House situation
New year, time for some updates. Not sure if I'll get them all into one post, as I've two distinct themes I want to explore; rather, I've one I *want* to, and the other that - just ought to be done. So that first, as I've been putting it off for weeks. However, its a year's worth of getting Caught Up, so off to LJ-cut land we go..
This tale is literally just about a year long, tho the roots go back further. Not ~exactly~ mine, but I definitely was impacted. At some point well prior to Dec 2018, Elder Daughter began dating a woman who lived a little way west of us (being on the outs with her fella just then, and also quite actively bi if that needs stated). Which was all well and good for a time. They both liked weed and video games, and this woman had an apartment that daughter-person would sometimes stay at, letting me have the house to myself - mermaid paradise.
Except. This woman made her living doing web stuff, a job that dried up somewhere along the way. Being a weed-smoking gamer, she hadn't set any aside when she was making bank, and found herself at the end of Dec 2018 in the position of having to give up her apt. At which point, Elder Daughter made the noble gesture of saying, well, she could come stay with us a while until she got back on her feet. Are your eyes rolling yet? They should be.
Problem the first with this was, that offer was made BEFORE consulting with me - who would not have agreed to it. I found out slightly before a fricking moving van showed up in our drive (lesbian second date!). There was also a cat involved. Hooray - not.
But, I am a Nice Person. And actually, her GF was also basically a nice person. And it was only for a while, right? Of course it wasn't. GF got a serving job by late spring, but restaurant work is hard, boo hoo. Lost that one, got another; lost that too. Maybe there was briefly some kind of customer service rep gig in there; I lost track. Because as all this was going on, I was dealing w my own job getting increasingly shittier and more stressful. I was also dealing with the fact that I now NEVER had the house to myself, ever. This woman was Always. There. Maybe just sulking in their BR with the door closed, more likely hanging out on the porch when it was nice out; but basically, being a Presence that my somewhat psychically sensitive self was always, always, Aware Of.
By the end of the summer, things got worse, in the form of, Elder Daughter & GF *broke up*. But of course, GF now 'lived here', and had no income, and nowhere to go - she also has no friends in the area to speak of, definitely no family (they're all down south) and bad family relations anyway. Like, at one point she had an offer of a house down in Fla she was supposed to move to; but it was in the same town where her mother's ex-husband or something lives, which was excuse enough to not do that.
Autumn then became an ongoing exercise in, when was she leaving? Promises were made and then ignored, several times over. I tried to get her involved in the art festival I'd started working on - come meet people! do amazing art! Get the FUCK out of the house for once!! - but of course there were Reasons not to do that. Mind you, she's still sharing not only a room but a bed with my daughter.
I would later find that somewhere in all this, she drank up the entire bar I'd set up just before she moved in - did we mention she's diabetic? She would smoke my daughter's weed. She would leave the house only to go buy half gallons of ice cream, which she'd down in a single sitting. I mean yes, classic depression signals; but at the same time, not seeing anyone, not dealing with it in any healthy way at all. There was talk of getting into a PTSD program, but that kept being a thing that Might Happen Someday, not an actuality.
Now I should say that I got along ok with this woman, despite everything. I'm really not particularly bi, despite leanings; however, if I was, I could see myself dating someone like her (or the Good her, if you will). She and I got into the scooter charging business for a while, and we had more than one conversation where I served as village witch earth mother counsellor friend, like I do. Which btw was quite uncomfortable for me under the circumstances; but I sucked it up and did the best I could.
Finally, we get up to the end of the year and the beginning of the holiday season. She'd let it be known that she was planning to go to this special PTSD treatment program before Thanksgiving, since holidays were triggering due to an abusive childhood - ok fine, except then she didn't go. Instead she stayed in the room sulking and ignoring invites to join us while we had dinner at the other end of the house. Awkward! But ok.
Except not ok. By the end of that holiday weekend, there was some sort of blow-up. I don't think I was home when it began, and honestly now, I think I've maybe blocked some of it cause I don't even clearly remember what all went down other than that there was yelling, and threats of violence, and while it didn't even involve me directly at all, it was enough to kick in *my* PTSD. I divorced that kind of behaviour years ago and I don't want it under my roof again. At this point I don't quite remember how it all wound up, other than that was a Sunday, and by Monday, she was gone.
We spent most of that week not knowing what was up. Where was she? Would she show up? Would the police, asking someone to identify her body? (suicide attempts had already been made, so this was definitely possible). Then by the end of the week, I started getting calls. Why me? Well, my daughter's phone had died right around then, and maybe her google number wasn't working for some reason - I don't know. All I know is I looked the number up, realized it was for the PTSD hospital, and started handing the voicemails (So. Many. Voicemails) over to my daughter. Who, bless her, realized it was her problem and her responsibility to deal with and took every call.
Amazingly, this woman assumed that once she completed the week-long in-patient program, that she'd be coming back - she even apparently insisted at one point that this was her home. Uh - no. This is OUR home, which you were temporarily invited to share, and then discovered it was a nice, cozy space with free (to her) internet, utilities, weed - even the cat food was paid for. Granted, she did kick me money when she had some available, but given how long she was here, she contributed at most two month's worth of what should have been her share of expenses.
So the weeks leading up to xmas had a lot of voicemails and back&forths, but she has not returned. Elder Daughter made it very clear that she was no longer welcome here. We still have her stuff (So. Much. Stuff), but daughter's BF moved it all to the basement; and we have her cat until such time as she has a home she can take him back to. Poor buddy - he doesn't know what's going on. We're not going to kick him out just cause his momma's cray-cray tho.
We're not entirely done - as I said, stuff is still here. She's staying at a shelter, I guess, and has made at least one more suicide attempt in the interim. I do feel some compassion for her; I realize that she didn't grasp (wilfully or not) that this was meant to be a TEMPORARY solution for her, not permanent. And if you view it as the latter, then she got kicked out of her home, which was also a nice, comfortable, stable home where her needs were pretty well all met. Yeah, that's rough; but it also never really was the case, and if she didn't know that, its because she was lying to herself.
So yeah. That's what we've been dealing with for the past year. Now that it's all but over, the relief is very, very palpable. Like, there was all but literally this big cloud of GLOOM in the house (bad juju man!), even before things got Bad. Vague, tho, so you didn't entirely notice it was there until it was gone. Now, I really wonder how much that impacted my work situation; which as I've said had become increasingly stressful - hard to manage that well and then come home to even more stress. I mean, it was so bad that half my houseplants died, partly from neglect - I couldn't GET to them for a long time, as all her crap was piled up in the front room - but partly too just from the negative vibe in the house.
But now we're done with that, its a new year, I'm no longer working for that company, and the other theme I mentioned is still to be explored. That one isn't going in a public post, tho, cause that's just not how I do. Ping me if you actually care.