Settlements & Howrses.
I suppose it's time to be frank about the part of my life that's been encroaching on all other areas of it.
Three years ago my dad left the house. A year before that he started seeing someone behind my mother's back. Last December he filed a divorce petition and since then he and Mom have been, well, arguing over the settlements - aka, will he or won't he financially support her post-settlement.
I wasn't home when this all went down. I was down in San Diego for college. I wasn't aware of the very late hours he kept, the random phone calls at 3AM, or Mom's despair as she slowly figured out that he was seeing someone. My brother was witness to it all, though, including Dad's ultimately decision to leave everything behind and go.
My parents got married more out of convenience than out of love - they were both under pressure to marry someone before they turned thirty (or, in Dad's case, marry someone before thirty-five). Mom moved to the US not realizing how difficult the culture shock will be, or how cold and tough my dad's family is compared to her warm and open one. She had hoped to get an education and a job before children - but I was conceived during the honeymoon. She now has sclerosisr, preventing her from staying on her feet for more than a few hours, and her English is still rather...bad. Dad was studying towards a Master's in electrical engineering but I was born and he had to quit right before he could earn that degree. He had to work at the company the majority of his family worked at because, well, it's something of a family business. He invested $300k in it and then made a blunder while drawing up the contract when the company was sold to a new owner. After the 2008 recession hit, the new owner called Chapter 11, preventing Dad from taking out that $300k and forcing him to stick with the company until things improved.
While Mom became depressed Dad found a distraction outside the house.
And now they're fighting over the settlement, because Dad is (initially) not willing to make legal his giving a portion of his salary monthly to my mom, even though we all know she's unemployed and probably never will be employed. My brother's a sophomore in college and I work part-time at my uncles' SAT academy; what I make is not enough to pay for the bills. It's why Mom decided to go the home-stay route - my uncle's acquaintance has a daughter who's coming here this Christmas and going to a private Catholic school a couple minutes away from here for a year. It still won't be enough unless Dad sends a portion of his salary to her. Anything, really, to keep from selling this house and moving to an apartment.
Not surprisingly the stress is getting to Mom. She can't sleep well, snacks constantly, has headaches all the time, gets muscle cramps, etc. She wants me to stay as close to her as possible at all hours, which is something that will drive me up the wall.
The problem is that she expects me to be able to read her, react the way she wants me to, and express myself according to how she thinks I should. While waiting for her appointment with her ob/gyn we talked about the divorce settlement and her issues with it... and it devolved into her practically yelling at me for not understanding her, for not showing emotions, for being emotionless and complacent. There are not enough what-the-fucks in the world. I told her time and again that I don't express myself the way she does, that it's still very hard to process what happened with Dad since I left for college while things were still good, and that the mother culture makes it very, very difficult to talk back to one's elders, especially if the elder in question was a father who, up until a certain point, was a very good one.
I'm not good at physically, outwardly expressing my emotions, especially the way she wants me to. It's probably a consequence of the way I was raised, which was that when I was an infant Mom would play with me until she got tired; she would then leave me alone to entertain myself and go watch TV or read the newspaper. She didn't know any better and I obviously wasn't aware of anything at all, but I guess there was more to me than just being born an introvert. Maybe it's why I have such a massive touch!kink or can oh so easily write in the minds of characters with parental/abandonment issues. I can't physically yell at people - I never have - and I cannot, will not empathize with Mom to the point that I feel the exact same stress that she does. I'm sorry, but I absolutely refuse to put that kind of burden on myself. I'm already in a constant state of low-level stress - what the fuck do I do? Why is my dad being such a dick? Why can't Mom stop saying that she needs me all the time? How am I supposed to live like this? How long will this last? When will I get out of here? It's getting harder and harder to see any kind of promising future, like the roads are all disappearing one by one until all that's left is a narrow corridor that ends at a wall.
Because of this culture I grew up with I can't just abandon my mom and leave her to despair over the loss of pretty much everything she cared about (besides my brother, but since I'm her daughter...). Because of this other culture I grew up with I want so very desperately to be able to lead my own life and leave this house when I want to instead of being stuck here supporting Mom because she's physically incapable of holding a steady job.
I think I haven't been able to really write the past several weeks because of this. All I've had the mental capacity for is Howrse.com, a French-based virtual sim game revolving around horses. There's not much to it other than training, breeding, working your way to the top of the game. It certainly takes less brain and willpower than writing stories. Now Mom's getting suspicious of it because she sees me play it all the time, but I need an outlet that can fit my energy level and this is it.
Basically, I don't know how long this writer's block will last and NaNoWriMo is already a fading dream. There are all these ideas coalescing and struggling to break free from my head but I have no will to write them down.
