Spaceman Down

was going to post something on facebook about my family and realized it sounds too sad and would likely only elicit sympathy responses, or worse-more comments from my sister and the rest of the 'family', neither of which I want. It just has not been a good day today. the only daylight I saw was through the window in the bathroom. thinking about food makes me feel like throwing up. Otherwise I spent the day in bed, pulling the covers over my head and wanting the world to go away.

Dealing with my family has become impossible. My mother has now come to the place in her addiction/OCD/Hording that the home she lives in is no longer habitable, nor is the house the business has been in habitable-the house doesn't even have a working kitchen and only one toilet and no shower or bath. The house she lives in has one working toilet and a bathtub-each one in a different bathroom. the house is full of dog poop and urine smell from the dogs she doesn't clean up after, unsanitary levels of bird dust from the 20-30 birds which all still live in the house, which she also doesn't seem to be cleaning up after. Add to that moths which live off the waste bird seed the birds throw out of the cages and on to the floor and what is left of the carpet. The rebuilding from the fire she caused has never been completed so there are holes in the walls, the ceilings and floors in both homes. There are also holes in the walls in every room of the house-not from construction but from rats and mice which have for years come from all over the neighborhood to feed on the birdseed as well. There is construction debris all over the house, the backyard and what is left of the garage. But wait! there is more! Have I neglected to mention she has been shopping pretty much non stop since the mid 1990s? And not things she needs or has ever needed. Two very rare Limited edition Eames' Rosewood bentwood screens(at $7,500 a pop) and a solid walnut stool, also by Eames($900) sit in the dust caked boxes she bought them in 14 years ago having never been used or even enjoyed. Of course its hard to enjoy them when they are surrounded by 47(and counting) large danish floor lamps, 12 full dining table and chair sets, 7 headboards(for beds she doesn't have), hundreds of troll dolls, thousands of christmas ornaments(though she hasn't had a tree in over 16 years), and hundred and hundred of cardboard boxes from orchids she has bought that sadly, mostly die in the boxes they come in because they never actually make it into the greenhouse-one I helped build over a summer as a teen. Not that it would matter as she has not properly cared for it and just about everything that isn't epiphytic is dead. This is how she lives, day in and day out. She spent the insurance money from the fire(she caused)on ebay instead of finishing the repairs. So she took out a loan(at 64) against the house itself to 'finish' the construction. She should have just repaired what was there and left it at that.

But if you read this far you know THAT would be too easy and pragmatic. Instead she decides in the middle of winter to totally expand the house, moving the front out 10 feet and expanding the kitchen by 3 times its current size. Then buying a $5,400 refrigerator when a $500-$800 would have been overkill. As it stands now the house is semi-finished and really, if the truth was told, not safely inhabitable. and she is out of money, even claiming to my sister that she is broke, not paying her bills, not taking care of her animals.

Funny...last week she managed to spend over $1,000 on ebay on what? plants, more furniture and...wait for it...xmas ornaments-even though last week she sent out an email saying she wouldn't be having christmas this year. Which is like Siran Siran saying he won't be visiting his homeland this year. of course she didn't send it to me directly but through my sister.

That would be my sister who has for the last 16 years lived in the THIRD of my mother's homes paying $600 a month for a 4 bedroom house. a house that should rent for $2,400 or more. In fact she was saving so much money she was able to buy a car-but not just any car-a limited edition Pontiac trans-am millenium model, a sports car. Shitty on mileage but horrendous on insurance. Of course because my sister was working for my mom and her partner's business she got ALL that gas paid for-for free! All she had to do was pay the car payment and even got a reduced premium because my mom added her to the company insurance policy. While she was getting paid $24 an hour!! She lived the good life, partied, went to Vegas, went on trips with her friends and got two purebred dogs-pomeranians. I later found out she was also doing the same thing for my brother who drove a cadillac, lived at home and made good money working retail-she even paid his credit card bills

Oh yeah, I should mention that during this time I was living in my car or sharing a flat with 5 other people, eating Ramen noodles and ricecakes and making $8 an hour-barely getting by. When I asked my mom that christmas if she could take me grocery shopping(I was literally starving, eating at Glide memorial,etc) her reply was "Well, things have been tight with the business, could it wait until after the holidays?"

That year the company posted revenue of over 2 million dollars.

she kindly offered to fill up my gas tank-not out of her pocket but from the business' account. I accepted but later regretted it as she never forgot to remind me of that fact for years and years. So I got $22 worth of gas and my brother and sister got thousands and thousands of dollars of free gas, insurance, food and free AAA coverage, costco cards, VIP tickets to see Phantom, you name it.

