This is the longest I've ever gone without a post! I think I needed to recharge for a while. Also, a lot of things came up that I want to blog about, but I'm not sure how to.
The main thing is that my cousin is now living with my mother. There's a lot of family drama going on. Here it comes...
My mother and her brother were never very close. My uncle must have had undiagnosed ADHD, but besides that, he's a jerk. My other (male) cousin has ADHD too but has a much, much sweeter personality. In fact, my cousin has decided her dad has ASPD which stands for Anti-Social Personality Disorder. I'm a little skeptical about all these labels, but whether you call it ASPD or a**holism, it sucks for the other people in his family.
My uncle has a lot of money and a high position in what I'll call "The Industry". Since the 1960s, our family has been involved in The Industry, starting with my grandfather. I grew up in The Industry, so I never thought it was anything unusual. But your average American has some negative associations with it. It's supposed to be lower class and a bit shady -- which isn't fair, because without The Industry, our civilization would collapse! Think something like waste management (although it's not waste management).
My grandparents never had a lot of money as adults. They came from the old West Virginia upper class, but their family money ran out before they left West Virginia. My uncle and my mother both went into The Industry and became prominent figures within it. My uncle had a sales position in an existing company, while my mother started her own company out of our house with my grandfather, with me as a little kid stuffing envelopes, built it up into a thriving business, then lost it all in the recession of the 90s.
Shortly after, my grandmother started dying of emphysema. My grandparents had downsized into a tiny apartment. I'd gone off to college but came back to sit by my grandmother's bedside with my mother. Seeing someone die of emphysema is pretty rough. All the energy in your body goes to breathing. You can't get enough calories to replace that energy so you lose weight rapidly. Since the end was so near, my grandmother decided she didn't want to prolong it with feeding tubes. Around the time she died, she probably weighed 50 pounds. My uncle didn't bother to visit her. He showed up a few days after she died and took the nicest heirlooms, since my mother didn't feel like arguing about them. A few years later my grandfather died, and he also didn't visit much either.
According to my mother, he'd always been the golden boy in the family. Not that they neglected her, but they gave him a lot of latitude. My grandparents had lived somewhat according to their old status in West Virginia... they always paid their country club and private school fees, even if the electricity was about to get cut off. My uncle was kicked out of a long succession of private schools and each time they found him a new one. My mother's explanation of her childhood is internally consistent, sociologically appropriate and independently verifiable. My uncle's is something else... apparently my mother ruined his childhood somehow (maybe because she did so well in school) and he had a hardscrabble life growing up on a farm. Instead of moving from higher to lower class, he invented a life where they went from lower to higher: a redneck made good. He developed a strong Southern accent, too, which my grandparents never had. Basically, he flipped the script from William Faulkner to Horatio Alger. According to his new story he made a lot of money in the 1970s as a cattle trader. I happen to know he was a cowboy, alright -- a COCAINE COWBOY. Not only that, he endangered my grandparents with his dealing! My mother was also involved with some common (but very illegal) stuff back in the 70s but she was responsible enough not to involve her parents!
So aside from just generally being a jerk, he's also ungrateful to his parents, refused the duty and privilege of sitting by their deathbeds, a narcissist self-mythologizer, an intermittent alcoholic and a terrible father. His little son, who couldn't help being hyperactive, was constantly yelled at. One day when his son wouldn't sit still during a yelling session, my uncle picked him up and hung him on a coathook from the back of his pajamas so he could yell at him some more. There was a replication of his own childhood: he had a very competent, responsible older daughter and a difficult son with special needs. The son got all the attention. He had the family first name. He was going to be a Big Person in The Industry.
The month before she went off to college his daughter did something unforgivably evil and defiant. She got a nose piercing. He retaliated by handing her a FAFSA. She had to pay for college herself now, and of course, since their family was wealthy she had no hope of a scholarship and had to take out loans for the entire amount. He could have afforded to pay for it all, but spent the money on a boat instead.
His son wasn't ready for college; he gave it a try but after a few months it didn't work out. From what I've read, my cousin's ADHD means his brain is not going to fully mature until he hits his late 20s, so I have every confidence he's going to succeed later in his second try. Anyway, the son got an entry-level, manual labor position at his dad's Industry company. The daughter, after she graduated with honors and a four-year career of leadership, starting working for the company in the highest sales position. It looked like she was going to be the heir. She loved The Industry and worshiped her father. When she graduated, she had "The Industry" Princess written on the back of her cap.
She was a natural salesperson and initially did well at the job. However, the reason I never had the slightest desire for a career in The Industry is that it always seemed like a white man's realm. If you want to get into it otherwise, you have to be tough as nails. I'm not. I don't have the social skills. I don't want to make things hard for myself; I need a more even playing field. Any woman who goes into it has to be twice as strong and tough and smart as a man. I don't hate The Industry, it's not worse than many others, but it's not for me. My cousin thought she could handle it, but it started getting to her. She had to wine and dine clients who talked about shooting interracial couples with a shotgun. Enemies spread rumors she'd made a big sale by sleeping with a client's son. People at the company sucked up to her because she was her father's daughter, then tried to stab her in the back. She started telling us she felt like she was walking into a snakepit. She was transferred to another city, and thought that would help a bit.
