Raging against those near and dear
It’s rather late now, close to midnight and my mother, my ferret and I are the only people still awake in my home.
My ferret is romping around the floor of my room with her toys, venting whatever ferret emotions were making her claw her cage in a plea for freedom. My mother is rattling around on the same floor as my room, setting the house to rights, and getting ready for a visit-this is not an accurate term, but is more polite than, say, “pit-stop” or whatever term is used to concisely describe staying at a hotel-from Rose (my 3rd older sister), Michael (her husband), Raiden (their son, oldest) and Yaya (their daughter, youngest); which was arranged by Nellie (my 2nd older sister) without consulting my mother.
This bothers me, because my mother is sixty years old, has raised six children of her own (of which I, at nineteen, am the youngest, and my sister Maria, at forty, is the oldest), and intermittently aided in the rearing of my 1st oldest sister Maria’s three children, my 2nd older brother Jorge’s two sons, and now my 3rd older sister Rose’s two children, since their infancy. My mum still manages the household my 2nd older sister Nellie’s salary maintains for myself, Nellie, and our father. By this, I mean my mother has stipend of a few hundred dollars every month from my sister to cover food and upkeep, as well as medical expenses for myself and her (we have diabetes II, my mother for twenty years, and myself for almost a dozen).
So, the fact that the nuclear household of four expends to eight (or at times even the full count of our family of seventeen), who must be fed and taken care of, and who don’t really do much to clean up after themselves, or by their presence limit activity and stretch small funds, these conditions upset me, because it always falls to my mother to do for everyone. I feel a pang of guilt as I write this, as I think through my own complicity in these circumstances, because I am not a baby, rank of birth aside, and am capable (more so, compared to some) of doing for myself and even doing for others and thereby alleviating the demands on my mother, yet my own actions are often indistinguishable from those of my siblings and their assorted spouses and offspring.
I am still upset, terribly angry, actually, by the strain I see my mother subjected to, but I can see no real solution that does not call for those others to cooperate. Ideally, we could go back to the model we existed in while I was in high school, which was my mother, father and I living in our home, while Nellie lived at uni, getting by with food stamps, Medicaid, sporadic money’s from my dad’s carpentry, and some money’s from Nellie’s scholarships, seeing my other siblings and their families only on birthdays (of which there is one a month, and holidays besides), and generally having to satisfy only ourselves, which was simple and easy.
The model we have lived in since Nellie completed her university studies, got a great paying job, and started living out of the same house four years ago is nothing so neat or uncomplicated. We have more money now than even before, but it never seems even enough to satisfy; we see our family more, but their company is exhausting on many levels; the everything of everyone else is more important than anything one might feel.
Nobody else seems to feel that anything is wrong, but my mother and I cry, sometimes together and sometimes each alone and always despair of this or that, and are never easy as we were before. My mother has aged so much, been worn down so much, in all ways, by these conditions, and I just want it to stop, damn them all, why the fuck won’t they stop doing this to her?