the_wanlorn | (no subject)

Right, so. I was going home this weekend to make my Halloween costume. Since I had interviews, I had the car, which meant that I could drive to my bodhrán lesson. Finding a parking space in Porter Square? Oddly not that hard.

I haven't eaten all day, so I nab some peanut butter crackers whilst I'm waiting for the teacher to show up. He does, and we start my half hour lesson. Halfway into it, my phone rings. Since it's my sister, and we're taking a break for him to write out some patterns for me, I answer it.

"Mom just hit me."

Kerry's completely hysterical, but I manage to gather that she was talking about how she thinks about killing herself sometimes, and my mum went off a hit her. Also that her boyfriend's at work, so he can't come get her.

I tell her to get out of the house - go for a walk, go anywhere, just leave - and that I'll be there in an hour and a half. I'm in Cambridge; Cowtown is far away.

I hang up and I'm trying not to cry, because I'm scared and far away and don't know what to do and crying is my reaction to pretty much everything. Of course, it doesn't really work. My teacher is sort of quietly freaking out because A) he knows it's an emergency, and B) I'm crying. I can't get the zipper on my drum bag to work because I'm shaking too much.

Out the door I go; I get outside and I start sobbing. "I knew something like this would happen I knew it my family's insane I fucking hate my family I knew it" keeps running through my head. I call my mum, and experience the following conversation:
"What the FUCK is wrong with you?"
"I can't talk to you right now."
"Fuck. You." And then I hung up on her.

I get in the car and start driving. First thing I do (after, yanno, arguing with myself for a while about it) is call Lexi. I'm still crying because, well, I'm upset. And I don't know what to do. We talk for a while, I get some idea of what to do. Or, at least, some idea of "okay, well, I'm not supposed to know what to do."

It's not like they give you a primer on this at school. "What to do when your mum hauls off and hits your baby (even though you're only 16 months older than her so you shouldn't've had to be her mum) and you're almost 2 hours away"

I call Dot, too, because again, no clue what to do! And as much as Lexi helped second (and third and fourth and so on) opinions are nice. During that conversation, I calmed down a lot. Got composed. And started getting furious.

Whenever I know a fight's going to happen, I like to plan out every possible way it could go down in my head. That way, I'm prepared to respond to anything thrown at me. Had the most favorable one occured, it would involve the phrase "I swear, if you ever touch my sister again I will end you."

Once I hit Cowtown, I called Kerry to find out where she was, so I could pick her up. It turned out that Dad took her to work with him, and Mum had disappeared off somewhere. Which was good! Because it meant Kerry was out of the house! But I just made an hour-and-a-half drive in forty-five minutes for her. That averages out to something like 100mph the whole way. It's a miracle I didn't get pulled over.

Then again, if I had, I think that the officer would've let me off based on my countenance.

I go home and everything's quiet. I work off some stress (woo for raking leaves) and play some piano. Kerry calls again, and she's a lot calmer. Now I get a more full version of the story. Are you ready for this?

Kerry and Da were in the kitchen together. Kerry was talking about how much she hated school, how she was transfering in the spring, and lightly touched on how it was so bad she sometimes thought about killing herself.

Mum wasn't even in the room. Mum wasn't even on that floor. She was up in the attic-bedroom.

At some point, Mum appeared out of nowhere (well, obviously, out of upstairs. But very quickly. For no reason at all.) and hit Kerry on the leg, yelling things like "I don't want to hear you talking about that don't you dare say you're dropping out of school just to get back at us*" and such. Then she hit her in the arm (I'm assuming this all happened within 5 seconds or so).

Kerry was, of course, freaking the fuck out. She's never had to deal with any of this because she wasn't the whipping boy. So she's shrieking and having a panic attack. She runs and is bouncing off the walls because she's shaking so much. Mum's yelling "Why are you yelling what do you have to yell about shut up" and going after her.

So Da gets inbetween them, takes Kerry to her room. This is when Kerry calls me, so I don't know what happened next because she wasn't there to witness it. But at some point, Mum left.

And, of course, now I'm furious. This wasn't just "Oh, Mum slapped Kerry while she was talking to her because parents are freaky about their kid's mental health". This was "Mum went fucking psycho out of nowhere on my baby sister."

But I'm also kind of worried because clearly Mum snapped, so she might be having a mental breakdown and driving off a bridge somewhere. So I call her, again.
"Where are you?" <-- me
"Busy."
"... um, yes, but busy where?"
"I'm busy. I'll be home in a while. What do you want?"
"... to know where you are since no one else seems to know. Are you busy at Andrea's? Busy driving to Maureen's?"
"I'm busy. Bye."

Right, so, now she's playing her stupid fucking "I'm not going to tell anyone where I am even though they're worried" mind game. Whatever.

Kerry and Dad come home. Her boyfriend comes over. I talk to Dad to find out what was going on, since he was a semi-impartial observer. Even he has no clue, saying Mum just came out of nowhere. Lovely.

Jeremy calls. He's less than sympathetic, because A) he lived through them both being drunks and beating on him back when they were in their 20s, and B) Kerry could totally take Mum on. Which she could, if she weren't so freaked out. I mean, I've been fighting back since I was 10ish. But, yeah. I have the experience, she doesn't, so how could she know that?

We try to formulate a plan to get them both into therapy and on meds, but it's tough since really nothing short of dragging them physically will work. And, well, that won't keep them going.

Mum comes home and acts like nothing happened. Seriously. Like she was just out fucking about and came home and everything's completely normal. She gets pissed off because I'm not talking to her if it involves anything beyond a monosyllable answer, Kerry's avoiding her like the plague. So she sulks about.

I ship Kerry off with Patrick, and go to bed. I'm exhausted, obviously.

This morning, Kerry came home and was in her room, and Mum went in to ask if she needed anything at the grocery store. Kerry told her to get out, and came in and bitched to me about her acting like nothing had happened. At all.

So, um, yeah. My relaxing weekend turned into a fucking nightmare. Kerry's not coming home anymore, I'm not coming home anymore. I'm sick of being shoved into the middle of everything, and I'm washing my hands of all of it. They can deal with their own shit from now on.

I seriously can not deal with this right now.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I seriously can not deal with this right now.

Nor should you have to. ::hugs::

Thank you. :-)

I've told you how I feel about the mother. She has no excuse. NONE. Even having grown up the victim of severe, daily, systematic physical, emotional and psychological abuse mine never used that as any excuse but to END THE CYCLE.

Mommies do not do this. Parentals who do forfeit their right to be a part of anything until/unless they shape the fuck up.

~hugs~

If I'm not near a computer in the next few days I'm still near my phone. Use it.

I have a friend whose father is an undiagnosed/unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic, I think. He had mild psychotic thoughts and was incredibly paranoid. He couldn't be treated, though, because unless the doctor coddled him, the doctor was obviously a quack.

A thing I did when my friend went through all of this (though nothing materialized) was use the Yellow Pages. We thumbed through, I think, the blue pages looking for info on services for abused near-adult children. There may not be much they can do, but any help helps. And...sigh. Well. She needs to student loan her ass, maybe part time student, and work and move out. :/

Oh my God, Wanlorn, I'm so sorry.

*hug*