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I grew up as an only child with an alcoholic father and an enabling mother. Both also smoked lots of weed, and my father was the stay-at-home parent so chaos was the norm. Somehow I grew up rather normal, I excelled in school and once I got into college I had hoped to get my feet under me as an adult and go back to work on my personal relationships with both parents. My father died of a heart attack at the age of 42, when I was a freshman in college, so I never got that chance with him. I recognize the resentment I feel towards my mother for enabling his terrible life choices, and not protecting me from the daily chaos of my childhood. I am raising kids of my own now and do everything I can to keep their childhoods relatively chaos-free, no more than normal. My husband and I don't fight in front of the kids, we drink socially but rarely to excess and never drugs. Over the past 2 days, my husband's cousin had been missing. The family had met to spread his mother's ashes and the cousin went on a bender and didn't come back. Apparently it's not that unusual for him to be out all night, but it was unusual for him not to make it home in the morning. A full 36 hours after he disappeared he turned up in a motel room, sobering up with a story about getting drunk and being given hallucinogens. His wife and kids were a mess, a day they were to spend exploring tidal pools they spent sitting by the phone waiting for news from the cops. And the family that was there to celebrate his mother's life was left to worry about his well-being. I would chalk his behavior up to grief if it was a one-off. But we've been in their presence over the years and heard the fights, and he often drinks specifically to get drunk. His two kids are turning out great (so far) but having been in that kind of chaos before I recognize some of their coping methods and worry they may harbor that same resentment I have with dealing with childhood chaos. We live a few states away, so we only see them once or twice a year, but I'm worried about how this is affecting their kids. And him being the stay-at-home parent with chaotic tendencies, I can see some of the parallels to my own childhood. So my question is - do I butt out of it or do I say something? Who do I say something to? I was thinking of reaching out to his wife and sharing my story, hoping she might recognize the resentment I feel with my mom might be something her kids develop towards her. But, who the gently caress am I to pass judgement? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
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Jun 30, 2017 00:50
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 02:50 |
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have you seen my baby posted:Pretty much this. The post begins, not with concern for anyone else, but with you talking about your own problems. It seems like you only really care because this reminds you of them. It was more laying a foundation that I have experience with chaos, specifically alcohol/drug abuse, and I have perspective on how that affected me as a child and how it affected my relationship with my parent(s) today. I'm not coming at this from a vanilla perspective with no idea what I'm talking about, I have lived through the things I see happening and I was asking for advice on if/how to prevent the kids from going through what I went through. It turns out that on their long drive home across two states, the cousin started having paranoid delusions similar to what he experienced on drugs a few days ago. He's either having a mental break or he already had mental health issues and might have been using alcohol/drugs to mask or cope. We will check in with the family once they get home and settled back into their lives in the hopes they are getting the professional help he needs.
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Jul 1, 2017 07:25
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