You Can't Reason with Crazy

As a good friend once told us, “You can’t reason with crazy.” This most definitely applies to someone we know.

Yet again we are dealing with more drama from the boys’s aunt, and yet again she is using her nephews in ways that are not only abusive but can have psychological implications as well. I’m not sure if it is because she is possibly addicted to the pain killers she’s taking due to her major hip problems, which she needs hip replacement surgery to remedy, or if she really is like our dog’s yeast infection, taking one last stand and going all out to make life miserable for everyone involved before realizing resistance is futile, but I’m getting tired of reading the excessive text messages she keeps sending to my husband. Of course, she has yet to contact me, and I’m clueless as to why, considering I am part of the equation. Must be because I’m perfect.

What pains me is not a lost friendship but the fact that she refuses to be a grown up about the situation around the kids and instead uses them as pawns in her little scheme to control those around her. I often wonder how many times she’s used her own kids as bargaining tools in her relationship with her partner. I often wonder what she would do if she did find out about the time we went out to dinner with her partner late one night after she got off work and she called her in the middle of dinner and after the phone call ended asked us in a panicky voice not to say anything to her because she’d be angry about going out to eat. I often wonder what makes a person decide to be so vindictive.

But at the same time, kids are smart. They have a funny way of knowing who is really on their side and who is using them. Any adult who thinks otherwise is delusional. It makes me wonder what her ultimate goal in the matter is. I mean, does she really think the kids are going to listen to her when she tells them stuff that makes them sad and they cry because they don’t like what she is saying about people they obviously love? Okay, so just one of them since she rarely sees the younger one, who just the other day asked why his brother always gets to go to his cousin’s house to play and he doesn’t. I told him I don’t know, he should ask his aunt why, and then told him that he was welcome to come over to our house any time he wanted, which made him smile and somewhat forget his original question.

Part of me is hopeful that one day she will realize we don’t have some evil plan to kidnap the boys, but the realist in me is quite pessimistic about that. I can scream it at the top of my lungs for the whole world to hear and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. This is the same person who, after my husband said (years ago while reminiscing over high school) he’d wished he’d gone to prom with her partner (before they were together, mind you) instead of his cousin’s cousin (long story), assumed that meant that he wanted to have sex with her. No matter what we tell her or what the boys’s mother tells her, she is going to believe whatever she’s already concocted in her brain to be true. Ultimately it is the boys’s mother’s call, and as long as she wants us to be involved in their lives, we will be. So I suppose I should stop taking these attacks so personally. After all, you can’t reason with crazy.