Psychology 101

As many of you know, we have some real issues with Tim's family going on. I spoke to my therapist about the whole mess. As I explained Tim's father's behavior, the first question she asked me was, "Does he drink?" Um, yep, nailed that one. After I told her about the fight
and the things that have happened in the past, she asked me this. "If his parents fight in front of your child
and his father frequently insults you and there is all this ugliness going on, why do you continue to spend your holidays and vacations with them?" Now, this is a question I've asked my husband for years but I told her that we did not want to break up his family or keep our kid from her cousins and grandparents. I actually think I saw my therapist roll her eyes at that answer. I could hear what Sandy said in one of her comments about the whole "insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results," hanging in the air between us but the look on her face said it all. How foolish. Look where that got you now. She said,  "this is not good for your daughter to witness, you realize." "Yes, I know." The last thing I ever wanted was for her to witness a fight like this but like I always thought, and everyone who has now heard what happened and knows Tim's family, has now said, it was inevitable and not a matter of "if" but "when." I guess there
was a part of me that still hoped it would not come to that but anyone with the least amount of self-respect and concern for her daughter's self image, does not allow her father-in-law to call her "stupid", especially in front of her daughter. People who know me and him have actually laughed at that. I am not perfect in a lot of ways but I did relatively OK in the IQ department. I am not the highschool dropout with a chip on his shoulder. Stupidity was him thinking he was going to say that and get away with it. Stupidity is also going around insulting people and throwing temper tantrums and thinking it doesn't reflect on him and make people stay away, all because your wife put up with it for 55+ years. I have 2 sisters who were involved in abusive relationships when they were young. It's VERY hard to see that and be helpless to stop it(I tried). The thought that my daughter could accept that for herself someday because she heard her grandfather be verbally abusive to her grandmother and thinks it's normal(we explain all the time that it's not), or was at least good enough for 2 people she loves, is not Ok with me or Tim by a longshot. She almost witnessed him be physically abusive to her one Christmas a few years back.  Tim often says, "I had to listen to this cr** my entire life. I don't want my kid hearing it."
This thought came to me today. My therapist told me, a month or so ago, that some people knowingly or unknowingly start to distance themselves from someone who is very ill. Could that be what his family is doing?  I wonder. Tim is not the kind of person people don't want to be around. He drops everything for others and is always there for people. He gets along with everyone. Yet, his father continued to gun for me despite both of us telling him to quit it and Tim telling him a year and a half ago, that "this ends now!"
Tim warned him this past spring, when his father brought the whole brother and sister-in-law thing up at our kid's ball game, to stay out of it. These people knew we had had it with the constant fighting. So.....are we dealing with people who just cannot control their anger and are so disrespectful that they couldn't care less what we want or don't want in our lives? That is definitely part of it. But, are they also purposely taking themselves out of our lives
because of Tim's illness? I think his brother has the perfect excuse to back away and that doesn't surprise me
at all. He never stepped up in any way from the get-go. His wife caused this, he's backing her, he has his out. It takes guts to hang in there with people like us who are facing this. You find out who has the guts and who doesn't pretty quickly. But maybe that explains all this, or part of it. I know I would want to spend as much time as possible with my child/sibling and do as much as I possibly could to help. Most of them have done just the opposite. Are they getting the loss overwith now because they think it's coming? Are they  looking for someone to blame because their son has cancer so they're taking their pain out on me? They were always disrespectful like this though and his father always hated that I was smart and not intimidated by him. Ya know, it's ironic. They're glad that I am smart enough to be a good caregiver and advocate but don't be smart around them though. I can't even talk to anyone about anything that is above his father's intellectual watermark, without his father listening in and shooting an insult across the room at me. Nothing like wearing your insecurities right on your sleeve.
Well, I know this. Luckily, we have a lot of support from other people. For the first time in many years, we will be able to enjoy Christmas without having a knot in our stomachs. But the sad part is that we didn't want this and in 26 years, I have never seen my husband this mad, disappointed, and hurt and that REALLY STINKS! And the fact that it was caused by his own parents and siblings is unimaginable, but true. He did not deserve this. I hate that so many times, the good guys get the short end of the stick. (cleaning that up a bit) Gonna be a hard road trying to find the silver linings in this whole mess. But we are staying busy, and loving and supporting each other. Life goes on and we can take care of ourselves without them. Our kid tried out for the first time in a competition dance/cheer squad and made it yesterday. This is and will be her busiest year ever. We are dealing with a lot but we are a united front. We'll do what's right for Liv and us and folks will either get on board or not. That's their choice. We remain true to our values and those that know us well, know we did not cause this. Now it's off to the laundry and paperwork with me. Blessed tedium.

