Now What?

Just when you think life has one plan for you something goes awry and changes everything. Hardly ever does it turn out for the better.

With it coming up on almost a month since the boys’s mother has bothered to contact us and the crazy lesbian aunts holding them hostage, I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever see them again. While part of me is okay with that, as it will mean far less drama to deal with, a very large part of  me is not. I’ve come to think of these boys as our kids over this last year and to suddenly have them yanked out of our lives makes me both sad and angry at the same time.

However, with that being said, I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. The other day my partner asked one of the aunts via text message if we could have the boys the next weekend because we miss them. A little over six hours later we got a response that they didn’t want to. This isn’t at all surprising because over there they get cookies for dinner and watch movies and television all day. What kid wouldn’t want that over having a structured day where they have to eat their vegetables and brush their teeth and actually use the toilet to pee instead of wetting their pants?

I guess now is the waiting game, but for how long? When is giving up the best option? As tempted as I am to simply take over any of their stuff we have over here and just leave it on her doorstep, a small part of me still thinks there might be a glimmer of hope after all. Albeit, I don’t know how much longer I can hold onto it.

Distracted

I’ve been easily distracted lately. I feel like I need someone to snap me out of it.

I’ll be honest, there is a lot going on in our lives right now. Between drama with the boys’s aunts, our old house reverting back to the bank since nobody even made a bid on the mold infested structure and the few things we had left there thrown out, along with coolant issues on one of our cars. There’s more, but these are the big ones. When life comes at me in so many directions, I tend to either shutdown or ignore the problems. I don’t know why, but it must be some self defense mechanism that triggers when the going gets tough rather than simply dealing with the problems head on.

Yesterday for example, I was blogging and started going off on a tangent for twenty minutes before I realized what time it was, and there was no way I could ever publish what I wrote so I just deleted it and abruptly ended the entry with a quick couple sentences. I’ve used writing as a distraction for much of my life, so sometimes it is a great stress reliever and other times an inducer. Worst of all is when it is both.

Alas, something has got to give. Perhaps I need to focus on getting beyond the problems at hand and stop ignoring them. Perhaps I need to figure out how to prevent getting to this position in the first place. Perhaps I just need a swift kick in the ass.

The Aunt Drama Continues

“Never make a promise you can’t keep” is said throughout the Bible. I guess some people who claim to be Christians didn’t get the memo.

Apparently the aunt went to pick up the older boy the other day to stay the night and go to his cousin’s soccer practice. When their mother asked why she wasn’t also taking the younger boy, the aunt said that she’ll pick him up after practice and take them all to a movie. Needless to say she called right before she was supposed to pick him up and said she wouldn’t have time to get him before the movie started. The younger boy was obviously distraught over the matter and asked his mother to call his daddies to talk to us. As luck would have it, my phone was away from me because I was at the church setting up a wedding cake when this all went down. However, we picked him up after the wedding.

Honestly, I don’t understand why the aunt, who claims we are causing psychological damage to the kids by helping parent them, doesn’t see she is the cause of quite a bit of his emotional distress. I was hoping that she would at least have the integrity to keep her word, but apparently breaking promises made to people she says she loves come relatively easy, as evident by her actions over the course of this last year. I wonder if she ever intended on picking him up or if it was just a lie she told in order to get a playmate for her daughter so she wouldn’t have to entertain her. I don’t think she got the memo about never making promises you can’t keep… or have no intention of keeping.

Alas, I know that blogging about this is petty, but as an emotionally stunted person, I find the best way to get out my frustrations is to write about them. And when the actions of one person affect the lives of so many people I care about, I can’t just stand by idly either. Until she will actually talk to me face to face, I suppose my only choices of recourse are to ignore the shenanigans or write about it. Obviously I’ve chosen the latter.

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.

Petty Drama

Sometimes I have to wonder about a person’s motives when they suddenly do a one-eighty. Especially when there are children involved.

One thing I don’t understand is why people use other people. Friendship is one thing where there is a mutual goal of being there for one another, but when it starts to lean towards one doing most of the work in the relationship while the other demands more and more and then when they’ve gotten all the use out of you they could possibly get simply end the friendship by saying they never trusted you in the first place, one has to wonder what the hell is really going on.

