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Break from the family? (sorry...long)
Ok....I'm not sure where to start because a little background would be helpful. Here goes...I'm sorry this is super long!
About ten years ago (I was 12) my dad did "SOMETHING" and there was an upheaval in my house. My mom is a huge secret keeper, and to this day she refuses to tell me or my four younger siblings what the deed was, but it could be anything from porn to irresponsibility with money to sleeping around. Whatever he did, they have not slept in the same bed since that day.
After that day, my dad lived with my grandmom for a month or two, and then moved back in but slept on the couch. For the next nine years he would continue to either sleep on the couch or in a spare room, depending on which house we were in at the time. To help my mom cope with her emotional trauma following the "event", she turned to a good friend, a single woman about her age. We'll call her "Alice". Alice began to spend more and more time with our family, and eventually we actually moved into her house for a year while we were trying to relocate. Alice's family lived about six hundred miles away from our location, and my mom decided that this was where she wanted to move. She took us from our church, all of our VERY close-knit extended family, and everything that we had grown up with to move us to a place where she did not have to feel "guilt-tripped" (because most of the people she knew were counseling her to make better choices than the emotional ones she was at the time....she almost put herself into a nervous breakdown).
After we moved, my family lived ANOTHER year with Alice while we were both building our homes (on a wooded plot in the country....two homes but within yards of each other and miles from anything else). Alice is a very abrasive person who gets angry very quickly, is verbally abusive, and very non-effiminate in her personality. She is also very controlling, but is also able to do such jobs as plumbing, financial planning, heavy yard work, etc. which my dad used to do. As a result, my mom absolutely depends on her for emotional and practical support. Alice hates my dad, and spent those nine years verbally abusing him. My mom also does this, but in all of that time, I have never heard my dad respond in kind....even in private.
Fast forward to today. The basic situation is this: Alice is my mom's "partner" in every way except for a sexual one. Their finances are mingled, Alice makes major family decisions with my mom, she has complete parent authority in the house, she eats every meal with the family, and basically is one family in two houses. She is often verbally abusive to my younger siblings and gets angry extremely often. Everybody instinctively knows how to tread carefully when she gets angry, or how to not make her angry--including my mom. Even setting the volume slightly loud on the TV will set her off for hours. On the flip side, my dad lost his job last year. My mom basically told him to get out of the house until he found a job. He was already working full-time and part-time before he lost his full-time job, and had been giving her 100% of his paycheck for ten years. Now, he works his "part-time" non-benefits job for about 70+ hours every week, and only keeps for himself the money that he earns from regularly selling blood plasma. He has been living in his car for a year. My mom is always talking about how finances are tight, but in the last year, she and my younger siblings have flown/vacationed to: Chicago, the Bahamas, Williamsburg, Disney World, and several family visits. I know that Alice helped greatly in paying for most of these, but I still can't help being incensed. She also told me how upset she was that she couldn't pay for my wedding last year. She paid exactly $0 because of her "financial incapacities."
Even though my mom sounds pretty bad, she really is a good person in a lot of core respects. When Alice isn't around, she is much less prone to negative actions. And she was a good mom to me growing up. I truly do love her very much. However, she is completely emotionally dependent and clingy to Alice, as well as semi-financially/practically dependent. She tries to guilt-trip me into accepting Alice again because of all the financial ways she helped me when I still lived at home 5 years ago (Alice and I have had almost zero verbal contact since about four years ago, when she ripped into my then boyfriend and now husband of over a year for being a "sexual predator" because he and I held hands...she's um...a little conservative).
For those of you still here, thanks for hanging in there! My question is this: How would you handle visits/Christmas visits with my family? I am very close to my siblings, and if I stir up a lot of trouble, the younger ones experience the negative fall-out after I am gone (My husband and I live six hours away, thankfully). I also love my mother, but she insists on having Alice in proximity for a least a little of the time we visit, including Christmas dinner. I also can't accept her treatment of my father, no matter what he has done. Should I cut them mostly off, and deal with my own emotional hurt as well as the guilt of knowing that my younger siblings will also suffer emotional hurt because of something that is not their fault? Or should I just continue to suck it up a few times a year while still making my feelings clear? We help my dad independently as much as possible, which is not a lot. If it weren't for my siblings, my husband would want us to completely cut off my mom altogether. But I am also a HUGE family person, and hate the idea of splitting my blood family. Opinions?
Re: Break from the family? (sorry...long)
Well, this is all really complicated and I have to get ready for work, so here is my quick reply:
Your mother sounds like she has given up all responsibility to Alice. She is allowing Alice to rule her home and her family and that is not okay, IMO. I also am appalled that she would allow her husband to live in his car and take all of his paycheck. Why is your father agreeing to this?
If I were you, I think I would still visit at times because of your younger siblings. But I think your mother deserves to be called on all of this so I don't know. I guess I'm no help. But I feel sorry for your father and your siblings and Alice sounds like a real bit*ch. Your mother too, in ways.