A freaky Halloween

Well, the kids are off school for the second day. A freak snowstorm on Saturday while the leaves were
still on the trees had/has many of us with no power and the kids trick or treated yesterday climbing over snow
mounds and tree limbs. They worked for their candy this year. The scariest thing is that Olivia had a dream
Friday night that a tree fell and crashed through our rental house. Well, I wish she could have dreamt that I
won the 200 million dollar power ball lottery, 'cause I would have much rather gotten that news Sat. evening
than the news I got, which was........................you guessed it, a tree fell and part of it came into the diningroom of our rental with our favorite tenant just 8 feet away in the kitchen. Perfect ending to a crazy week. OUr tenant is fine and the coolest woman ever. The tree is still there as it was a town/county tree from the nature preserve behind us that fell and the ins. company
hasn't come out yet, nor has the town department to remove it. It is stable and luckily only one branch came through the wall and sealed the hole as it did. Spookiest Halloween ever.

If only one thing could go right..............

I am sure grateful to God that it was this. After such a difficult week, which always makes us feel more nervous when one of Tim's appts. falls around such grim times, we got the wonderful news today that
Tim is still stable. We know when the doc comes in and talks wood flooring with him(he just bought a new
place in Manhattan) that there are no worries and I rummaged through the labwork to see that all is the same
as it was in July. I told Tim before we went in that as long as he was OK, I could let go of all the rest of the
crap we dealt with this week. This is our goal: to keep Tim well, to keep me from getting sick dealing with all
this stress, and to enjoy our days as much as possible while raising our daughter together. Anyone that gets in the way of that goal, and robs us of our happiness, is not on our team. We know that
we have been given a hard road to travel. We also know that we have been blessed and seen miracles happen despite that. We want
to keep on trucking with as much optimism and laughter as we possibly can. And that, my friends, will be my
focus, from this day forward. I'm going to learn to send all the garbage floating around us right to the spam file.

Fallout pending

Thanks for the comments folks. I have been unable to figure out how to go private with this blog and add folks to an "approved list". To be honest, the reason I don't want to is that there is myeloma stuff buried in the content of this blog(mostly older posts while Tim was in treatment) and I feel that if anyone could be helped by anything written here, going private would limit not only that but also the amount of people I could "meet" in blogland who walk the same path as us. Since I am as honest as the day is long, if someone in Tim's family saw things written here, well, it's all true and judging from the stuff they said to us on Sunday, they know nothing about our lives anymore and maybe they need a dose of reality. They were given every opportunity to be involved with us, they either screwed things up for us or backed out because they had more important things to do.With few exceptions, they make no time for Tim or our family, despite his health problem. They were warned that we were not going to continue to take the father's abuse on top of all that we are dealing with. He just kept pushing it. Rules of polite society don't apply to them. There's no place for reality or personal responsibility in their world. They screw up-they look for someone to blame it on. In my mind, you cannot even call yourself a grown-up until you are capable of taking responsibility for your actions and your words. Period.


I've sucked up as much as I could to keep the peace in this family. I hit my limit a long time ago. They do not even have a clue about half the things Tim and I have been through because I wanted to spare his parents the pain of knowing what I knew. Now, the added stress of the family fights is affecting my health and my quality of life too much, as well as those of my husband and daughter. Our sister-in-law has spent close to 30 years pitting the people in this family against each other and nobody sees this for exactly what it is except Tim and I and people outside this family looking in. Well, she got her wish. She succeeded in dividing and conquering and it is really amazing what one toxic person, even one who is not too smart, can cause in a family. There are people lying, twisting facts, backstabbing, tearing others down to try to make themselves feel better about their shortcomings, blaming others for their own behavior. Tim's parents don't even know what the truth is now. Because Tim and I refused to engage in this mess or cry to his parents and defend ourselves, they have half stories from people who twist the truth and now they have put 2 & 2 together and come up with 173. Now, they are all spouting their mouthes off with incorrect information and making judgements based on all this drivel. The sis-in-law ruined a precious day for our family almost 2 years ago and after years of her insults and watching her screw over everyone in this family, we said, "enough" and now we are being blamed for breaking up the family because apparently they don't think we have the right to decide when WE
have had enough. Well, it is our right and none of them are going through what we are. They are all
welcome to play this passive-aggressive game and put up with the insults and let their kids see grandma and grandpa fight even to the point of physical injury on Christmas day. Have at it y'all. Deal us out.
 
Tim's family is a train wreck being driven by the sis-in-law with the father-in-law pushing in the caboose. Well, it looks like Tim has decided us three will take the bus for now on. What a shame that it had to come to this.
 
 
I've probably written these phrases in this blog before but they're worth repeating.
 
"Denise, never argue with someone who is dead wrong. It's a complete waste of time"  my Dad
 
"Argue with an idiot, now you have two" my sister Cathy
 
"When people show you who they are, believe them."  Maya Angelou
 
That last one is a lesson I wish I had learned a long time ago.