She started showing symptoms of a strange illness.
Several months ago, she collapsed. She went home to her mother and father and brother. She couldn't leave the house. After many doctors, she finally got a diagnosis. It's a very rare mental illness. It's nothing like schizophrenia, but it's comparable in terms of the effects on someone's life.
She was in an institution for a while and got a lot of good help there. Now she's living with my mother and I think things are going to turn around. Sunny loves her, and she's teaching him how to play chess! There's some medication that seems to be working. She's on seven prescriptions and one of them is even the same medication Sunny's taking. The most positive development is that she's finally made a break with The Company, The Industry and her father. When they had family therapy, his children honestly told him how he had failed them, and he responded by saying he was never coming back to therapy. He told his daughter that if she didn't come back to The Company (the same place that caused her complete mental breakdown) she would be a failure in life, and even worse, responsible for HIM looking like a failure. What a dick!
It's great having her around. She's like me in many ways, even though she's so white I'm always terrified she'll get sunburn when we go outside. We're both tall and broad-shouldered and throw our bodies around in the same way. We have similar noses. She's honest and straightforward and blunt the same way I am. I always thought that in social skills she was superior to me in that she inherited my grandfather and my mother's amazing social genius, the ability to have conversations with anyone, to be the life of the party... natural extroverts. But now I understand rather sadly that she always had problems that were parallel to mine.
Anyway, that's the story. I'm so glad she's finally cutting some ties to her family. I mean, I'm very close to my family. My life revolves around my family. But when I was in my teens and her age, I was very independent. I'm close because I want to be, not because I need to be. I hope she gets to that stage eventually.
In other family news, my father is visiting from Japan. I knew he would find something to complain about in his new guest bedroom, even though it's the most Japanese room in East Dekalb. It even smells like tatami! The complaint was "It's too big. I can barely see the opposite wall." He's been teaching Sunny to use chopsticks, although he makes everyone call them o-hashi, of course.
We've discontinued TV and are trying to get by just on Netflix DVDs and Roku. It's removed a source of contention. Sunny was always complaining about not being allowed to watch his favorite shows, some of which I thought were horrible. I think The Fairly Oddparents is designed to give adults seizures, it's so loud. When we stopped using the TV, he just totally forgot about his programs. He can still watch the stuff he really wants to watch and specifically asks for.
Sunny went through a week of bad pouty behavior when school started up. He's on the upswing now. He's still especially clingy and attention-seeking. For example, he'll ask me to stand by the door while he's brushing his teeth! We'd gone to a behavior chart system where he would get a star every day for "No Complaining" but that was too challenging. We're starting a new system where every time he doesn't pout when I say "No" he gets a circle, five circles equal a star and seven stars means a Pokemon deck.
Sunny's learning a lot in so many areas. Yesterday he rode his new bike. He'd convinced Guy (the new blog name for my husband) that he already knew how to ride a bike, but he really wasn't that good at it yet. He fell down a lot and scraped his shoulder, but he's getting better. His swimming is also a lot better, and he might graduate from Polliwog to Guppy soon. And he's learning how to play chess! This is another thing he claimed he already knew how to do (by the way, he also says he can play golf at the PGA level... lack of confidence is not a problem for Sunny!). He really didn't know how, but with tutoring from me, my cousin and Ojiichan, he's getting the hang of it. Sunny has a very competitive nature so he loves these games, although he needs a lot of reinforcement that it's OK to lose and you don't have to win to have fun.
He's in tutoring once a week for reading. The tutor is great and has a lot of experience with ADHD kids. She can tell when he's getting frustrated the very second before he actually gets frustrated, and knows how distract and then redirect.
Ojiichan is not giving me as much obnoxious parenting advice as I'd feared. He did once mention at table that he wasn't too tough on me when I didn't eat all my food. Ha ha ha. He also told me I shouldn't be worried that Sunny wasn't reading on his own yet (and I'm not worried, I just want to give him lots of extra support) because he didn't learn how to read until he was at least 10. This is a really weird thing to say, because he's incredibly well-educated and knows perfectly well that reading Japanese with kanji takes much longer than English. A lot of Japanese can't even fully read a newspaper until 9th grade, so his timeline is totally irrelevant.
Otherwise, it's great having him around. He cooks a lot and plays games with Sunny. We all went swimming together once, and Sunny got to practice his cannonball and belly flop dives. The belly flop looks horribly painful, but Sunny loves doing it.
I temporarily discontinued Sunny's gym class for a dance class. He just has too much stuff going on right now to do both at the same time. I told him after he finishes his dance class, he could decide whether he prefers one over the other.
We also went to a nice birthday party this weekend for another agency family. They adopted three siblings earlier this year. Two of them are black/white fraternal twins. There are occasional news articles about these kinds of twins, but apparently it's much, much more common than people think. One twin has brown skin and curly black hair, the other has golden skin, blond hair and blue eyes.
The house is still kind of a mess and we need to do a few more things before we can finally have a housewarming party.
That's it for now. I hope to resume more regular updates and commentary.
Foster Care System Perspectives