I suppose there are reasons for wanting someone you don’t like in your life if you are going to be receiving something in return, like help watching an unwanted nephew or two, or moving into a new house. Wait a minute. No I don’t. I’m not that kind of person. Yes, I may be a control freak and have my own quirks, like what utensils go where in the kitchen, but these quirks mostly affect me and nobody else. There are those who feel a need to have absolute power over others because somewhere in their past they felt powerless and over the years developed a hatred over what made them powerless in the first place. Not that I want to make a comparison of this person and Hitler, but at the same time if left unchecked that is exactly what can happen if the person has the ambition to do so.

I guess I am at a loss when I think about the whole situation. Yes, there were warning signs, like suddenly after they were completely moved into the house and had us haul their new refrigerator in they simply cut off contact until we were forced to interact at a birthday party, but at the same time I don’t know what led up to the point they no longer wanted to be friends. Was it something we said or did? And then it hit us… this all transpired after her sister, the mother of the boys we watch every other weekend, asked if we’d be interested becoming their fathers legally, with all three of us sharing custody. This must have triggered something in her, probably due to previous conversations where she wanted us to approach her sister about adopting the boys from her. Somehow I think she feels threatened that her sister was the one to approach us about co-parenting the boys with her. I wonder if she thinks this means we want to take the kids away from their mom if we go through with the adoption process? But why would we do that? What good would that do the boys or us for that matter?

Somehow I feel there is something deeper going on. My husband does too. And why they feel that I’m the good guy and he is the asshole is beyond me, especially since I share the same sentiments he does. The only difference is that I may not always express them verbally. Huh. I guess I am expressing them literally here so I wonder which one of us is really the bad guy? Oh well. If they want to go on thinking that I’m the terrific person their preconceived notions and imaginations have made me out to be, fine. But honestly, my husband is a much better father-figure to these kids than I am. While I’d prefer to simply set them in front of a television for hours at a time, he takes them to the park or plays games with them. Funny, I wonder if they read this blog entry if they’d still see me as this terrific, wonderful person? I guess what I really want to know is that if they never trusted us in the first place, why did they seek us out to be positive male role models in not only their own kids’s life, but her nephews as well, especially after not talking to us for years for another petty argument?

Brother-in-Law

Don’t worry, this is only about a particular one. Of course, if he just happens to read this, I really don’t give a crap.

Dealing with various family dramas is like waking up; it just instinctively happens. However, I have to question those who seem to create so much drama around them as either attention-starved or seriously lacking social skills or, say, maybe a conscience. As self-centered as some people can be, nothing beats my partner’s brother and his wife. I can’t blame their newfound religion (they’re Pentecostal) so much as their using this religion to be complete asses.

My partner and his mother have been planning a trip out this way for quite some time now and bringing along my partner’s brother’s two older kids. We made plans to go see the Broadway show of The Lion King by purchasing tickets (in the fifth row back, mind you) and his mother booked a hotel with a pool so the kids could go swimming, as well as taking a trip to the Oregon Zoo and OMSI. A lot to pack into two days, but planned out to make it work nonetheless.

Then last night my partner’s mother called. Apparently The Pentecostal One has decided to lay down some ground rules. The kids cannot go see The Lion King… it’s too provocative, what with all those puppets and costumes… and the kids cannot go swimming because they don’t believe in wearing swimsuits for fear that they will not receive the keys to heaven. If you think I am joking, assuredly I tell you, I am not. As my partner is discussing this situation with his mother, I ask if the kids also cannot go to the zoo because the animals don’t wear shirts. I’m sure that OMSI will also be banned from the list of “appropriate” places the children can go because it is fact-based science.

These same parents are fine with their youngest daughter having constant constipation because they refuse to feed her real food except hordes of bananas and fast food Chinese orange chicken. These same parents are fine with their oldest daughter not going to school because she has a hard time getting up in the morning because her parents stay up until three and keep her up too, because then she is able to babysit the youngest while they go wash windows somewhere instead of getting an education, which, her being a girl, is not important because her role in life is to get married and become a nurturer. These same parents encourage their son to do well in school because his role is to get married and become a provider. These same parents are adamant that their children not go swimming because it is sinful or watch The Lion King because there are black people in it… or at least, that is what I can gather from their odd behavior.

So now I think we’re just going to ask that since the kids are not allowed to do anything that maybe they stay home with their righteous mother and father. I’m sure they will be disappointed as they seemed really excited to see The Lion King and go to the zoo, but alas, perhaps their father can explain why he thinks they will go to hell if they do. Of course, I’m sure he thinks our gayness will rub off on the kids and they will become homosexuals too because we all know that is how that works. As my partner so frequently says, “Parenthood is sometimes wasted on the wrong people.”