Family.
So...this is a tangled web, and I've been trying to figure out which string to pull. I think I have it now.

We will start with my mother. The child of an alcoholic single mother (I never knew my grandfather; I wish I had), she may or may not have been sexually abused, physically abused, and/or ritually abused as a child. I know for a fact she had to put up with my grandmother carrying on a ten-year affair with a Roman Catholic priest, who may or may not have aided and abetted the abuse.

See, the stories always changed -- and most of the time my mother was so looped on the tranquilizer-of-the-year (Miltown, Xanax, methaqualune, whatever she could get the latest doctor to prescribe) that it really didn't matter. She had three stillborn children after I was born in 1968; one a year like clockwork, '69, '70, '71. Sometimes she was functional after that; sometimes she set things on fire in the driveway and cackled like Macbeth's spiritual advisors.

Needless to say, she and my father divorced when I was nine or ten. She did the single parent gig for a few years; she had a decent job at the local hospital (yes, she was a registered nurse) and we were doing... all right. Not great, but all right.

Then she married my stepfather, a socially inept career virgin farmer who at 37 still lived with his parents. I have no clue what she saw in him; the man was mostly a waste of time and skin. He didn't want the kids - there were three of us at that point - and we moved to a farm outside a small town that would have to improve to be considered the rectum of the Midwestern US. I would have, at this point, slavishly accepted someone who wanted to provide me with a father figure; instead, he was just another dipshit who didn't have time for any of us. After five years of living with her drug-induced drama and my cro-Magnon stepfather, I left. Went to college, flunked out, went back home for just long enough to realize how miserable it was, and went to live with my great-grandmother a hundred miles away. Mum hated it; she screamed and threw things the night my then-girlfriend and I packed my stuff and I got the hell out.

Fast-forward. My brother gets out. My sister, who has cerebral palsy, has come to her own arrangement somehow. I get married, have a son -- my mother's first grandson. The wedding ceremony is unabashedly Pagan, and mom grits her teeth all the way through it. Ten months later, she has a heart attack in her sleep and dies. She was 47.

My stepfather says, and I quote: 'Come get your mother's shit'.

I go back to the house I lived in for five years, and am not allowed in the house. My stepfather has already taken up with the cleaning woman, of all people; I have to get what of my mother's stuff he allows me to have out of the barn, where he's unceremoniously dumped it. Family furniture: stolen. Heirlooms: ditto. Myself and my sibs are edited out of my stepfather's life before my mother's corpse is fully worm entree.

I actually tried to contact him some years later. Sent him a letter: his response was 'Fuck off, you fat queer; I don't want to talk to you'.

Fifteen years has muted the pain somewhat, and I've learned that the material things I lost are bearable. But because of my mother's issues, I lost eight years with my real father, and she replaced him with a complete and utter twit who barely let her cool before he moved on.

I don't know if this is a feud. I know I was a shit to my stepfather at times, so I suppose so. I just know that in the end, I cut my losses and moved on. I have three kids now, lovely children, and I'm relatively happy. I doubt the same can be said of him.
(springjack The King Of Pygmy Marmosets!, Thu 12 Nov 2009, 17:31, 3 replies)

Hooray for the last line. You've pulled yourself out of the shit.
Thought it was gonna be one of THOSE posts.
( rjmrjm, Thu 12 Nov 2009, 19:18, closed)

career virgin farmer
I think I know many people that would like to do that for a living. I think alot of them may just be around here somewhere.
(misskitty reeks of sex and turpentine; laudanum afternoons, Tue 17 Nov 2009, 2:49, closed)