Oh, I would have gotten a costco membership too-Susan even gave me the card with my name on it-like everyone in the family got. However, when I went to use it I was told the card was no longer valid-at the register with a cart full of stuff.

Me: the account is closed?
Agent: No, it says here its still open.
Me: then why doesn't my card work?
Agent: Well, only your card was canceled.

I didn't understand so the nice agent turned her monitor to face me and there it was "Account holder J Davis called to terminate card: Steve Davis from account". So she didn't forget, and it wasn't a clerical error-she did it on purpose. Why?

Why? yeah, why. Here is why...because years ago I recognized what was happening with her OCD when it was just in the early stages. Everybody knew something was wrong but they were all benefitting from her so everyone told me to mind my own business- mom was "fine" and I was the homosexual weirdo who had no right to tell other people how to live their lives. When I turned 30 I finally broke down and tearfully told her how concerned I was about her, her life and weather she was happy or not-because to all concerned she clearly wasn't happy. That I loved her. Her response will stay with me until the day I die.

"fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Its my life, my money and my business. I am perfectly happy. mind you own fucking business and stay out of mine."

Sigh....

Now here we all are roughly a little over a decade later. My mother is almost broke, the houses are in shambles(including the one my sister lives in)and her physical health is fading. She claims as many hoarders do that "the stuff' she owns prevents her from doing anything about 'the stuff' in her life. My brother lives out of state in Texas("as far as I could get away from this family")and clearly wants nothing to do with Susan or I and thinks we should leave mom to her own devices. And where is her partner of 30+ years during all this? Like all dysfunctional people he kept enabling her until he too realized what was happening and started drinking to numb the pain of having to deal with her, her constant nagging and belittlment-and her rage. Now he, after 50 years of smoking and 4 heart attacks he can barely manage being alive and Susan-who thinks of him as her dad-thinks he will die soon because he has resumed drinking. now the fun part! my sister want me to 'fix this'. situation.

My sister has made herself out to be the martyr but she is far too immature and emotionally volatile to handle the situation appropriately. She sends email after email attacking me for not doing enough NOW, YEARS after I was the only one who said she needed help-even going as far as trying to get the family to hold an intervention at the time. Now I get attacked for trying to reason with Susan. Her emails have wonderful supportive statements like "You need to get up off your ass and start acting like you care about mom-I can't take care of her all by myself!!"

and at the same time stabs both Stuart and I in the back in emails to Mom that include things like "2 weeks ago i reached out to my brothers...YOUR SONS n was flatly denied when i asked if they can help u. When u are ready to stop trying to control everything n accept help let me know."

So she's passive aggressive, hostile, angry and immature. Wouldn't YOU take help from her? yeesh! But I have to help "fix it" even though I tried and tried for years otherwise I am "just like stuart". My FAVORITE person in the whole world to be compared to-excuse me while I light my face on fire! As if! If anyone could be said to have done LESS than Stuart I haven't met them.

And its the holidays. Yay! right? well, I'd like to be all sunny and ice cream but right now its just darn near impossible. Getting out of bed to change the cat box is about as much energy as I had all day today. The apartment is FILLED with storage boxes of various fullness. every surface has glass nic nacs on it-my beautiful birchwood shelves sit cluttered with packing supplies and more of Mark's crap as does my standing bookshelves. Even though there is room for more books I now have to store stuff in my room because I can't actually GET to the empty spaces on it. The kitchen is a mess and almost too disgusting to cook in-making a meal there means I have to scrub everything before I can even start to cook-I even keep my pots and pans in my room because I got tired of reaching for them and having my hand come back covered in greasy dust. I can't get the mildew smell out of the bathroom-what the fuck is it about chinese families and carpeting bathrooms?! I'm a very clean person-a neatnik-so I spend almost all my time at home in my bedroom-with the door closed. I am broke because work has sucked this year more than any other and I just can't seem to find a full time job. What jobs are out there I am either not qualified for or over qualified for and with everyone else out of work...its not been great. i could really use a break from it all, really.

And yet, behind me sitting asleep on the bed are two cats-one of whom almost died this year because I was too broke to take him to the vet-who love me no matter how fucked up my family and my life is. And then there is Bob, who I wouldn't have made these last several months without. and Friends-I have some really great ones. So much to be thankful for-I just wish there wasn't so much rain right now.
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Oh, and I just pulled a flea off tweed. Great! now I fleas to deal with too!