It happened

Well, today, my father-in-law finally broke this camel's back.
We went up there to see family friends who were up from NC and with a few beers in him, he decided to
insult me AGAIN in front of people. As a matter of fact, he's done it in front of this man before. Both I and Timmy have warned him that we'd had enough of the insults and nastiness. I grabbed my purse, told him he really needed to learn to shut his mouth and stormed out. Thus began a family fight with
my kid crying in the car, and me going back and forth into the house trying to get Tim out of there as I had one of Liv's friends being dropped off at my house for a youth group outing I was taking them to. I knew this
was bound to happen sooner or later and get this. Somehow my father-in-law got it into his head that I told
off the neighbor for the firework incident back in July and now we're not on speaking terms. Hmmm. I never said a word to them. Tim did and it was all settled. As a matter of fact, the neighbor was just over my house
yesterday to ask if I wanted to buy a raffle ticket for the fire dept. We all get along just fine. My f-i-l tells me that I am stupid because
I was not on speaking terms with someone. It was said with a whole lot of venom and accusation, believe me.  I thought he was talking about the s-i-l thing. He claims no, that
he was talking about the neighbor. Either way, I said that was none of his business anyway. So it all blew up.
Tim told him he had totally wrong information and that what he just accused me of, NEVER happened. Tim's sister was there crying and yelling and apparently, despite what the s-i-l and f-i-l have done, and the fact that my f-i-l has lost most of their friends because they've all had it with his mouth, and everyone can't believe what the s-i-l did to us, Tim's sis said WE are breaking up
the family because we don't suck it up. She says the s-i-l has done things to her too but she deals with it for the sake of the family. I said, you are not living our life and what she did to us was totally different from your experiences. Tim said, "WHY DO WE HVE TO DEAL WITH HER CRAP AT ALL?" He told them, "I don't even know how long I have on this earth and I have to put up with that!!" What a mess. It's far too long to get all into but I always knew this was going to happen and
that my poor kid would wind up with a front row seat. They just don't get it. I told his dad, "your behavior
does not reflect on me. You think your insults make ME look bad, when I have 3 of your friends tell me that they can't believe how you speak to me?!" He tried to say he
was kidding but just like the s-i-l, he wasn't. You should have heard the tone in his voice. Passive aggression is still aggression, they just don't want to be held responsible for it when someone calls them out. Everyone knows he's not kidding. He's just miserable and makes everyone around him miserable too. He and the sis-in-law have the same problem and they think they can just go through life getting all this stuff off their chest but DON'T DARE say anything to them.  Anyway, I am thinking of taking this blog private. I hesitate to do this
because the people I know in the MM blogland mean the world to me and I do not want to lose touch with any of you. So PLEASE if I do take this private, put in a request or however it's done. I will set up access to
all those I can, if that's how it works, but I hope that I will not lose contact with any of you. As I've said in the past, I don't share my blog with our families. It's my place to vent without feeling the need to explain myself. But just in case any of them have stumbled upon it, I may need to go the private route. Ugh what a disaster. Some people never learn. And the biggest sin of all, is that my husband, and our family, has been let down by almost everyone in his family time and time again since his cancer diagnosis and you would think that it would be just the opposite and they would be there for him, and us.
I tell you, with all honesty, that it is a disappointment that I don't think we will ever recover from.
Just in time for the holidays. Yippee!