~Benjamin Franklin
DS dx with celiac disease 5/28/10
Ditto. My first thought is this is too complicated and needs a therapist.
wow. i don't blame you for living 6 hours away!
so, how old are your siblings? it sounds like they still live at home. i hope they can get out of there the minute they turn 18. that is NOT a healthy environment.
Even if there is no sex, Alice is in every aspect your mom's "partner." You say your mom is secretive - have you asked your dad what his "indiscretion was? Have you asked him why he hasn't filed for divorce? Does he just not believe in it? Has he considered getting therapy for abuse? If the house is in his name, his mom can't just tell him to leave.
I would stay in a hotel when you visit your family, and ask to take your siblings out. I don't think you need to "accept" Alice, especially since she treats your dad and siblings so terribly. Tell your mom that your visits are "family only," and if she wants Alice to be there (for one day), Alice needs to treat you, your H, and your siblings with respect, and not speak disrespectfully about your father. If she doesn't, you will go.
I will tell you that "family" was extremely important to my dh, too, but he cut off his dad because FILs "partner" (his wife of over 40 years) treated him badly, and was treating our children as "less than" her bio-grandkids. He had the help of a therapist guide him through this, as it is a difficult process. He now keeps in contact with the siblings / extended family he likes and doesn't speak with / avoids the rest.
EDIT: DH cut off his dad b/c he realized that by allowing her to behave the way she was, FIL was condoning his wife's behavior. DH did not want our children to realize that his dad went to his other grandchildren's events (his grandchildren with dh's stepmom) and could not be bothered to go to theirs.
Of course, dh's siblings were all grown at the time, but this process resulted in DH separating from nieces/nephews he loved with all of his heart.
How old are your siblings, if 10 years ago your parents stopped sleeping together? They must be teenagers by now - - do they have email or cell phones you can call / text? I think you can keep a relationship with them via technology. Not to say that you should never visit them in person, but you don't need to be held hostage to Alice's presence to have communication with them.
Thank you so much for the advice. I know there are a number of options, but sometimes it just helps to hear it from other people, even though my husband is a huge help when I need to discuss things!
I actually did see a therapist about two years ago, and that helped me to remove a terrible load of guilt and emotional responsibility that I carried, which I don't feel now that I earned.
Dad is a very passive person, and has spent the last ten years trying to reconcile his relationship with my mom in any way that she will allow. He doesn't believe in divorce, and I think that he has been hoping for reconciliation if he can just listen to her and pull things together. I will be talking more openly to him about my opinions in the near future. Thanks for the thoughts!
My family went through something a little similar. My grandfather married a woman who to put it mildly, wasn't a nice person. She would bad mouth my parents, my grandfather and my aunts and uncles. Once us kids got older, she would bad mouth us too. We were told we were stupid, fat, ungrateful, brats, rude etc. We were not any of these things. She simply didn't like us. Do you know what is worse is that my parents allowed it to happen. No one ever said anything to her because they were afraid of upsetting my grandfather. They also knew that if we said anything to her, she would make my grandfather's life miseable and make him stop talking to us. We all tip toed around her rules. So pretty much I learned that it was ok for people to treat me like sh*t and there wasn't anything my parents would do about it.
When I became an adult, I cut her out of my life. If that meant cutting my grandfather out too, so be it. I finally realized that by him standing back and letting her treat his children and grandchildren like that, he was just as bad as she was. I have never regretted my decision. Even when she passed away, I didn't even go to the funeral. I didn't like her and didn't want to go and I don't have one iota of guilt. I have talked to my parents about her and they have both said that keeping her in our lives was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made and if they could go back in time they would be done with her the first time she made a rude comment. Having a distant relationship with my grandfather wasn't worth the heartbreak she caused in their children's lives.
If you and your husband decide to have children, I guarantee that the abuse will not stop with you, your dad and your siblings. It will continue to your children. I understand you are a family person, but at a certain point you have to put the family you create before the one you were born into. Something my parents didn't learn until it was too late. I would not go ot that house if that Alice woman is there. Once she arrives, I would kiss your siblings good bye, tell them you love them and be gone. Once they are grown you will probably have a wonderful relationship with them.
I also understand that you love your mom but you have to admit that she isn't agood person. A good person would allow her children to betreated like this and a good person wouldn't allow her husband to sleep in the car. The sooner you accept that fact, the easier it will be.
I think a good deal of this dysfunction stems from the lesbian relationship that they are deeply in denial about - and the self-loathing and shame that their religious conservatism demands they have about themselves. Your mother is blaming your father for the destruction of their marriage but really she is the cause - and she knows it.
Open your eyes. There is a very good chance that this all stems from a deep repression of being gay. She may have likely acted on it and are even more repressed and shamed.
Go back to therapy, you are still making yourself feel guilty for not being able to "fix" this. You're still a part of this dysfunctional system, there is no way you can influence anything to change it. Visit or don't visit, it doesn't matter. Its not your fault that Alice is "worse" after you say something, its ALICE's fault.
And please ASK your father what the trigger was. The secret is one of the most dysfunctional aspects that keeps this whole thing churning.
Why on Earth is your dad still married to her...she makes him live in his car?!?
I agree with this 100%!
Agreed.