minute before then. I was at that point in my life where I was not going to tolerate any disrespect from the people I chose to have as close relationships in my life.

Of course, I was to blame when he stopped letting her have her way (according to his ex). I believe the way it was worded was something like he handed his manhood over to his current wife. I still have the letter in the reams of paper in storage we've had to keep. I could pull it out and get the exact wording but that would be wasting too much time on her words, which brought a laugh to me. My response was to tell her that if she'd known how to handle his manhood to begin with, maybe he would have been able to tolerate her a little longer. Yes, I meant the double meaning. Then I thanked her for being so amusing. (I thanked her many times in the first five years or so for providing so much amusement to us whenever she got stupid. I was taught to always say please and thank you.) Yeah, I don't put up with crap like that very well. If you are going to dish it out with me, you better be able to take some back in return.

With family members, I found that if a family member couldn't bully or direct my life, they moved onto the weaker sibling who they could do that too. It's a sick, sick dysfunction.

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RESPECT: People treat you the way you let them

I am a firm believer that people treat you the way you allow yourself to be treated. If a person is disrespecting you and hurting you, shame on them. If you don't do anything about it, a person with low moral or ethical standards will continue to be disrespectful.

This can be a spouse. It can be a friend. It can be a boss. It can even be your own mother.

I realized years ago that if I didn't EXPECT respectful behavior, and DEMAND respectful behavior, then I was going to continue to make bad choices in who I went out with and what family dysfunction was going to continue to have an impact on me. Had I continued making bad choices and had a family under those conditions, it would have brought my children into it. That was a big no-no. My kids are innocent and there was no way in the fiery depths of hell (if I believed in hell) that I would allow anything to affect them negatively that I had the power to put a stop to.

Once I realized that I wanted a family and that I deserved better, I got rid of the guy who left me sitting home all the time while he bellied up to the closest bar to get drunk (and later, come to find, pick up any skirt he could get for the last two years of our relationship) and then came home to take out all his personal angst on me. I found a man who respected me, my choices, my views, and my values. I found somebody who wanted me WITH him more often than not. I found somebody who would never think about raising a hand to me. Other than the baggage that is his ex, it's been great being valued and loved by somebody who believed in us enough not to want to do anything to ruin that, believed in our family enough not to want to do anything to hurt our kids.

Aside from intimate relationships, toxicity can exist in immediate family relationships as well. It can be a sibling or a parent. In my world, removing anything toxic that continued to bring me down and affected my day-to-day life was a necessity after several years of feeling like I was associating with emotional vampires who sucked the life right out of me with their constant state of problems they brought on themselves by their behavior or by having a screw loose and enjoying the constant drama it brought to their lives.

Nobody deserves to be disrespected. There are people who will treat you the way you should be treated and settling with what you have, that is hurting you, over what you should have because it's scary to take that step...life is too short. Enjoy the time you're given here. There's no reason to be in a miserable relationship with a boyfriend/girlfriend, parent, spouse, friend, if all it does it bring you down.

RESPECT!

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Forgetting Birthdays Again

Well, the stepkids didn't acknowledge their baby sister's birthday last week. Was I surprised? No.

I also wasn't surprised my own mother didn't either. She's managed to forget every child's birthday this year (three so far). When you're not the favorite, that tends to happen more often than not. Yes, I come from a highly dysfunctional family. Keeping my own from becoming dysfunctional is why I keep my distance from most of them.

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Not All Mothers Should Be Mothers

In our society, mothers are generally given favorable bias in the family court system. Fathers are second-class citizens in family court (not all the time but too often). People don't want to believe that mothers could do anything to harm their own child. It happens. We see it in divorce situations. We see it in parental alienation (which should be a crime in my opinion). We see it in felony criminal cases as well.

For instance, take the "mother" who drugged her own 13-year-old daughter so the mother's 40-year-old boyfriend could get her pregnant in Pennsylvania. The mother and boyfriend attempted this THREE times. The girl, thankfully, prevented it every time. How awful for the child - not only the act tried against her but to know her own mother put her in harm's way on purpose. A MOTHER participated in trying to get her own child RAPED. Sick!

Not all mothers deserve the title of "mother". Some mothers are too sick, too selfish to be the mothers that our children deserve. It is past time that the family courts see this!!!

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Who Looks Forward to Holiday Family Time

Not me. That's for sure.

With November around the corner, it is time to make family holiday plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Everybody wants the family to get together because it is the holidays. My feelings are why would I want to ruin my holidays by doing that? lol

I don't see the point in spending all that money to head to out of state family's homes pretending to get along with certain people I don't want to see and stressing out my own family's holiday. What for when I can have a quiet holiday with my husband and kids in my own home? Sounds good to me! The downside is that you do miss out on seeing those you actually want to spend time with.

We didn't get the choice on who our family was but we do have the choice on whether we want particular members in our lives or not. Guess you know my choice.

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