The closer it gets to Christmas the less inspired I am to finish putting decorations up. It seems like every year my Christmas spirit shrinks a little more.
Pretty soon I’ll be a shriveled up old hag, walking around kicking mall Santas in the shins.
But the tree is up, at least. More for the benefit of Babygirl than anyone else, though. She was so cute helping us decorate it. She kept running around going, I so assighted, Beebaw! (that would be ‘excited’ btw, in case you don’t know Babygirl-ese.)
Speaking of her language, for those who are not on my Facebook and miss my constant blathering about her, her pronunciation of “Pixie Stick” is highly inappropriate and funny as shit. The ‘x’ is an ‘s’ and the ‘st’ is a ‘d’. I am amused and refuse to correct her. I’m a bad granny.
So, for awhile Jes was talking about moving. She’s so flighty, though, and I know I say that a lot. She makes my head spin and I have trouble keeping up. The other day M made a comment about how I never tell him anything (about her doings) and I said that was because by the time I have a chance to tell him, she’s changed her mind and is on to something else already.
I think the last I shared here was that she was planning on going to the university and getting into the family housing on campus. The whole registration process required a $175 down payment fee, that, when it came to Am’s registration, we paid without hesitation. With Jes, I was waiting until the last possible due date. Because….
…within just two weeks of being accepted, she started talking about getting married to ‘Baby Daddy’ guy, with whom she still has an on-again/off-again affair going on, and who is currently at basic training in the army (yay for a step in the right direction from ONE of them, at least!).
So, yes, she was going to get married and follow him to where he was assigned to base housing. Which was, apparently, in El Paso, Tx.
But not a week prior to telling me this new plan, she was telling me about some guy she was skyping with on the net who lives in Colorado and she wanted to meet him and did I think it was weird to meet people off the net (haha).
As much as the idea of Babygirl being all the way in El Paso, Tx. pains me horribly, I latched on to the idea of Jes being all the way in El Paso, Tx.–and thus out of my hair and into someone elses. I liked that idea. A lot. A lot more than I should have.
Honestly, people. Bad mom label or not, she is WORK. A vacation from the chaos sounded wonderful. You have no idea.
But then.. just yesterday… she signed herself up with a group therapy course for her BPD. I know she needs to do that. But… fuck me if I wasn’t FILLED with disappointment when she then said that she probably was not going to go with Baby Daddy. At least not yet.
Seriously. Disappointed.
Unless you’ve lived with someone who has BPD, you just don’t know. You can’t know. I feel terrible thinking and feeling the way I do. My first thought when she said she was going to marry him and move out was “Finally! You can be someone elses problem!” Isn’t that awful?
That does it. I’m going to hell. -nods-
I read this recently about BPD: “People with BPD are born with an innate, biological sensitivity to emotions, e.g. they have quick to fire, strong, reactive emotions. Children who are emotionally sensitive take special parenting. Sometimes, the parents of the person who develops BPD just aren’t as emotional and cannot teach their child how to regulate intense emotions. We tell clients that they are like swans born into a family full of ducks. The duck parents only know how to teach the swan how to be a duck.”
I’m a duck, see? Quack.
Probably the most frustrating thing for me about living with Jes and her diagnosis is that M isn’t really on board with it. The diagnosis, I mean. It doesn’t seem to matter what material I present him with, there’s a part of him that is convinced she has more control over it than she does, that it’s, in part, deliberate; thus, he takes a good bit of it personally.
I not only understand it, I am aware of how it manifests itself and even *I* have a hard time not taking some of her behaviors and outbursts personally. So I get it. But I can generally talk myself back into what her reality is. I’m not sure he does- or even tries. :(
I always feel like I’m in the middle, with no one to really turn to about it. If I try to talk to him about it, even just to vent a little bit and get some of the frustration out, he holds on to what I say as evidence or proof or… something.. i don’t even know what. He adds it to the arsenal he seems to be building against her.
I know that he’s stretched real thin right now. I know that the resentment is building and building, primarily over finances and supporting not only her, as an adult, but her child, as well. And I don’t want to keep making excuses for her or trying to justify her actions, yet.. there IS justification and there is reason.
It’s all hell. Seriously.
I’m no psychic but I can predict how this is all going to turn out. I really can. He’s going to lose his shit at the same time she loses hers and all. fucking. hell. is going to break loose. I’m praying, praying, praying that she makes some significant progress in therapy before he comes unglued.
I don’t mean to trash talk him either, because, as I said, living with someone like her is difficult and he’s been phenomenal. Phenomenal. Hell, even I break sometimes and lash back at her. I’m not made of stone. Neither is he.
I just feel like I’m holding my breath all the time, and I just want to breathe for a minute. I’m sure he feels the same way.
I have a voicemail that she left me a few weeks ago saved on my phone. She was mad at me, of course, and just… ranted and raved for a long time. About how much she hates me. How she’s going to take babygirl and disappear. How I need to just shut the fuck up. On and on…
I saved it, initially just to let my mom listen to it; which may be playing dirty but every time I try and talk to my mom about Jes, she dismisses me with this “Jes doesn’t talk like that. She would never.” End of conversation. So suddenly I had this proof and I wanted to be validated.
Now I’m just holding it and listening to it the way a person pokes a sore tooth with their tongue. It’s painful. And I can’t bring myself to erase it.
Bah.
She’s going to drive me to the looney bin.
So get this, all of you who tried to tell me I was “overreacting” back when she was living with those fucked up people over the summer and had Babygirl with her and I was threatening her then with a custody fight because I *knew* that was a bad situation going on over there.
Last week, Jes *herself* called and turned the other girl she had been living with into CPS. See, once she was removed from the situation and got a good look at it from the outside, gee, shooting up and being drunk and having violent fist fights and wild parties with kids in the house really IS a big deal. Jes went there a few days ago to catch up with her “friends”. There’s a 2 yr old (not babygirl, another one) and a 4 yr old in that house, who were hiding in the closet while mom and her boyfriend shot up in the bathroom, started cooking food on the stove and forgot about it, had a fist fight, and were still sleeping the next day at noon when Jes left, leaving the kids unsupervised and unfed.
So you see? I’m NOT making this shit up. I’m glad she called and reported them. That’s a sign of progress, no? I think it is. The ability to recognize a bad choice and how it affects a child? It has to be.
Well shit. I hadn’t even intended on talking about her today. Things are just really frustrating right now. Am still hasn’t found a job. Jes had one and got fired. M’s irritated. I’m irritated. It seems like we’re both trying to avoid having everything blow up.
And yet, it isn’t nearly as bad as it all sounds when it’s typed out like this, either. We’re not fighting or anything. We’re tired and stressed and struggling, but not with each other. Sometimes I get fed up with him seeming to blame them for everything, and he gets fed up with my refusal to blame them for anything. Heh.
Kids are just a special sort of hell, aren’t they?
Joy to the world, and shit.
1 person likes this post.