That's it, I guess.
Three years ago my dad left the house. A year before that he started seeing someone behind my mother's back. Last December he filed a divorce petition and since then he and Mom have been, well, arguing over the settlements - aka, will he or won't he financially support her post-settlement.
I wasn't home when this all went down. I was down in San Diego for college. I wasn't aware of the very late hours he kept, the random phone calls at 3AM, or Mom's despair as she slowly figured out that he was seeing someone. My brother was witness to it all, though, including Dad's ultimately decision to leave everything behind and go.
My parents got married more out of convenience than out of love - they were both under pressure to marry someone before they turned thirty (or, in Dad's case, marry someone before thirty-five). Mom moved to the US not realizing how difficult the culture shock will be, or how cold and tough my dad's family is compared to her warm and open one. She had hoped to get an education and a job before children - but I was conceived during the honeymoon. She now has sclerosisr, preventing her from staying on her feet for more than a few hours, and her English is still rather...bad. Dad was studying towards a Master's in electrical engineering but I was born and he had to quit right before he could earn that degree. He had to work at the company the majority of his family worked at because, well, it's something of a family business. He invested $300k in it and then made a blunder while drawing up the contract when the company was sold to a new owner. After the 2008 recession hit, the new owner called Chapter 11, preventing Dad from taking out that $300k and forcing him to stick with the company until things improved.
While Mom became depressed Dad found a distraction outside the house.
And now they're fighting over the settlement, because Dad is (initially) not willing to make legal his giving a portion of his salary monthly to my mom, even though we all know she's unemployed and probably never will be employed. My brother's a sophomore in college and I work part-time at my uncles' SAT academy; what I make is not enough to pay for the bills. It's why Mom decided to go the home-stay route - my uncle's acquaintance has a daughter who's coming here this Christmas and going to a private Catholic school a couple minutes away from here for a year. It still won't be enough unless Dad sends a portion of his salary to her. Anything, really, to keep from selling this house and moving to an apartment.
Not surprisingly the stress is getting to Mom. She can't sleep well, snacks constantly, has headaches all the time, gets muscle cramps, etc. She wants me to stay as close to her as possible at all hours, which is something that will drive me up the wall.
The problem is that she expects me to be able to read her, react the way she wants me to, and express myself according to how she thinks I should. While waiting for her appointment with her ob/gyn we talked about the divorce settlement and her issues with it... and it devolved into her practically yelling at me for not understanding her, for not showing emotions, for being emotionless and complacent. There are not enough what-the-fucks in the world. I told her time and again that I don't express myself the way she does, that it's still very hard to process what happened with Dad since I left for college while things were still good, and that the mother culture makes it very, very difficult to talk back to one's elders, especially if the elder in question was a father who, up until a certain point, was a very good one.
I'm not good at physically, outwardly expressing my emotions, especially the way she wants me to. It's probably a consequence of the way I was raised, which was that when I was an infant Mom would play with me until she got tired; she would then leave me alone to entertain myself and go watch TV or read the newspaper. She didn't know any better and I obviously wasn't aware of anything at all, but I guess there was more to me than just being born an introvert. Maybe it's why I have such a massive touch!kink or can oh so easily write in the minds of characters with parental/abandonment issues. I can't physically yell at people - I never have - and I cannot, will not empathize with Mom to the point that I feel the exact same stress that she does. I'm sorry, but I absolutely refuse to put that kind of burden on myself. I'm already in a constant state of low-level stress - what the fuck do I do? Why is my dad being such a dick? Why can't Mom stop saying that she needs me all the time? How am I supposed to live like this? How long will this last? When will I get out of here? It's getting harder and harder to see any kind of promising future, like the roads are all disappearing one by one until all that's left is a narrow corridor that ends at a wall.
Because of this culture I grew up with I can't just abandon my mom and leave her to despair over the loss of pretty much everything she cared about (besides my brother, but since I'm her daughter...). Because of this other culture I grew up with I want so very desperately to be able to lead my own life and leave this house when I want to instead of being stuck here supporting Mom because she's physically incapable of holding a steady job.
I think I haven't been able to really write the past several weeks because of this. All I've had the mental capacity for is Howrse.com, a French-based virtual sim game revolving around horses. There's not much to it other than training, breeding, working your way to the top of the game. It certainly takes less brain and willpower than writing stories. Now Mom's getting suspicious of it because she sees me play it all the time, but I need an outlet that can fit my energy level and this is it.
Basically, I don't know how long this writer's block will last and NaNoWriMo is already a fading dream. There are all these ideas coalescing and struggling to break free from my head but I have no will to write them down.
That's it, I guess.