10-01-2016, 08:34 AM
(09-30-2016, 10:31 PM)taramarie Wrote:(09-30-2016, 09:41 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: "If you have any success in your field, then you will be an attractive mate for someone capable of contributing along with you for paying a mortgage. But note well: your mate will have even more problems with your mother than you have. That mate will not want your mother around. There are in-laws who can get along with each other, but I can't imagine any in-law getting along with her."True. My mother did not even want to talk to my bf at the time...till he saved my life one time. Then suddenly she started to warm up to him. He was a patient man luckily...well not luckily because it had to end due to this situation. Oh well.
He saved your life but your mother drove her away with her childishness. This is beginning to sound like a dangerous drama. This can end in tragedy.
Quote:Quote:"I have no idea what her age is, but many people now in their late 50s to their early 70s have chosen to maintain childlike roles long after such is appropriate. Such was monstrously cruel to children (one contributor to many messed-up lives of Generation X in America) and it is now monstrously cruel to adults who are old enough to have real children -- the children whom one expects to develop in the presence of competent adult role models. But if she is a bad parent, she will be little less competent as a grandparent."She was born in 1957. She is 58 going on 59 in December this year. Well, I am not an Xer but it has messed my life up but I will go back to school and specialize in something. It won't keep me down. Our fights tend to make it harder to deal with it as i have to live under the same roof. But there is always art and meditation. As for grandparent I do not plan on having children which is just as well. It is a deterrent for anyone thinking of having me as a gf when they learn of the situation and I have learned to accept that as ok.
Art and meditation are nice. Companionship is even richer. Romantic love is richer. Someone who truly loves you will be find it easy to deal with your art and meditation. Your mother? I wouldn't want to be involved.
Quote:Quote:Once one has children, one must cease being a child oneself. Sure, one can watch a Disney or Miyazki cartoon epic and imagine yourself a child again for an hour-and-a-half or so... but that is as far as it goes. Children need a genuine adult in a house. As a substitute teacher I have seen the consequences of a child in a family in which there is no semblance of an adult except for age. It is ugly.I wholeheartedly agree. What do you teach?
Anything third-grade or higher. In a rural area, specialization is a risky proposition. I just can't relate easily to very small children. That could be Asperger's syndrome at work; I just don't like loud, sustained sound.
Quote:Quote: "Above all, get the creditors to take away her credit cards. Credit cards are for adults == not for children." I got her to cut up her cards but they gave her more. I go out with her whenever she goes shopping to inspect if she is using them again as I have paid a few hundred off them myself (and now i apparently am in debt with WINZ even though they heard the situation. So i have to pay them the cash i gave her..)So stupid, I worked for that money. I cashed in my holiday pay so i could stop them ringing her bugging her to pay up.
Can you get her to declare bankruptcy? Or would that force you to give up the house? I am no expert on bankruptcy in America, and I have no idea how bankruptcy works in New Zealand. You may want to get some conservatorship over her. That means no credit cards. That means that you have much more control over her. If she is a big spender and lacks the means to meet her dreams, then you need to emancipate yourself from the financial drain that she has imposed upon you.
Has she ever thought that you might have been able to do something enjoyable with her with that holiday pay if she hadn't stuck you with her bills?
She needs to be taught to be a more pleasant person -- which means that she will have to do some real good for people. She needs to learn to set some priorities.
Get her to do something -- like raise a garden. Have her get some job, even if it is as a retail clerk, restaurant worker, or domestic servant, so that she can associate her efforts with buying at the least her food.
I have heard of a type in America in my studies of genealogy. The fourth or later daughter of an English aristocratic family has no significant role in life but has been brainwashed to believe certain things about herself -- things that she cannot sustain. She has nothing but her pretentious airs and a few heirlooms. She ends up marrying someone 'ill-born' and her family rejects her. She and her husband emigrate to America, and she takes her airs and some portable heirlooms (the non-cash part of the dowry) with her. One of those airs is ordering people, often her grandchildren, about as if servants.
She dies. The grandchildren have a bonfire into which they cast her aristocratic heirlooms, around which they dance a mock-Indian war-whoop. I have discovered the same story on both sides of my family. This fourth daughter who marries an unwelcome commoner (fourth sons of English aristocrats in a culture of primogeniture generally have little to offer) is a nightmare of a grandmother.
In The Wizard of Oz, that unpleasant woman becomes a "wicked witch".
Witches are easier to understand than a sociological phenomenon. Like that aristocratic grandmother who has been stranded in a hardscrabble world in which her aristocratic airs and heirlooms are useless and detested, she is not missed. That was largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon in America. She has her expectations, and others have their own needs. L. Frank Baum found a way to transform a once-commonplace reality in the American middle class into something people could better understand beyond his time. It is a stroke of literary genius that became a great vignette in one of the most beloved movies of all time.
Quote:"I hope that I have not said too much."No it is totally fine. I have grown to accept all of this and shoulder the burden as it is in my character to help others and make wrongs right again.[/quote]
Maybe she knows subconsciously that if she ever has grandchildren, they will perform a mock-Maori celebration of her demise. "Ding, dong, the witch is dead", indeed!
If she messes up her lungs and heart on cancerweed or her liver on booze (both expensive habits), then maybe you can outlast her and have a gap that you can fill with a suitable spouse. Sixty (my case) isn't really old (except perhaps for being out of touch with mass culture and with spending habits of young adults) so long as one has as body consistent with rigorous activity. Mass culture and trendy consumerism are overrated.
If she is using her credit cards for food, then she has a problem. She's spending on something. Trying to impress a much-younger boyfriend?
But if one has a cirrhotic liver, sixty is old. If one has emphysema, sixty is old. If one has been a druggie throughout one's life one probably does not reach sixty. I have known alcoholics, and one pattern that I have seen in the alcoholics that I have known is that they never grow up.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.