Posted by:
Anon for this One
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Date: September 22, 2017 12:34AM
It took about a decade of my first quarter-century with this family to smooth everybody's feathers, and "translate" my DH's volatile verbiage into sentiments that would help the rest of the family settle down around him.
He has this incredible gift of being able to p!ss people off by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, but with the best of intentions. He has a the proverbial heart of gold but had the misfortune of being raised in a family of angry, angry Mormons who would fly into rage at the drop of a hat. So, when ruffled, his default setting is rage.
I have always been able to see through this, to the truly beautiful person hiding in there, buried under layers of rubble and rage. (My grandparents met during the 1906 "Great Quake" in San Fran, in 1906. Maybe that's where this resilience comes from. I don't know.)
The older kids have been successfully launched from the family nest. The youngest, a 31-year-old perennial adolescent who is wise in many ways and hopelessly backward in others, still lives with us. She is a semester away from college graduation after a decade of academic indifference and stumbling.
She and her father are so much alike - quick-tempered, both of them. And then their gears mesh wrong, and sparks begin to fly. That's when I have to turn into the family Jiffy Lube and try to keep things running smoothly. (I can't take the flying sparks. I grew up with that kind of crap, at it is triggering.)
Daughter has YET - in her 31 years - to really succeed at anything. She has had numerous jobs, but she is incapable of tolerating (emotionally) a dominant personality like an authoritarian employer. She will tell them to go to He!!, and then quit. And then she is back in our pockets again. She has never been financially independent for a sustained period.
She is a poly-substance abuser - weed and alcohol, which she funds from her own part-time earnings. But if, when school is done, she applies for any kind of job that requires a drug test, she will fail. I truly don't believe that she is emotionally capable of settling down into a regular, 40-hour-per-week work life of predictable tedium.
For many years, it has been a joke between DH and me that we should just sneak away in the middle of the night and move into a house in Maine or Alaska or someplace off the charts (not likely, as I LOATHE cold weather), do something technically convoluted so that she can't trace our IP source, and remain hidden, so she can't find us. Without us, she would be FORCED to stand on her own two feet.
But Jeebus H. Kristofferson!! I'm old and physically impaired. Why should I have to leave the home I love, the only son I gave birth to, and a life that is comfortable for me, because this difficult daughter and her hard-headed father can't get along?
At this point, both of them are confiding to me that they never want to see the other again. And I love them both. WHY SHOULD i HAVE TO CHOOSE??
I know that we have been talking here about boundaries, and that may be part of the situation here. Right now, I am too close to the situation to get a reasonable perspective on it.
I have a decent enough pension that I could move out on my own and make a go of it. So could DH. But I don't have the physical health to do it. I can't walk a whole city block without collapsing into a heap of aches and misery. I don't WANT to leave DH, nor does he want to leave me.
I sometimes wonder if DH and I should hang in there until DD gets her diploma, and then tell her, "Congratulations, Sweet Child. You have 48 hours to find a new place, and then we are changing the locks on your apartment. YOU ARE NOW ON YOUR OWN."
I am so sick of the contention between them!
I know that there are other parents here who have been in similar situations. I would like to hear from you.