Family Tensions

I don't understand the split in my family currently any more than the next person but I can tell you what I see. Families split. I think it is the nature of us as humans. We move on and change but it is sad that it has to be that way. We have grown as a family and it has not been for the better. Unfortunately the riff is occurring right before our eyes and there is not much I can see to stop it. There is divorce on the horizon, the looming dilemma of putting my grandmother in assisted living, and the tension of daily struggle. It is taking its toll on everyone!

The riff, I suppose, has been coming for awhile now but we have all been too blind to see it. Or too afraid what the outcome was going to be to fix it. I am saddened by this for multiple reasons all the obvious ones included. You could see the split coming almost 3 years ago. The distance between my mother and her sister growing ever stronger. The snide little remarks said beneath their breaths. The way we interacted with each other growing dimmer and more strained by the moment. We knew it was coming and yet none of us did anything to stop it from happening. No one screamed out that this was insanity. No one gave us the heads up. No one even whispered that something might be wrong. Wham! Here it is, in your face, and ready to crumble completely.

It is always sad to me how things like this occur. You don't want them to. You want everyone to just go back to when we were a strong close knit family. We are being torn apart limb by limb and I feel helplessly lost in all of it. I am stumbling through a darkened tunnel and I am not quite sure when the light is going to shine at the end. The stress of having an elderly family member is great. I never thought it could be. I have heard people say it but never thought there was much validity to it. There is. It is hard. It is hard to deal with each passing day and the moments they are having. It is hard to watch them cripple with age, their bodies and minds not what they once were. This stress is culminating within our family. My grandmother is elderly, although she would never admit it. Being a single woman, the brunt falls on her family. We would willingly take care of her, hold her up, and carry her burdens...if she didn't make more burdens than the ones that are already there. There is NOTHING wrong with her. This point I have to make. She has had every test known to man...from CAT scans to MRI's...NOTHING. Blood work turns up nothing. She has it in her mind that she is dying. That there is some horrible disease she is suffering from and there is nothing. This makes it very hard to feel any concern for her, or to even know how to help her, since you never know which ache and pain is real and which one is a figment of her overactive imagination. She is never happy. Never in a million years is she happy or content. She sits and pouts if things don't go her way. If we do not drop everything, including what is best for our children, to cater to her every whim she sulks. It is a difficult and complicated web she has weaved. And we are tired.

Divorce is on the horizon. You can see it plain as day. The divorce of my aunt and uncle would be a devastating blow to a lot of people, most of all to their three young sons. The stress of life has taken its toll on this once tight family. They have been so blemished by money and family issues that it has torn apart their home. My grandmother has her venom in this issue as well. She requires so much time and energy she has left very little for my aunt to use to focus on her own home. They have been sucked dry by circumstances beyond their control. It is sad to watch and I know that there is nothing, personally, that can be done to right the wrongs. Not being married, I guess I do not understand what it takes to make them work. But I would think that in times of hardship would be the time you would want to get closer together. Pull the resources you have available and plow right through it. I know that for some this just cannot be done. I have to wonder sometimes if my aunt married her husband for love or for security. She was a single mother and he came in and took right over the role of "dad" with her 3 year old daughter. Now that daughter is 22 and practically married herself. Odd how time changes things. I just have to wonder if he was more of a security marriage than a love marriage. Can such a marriage ever be deemed a success? Can you marry someone for security and ever expect to get through rough times together? My parents have had their moments of hardships. They have fought like cats and dogs. They are polar opposites, but it works. They have been married for 30 years and I don't know how. I look at them and then my aunt and wonder what is different. What is the difference in the two couples and which would I rather have? Would I marry someone because he can provide for me? What happens when the security he once gave me is no longer there..can I stand by him? I don't know. I don't think that is the intention of marriage, but i have said before I am a hopeless romantic. Maybe that is the reason I am still single. I am waiting for the perfect match and all I am supposed to wait for is the one that will do! I don't know. Divorce is such an alien thing to me. How do you just call it quits so easily? How can you walk away from someone, who although he may not have money has provided you with comfort? How can you walk away when he has been a model good husband, never laid a hand on you, and has been an excellent father? Maybe he is the one walking away I don't know the details and I really don't want to. It just makes me think of life. How sad and ever changing it can be. Sometimes it is so good you want to cry out and other times your heart just breaks. I hope they can reconcile. I hope that things work for the better, maybe that includes divorce. I just want what is going to make the situation fixed. I don't think there are any easy fixes in life and wonder how the children will come out of this whole. I guess that is what I am worried about most. The children.

To say that money is tight right now would be the understatement of the year. I am losing my job, although I do have a couple very promising leads on new ones. It is very stressful to be poor and not know how to make it right. I guess for me it doesn't really matter. I am used to living poor. I will probably continue to do so and die in just that fashion, but it would be nice, just for once to not have that worry. I just want enough to pay my bills and spoil my son. I don't think I am asking too much but you would think I am asking for some one's first born. I try to be philosophical about all of it but in the end the reality stays the same and nothing has ever changed. I really am a positive person it is just right now I am meandering my way through some rough currents. Maybe this is the point of life. Struggle. To become stronger, smarter, and more alive with each passing test. I guess maybe when you feel as if you have hit the bottom you start to see things a bit clearer. If I look at it in that way I am better for all my struggles. I am a better person because I know these lessons. I have been taught through experience that sometimes life makes you work for happiness and I am not afraid to get in there with both feet and make it happen. Sometimes I think God gets bored up there, decides my life is going too smooth, and shakes things up a bit. I think when he needs amusement I am his puppet. For now I will go with the flow. Whatever happens happens. I will hold my breath when I feel myself sink and hope I float back up again. I just wish I had someone who would throw me the life jacket!