De-cluttering at its best

We've just done 2 days of yard selling. It went well. My older sister came and brought a truckload of
items and we made about $700.00. And if you saw how reasonable our prices were, then
you would know we moved a lot of clutter to get to that amount. For now, I packed what is left on my porch and after all the work
of getting it down from the attic and up from the basement, I may do 1 more day of this, weather permitting,
this coming Friday.  I got a real "leg up" on cleaning out that spare room and I am on my
way to making it a cozy office so MAYBE I can be better about my filing and paperwork instead of making
things so much harder on myself by not being organized. I've really been bad about letting things get away from me around here. I feel like I'm always overwhelmed with paperwork and such and I just dread some
of these tasks so much that I procrastinate. I did look up that flylady.com that Christina mentioned on my
last post and I am definitely going to start using that site to help me out. I really do need to do the baby steps method that she talks about since my free time is so fragmented and I seem so darn A.D.D.-ish these days.
I believe, without any doubt, that it is hard to relax and clear your head in a cluttered environment and I think
I'm ready to become a minimalist for this very reason. We really need so little but we surround ourselves with so darn much. Getting rid of things is much more my angle these days. Now if I could just get the 2 cr** collectors I live with to get on board. Oh and on a totally different subject, there is a man that owns
a stationary store in my town. Everytime I go in there, he looks like he just lost his best friend. I've never seen anyone radiate misery more than this man. So, I struck up a conversation with him after he got off the telephone in an irritated manner. After a few innocent conversation starters, I said, "you're not very happy, are you?" At this point, keeping in mind I live in Jersey, I thought this guy might tell me right off, but he said, "No, I'm not happy. The things customers do and say around here gets to me and I'm just not one to shake it off. I hate what I do but I'm stuck here." I said, "no, you're not, don't say that to yourself. You can find a whole new career if you want and as long as you have your health, nothing stands in your way. And besides, that's their issues. It's not your fault people are impatient and rude." He nodded and we taked about living in this area. Then,he told me about his mother's cancer. I told him about Tim's. Then he told me that a woman he met in Amsterdam and became great friends with, was attacked by a man who stabbed her 10 times. She lived but is paralyzed from the waste down. Then, there was this little girl dying of brain cancer in the next town. Her story had been in the papers. Turns out this was his good friend's daughter and the first baby he had ever held. His friend came into the store a few weeks ago to tell him she had died. This man's friends were all dealing with such tragedies and this guy too was in a bad place. He really had a lot to be sad about.
I told him that I know of similar cancer stories about kids and I don't know how you recover from that, as a parent, but I told this guy that he has to stop carrying all this around on his back. He has to be grateful for whatever is going good in his life, (his mom is fine now) and carry on. I told him that I don't know how but my husband goes to work each day with a smile and he has cancer. I'm not trying to minimize anyone's troubles but I do tell people, if you have your health, you have the world by the "you know whats." Everything else is fixable and changeable if you're miserable about it. Not easily maybe, but do-able. And SMILE for Pete sake!!! He told me he was going to Paris and I think he hoped this vacation would help him get his groove back. I know where this guy is. We live in a difficult area. If you've read my blog awhile, then
you know I get sick of living here, a lot. But, just when I've really had my fill, someone pops up and does something nice for me and restores my faith. I don't claim I did anything earth moving for this guy, but I hope
our talk had some effect, even if just showing him that even a stranger gives a hoot that he is sad. He thanked me and I wished him a good vacation. If you're living with cancer within your home, then you probably know the feeling of watching people kind of throw their lives away when they have SO much going
for them. I remember whining about my job years ago. Now, I wish that my biggest problem was a jerky boss. I didn't know what real problems were. I do now. And somehow, I smile and get on with it. It may not always be this way, but I'm trying to be a positive influence on those around me instead of bringing them down. It is just too exhausting and depressing to walk around thinking about everything that is
wrong all the time. I try to enjoy the things that are going good. And today was a good day, starting off with
watching Liv's soccer team win another game(they're undefeated). Liv has scored in every game and I just love watching kids' sports. My sisters and parents were here today and we laughed our fool heads off on the front porch on a gorgeous fall day. Small blip. Mom got bit by a bee but the good thing was that it had just landed on my dad's..............um.............."situation" and I warned him just in time so although it then flew over and bit mom when he shooed it away, at least I spared Dad a swollen, stinging situation on his "situation." Always these little silver linings. ;o)

Help I am drowning in a sea of STUFF

Well, it's that time again. Time for the yard sale. I have been wanting to turn my spare room into an office
for years and it simply must be done now. First, I have to clear out the cr**. I have a hard time doing this job. I keep stopping in frustration. There is just too much stuff crammed into our house. I start getting angry
at all the wasted money (things our daughter just HAD to have and then never wore or played with) as well
as my husband's inability to let go of things.( I can EBAY those Evel Knievel things and make some money) We've got antiques he bought saying he would refinish them and he never did . We have boxes of  old Car and Driver and 4-Wheeler magazines. There is just no way of organizing the sheer volume of things we have into this house. Yesterday, Tim snottily told me, "I don't want anything to do with this sale. You're on your own, I'm busy." I said, "well, aren't you a delight?" I guess it's a darn good thing for him that I don't ever say I can't be bothered doing anything for him, he's on his own. I set him straight but really feel like getting rid of all his junk clogging up our basement, attic, & spare room. You don't want to be involved, fine, I will decide what belongings of yours stay or go. How's that?!  He knows I would never do that but boy, sometimes my conscience really gets in the way of progress!  Being sentimental is one thing
but there comes a time that you have to let go. I wish sometimes that I could be like those people who throw
everything out. I just think it's so wasteful when someone can use it. I've got clothes of Olivia's that have tags on them still and toys she never played with. I think it's a waste putting clothes in the charity bins because
they never get picked up so they get ruined by mold and varmints and why throw perfectly good toys in the trash. In this economy, buying these things for a buck or two is a big help to some families. You literally cannot give the stuff away. I've tried. Organizations will not take toys because people unload trash on them instead of clean, usable toys and games. Day care places, family aid places, none of them take anything. What a shame. So it's back to work sorting and pricing for me. That's the easy part, it's the climbing up and down 2 flights of stairs with asthma that is getting me. Oh, to be young and fit again and have great
lung capacity. Wouldn't that be luverly?