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crotchrotwedgy

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Do you know how hard it is to deal with the responsibility of knowing that your life will be the key to making or breaking the future?  Do you give in to your past and continue on with the path of chaotic behavior that is so easy to fall back into?  Or do you accept that the only way that you can change is to completely destruct the way you think and to embed a new life in your mind that a healthy way of living can revolve around?

            This is my dilemma.  I can see that I hold the behavior and thoughts of my family.  I can see the world from both sides of the spectrum.  I can see why my family holds the anger and resentment that they hold towards the world, and I can see why they refuse to change.

            I have not come to expect much out of my family.  My entire past has been an effort to survive on my own, and every time I try to heal my past and get close to my family, they wind up showing me how much they really don’t care about me at all.  The last real question I had for my mother was “why can’t you just love me?” and once again the topic was change to something else.  Outside of arguments, I receive lines of how proud my family is of me, and how much they all love me and my wife.  The actions however do not support this apparent babble.

            My brother was recently released from prison.  While he was locked up he talked a good talk about how he had changed and how he wanted to get his life together.  He promised that he would not get caught in the middle of the drama, move on with school, not fall into the same crowds, and have a relationship with his siblings.  Since getting out, I have only talked to him a few times, pretty much just him wanting to know how to do, or where something is.  Before he was arrested my brother stayed with me.  While there, my mother would make special trips to leave groceries and leftovers outside the door of my house for him to eat.  Strangely, this was never done before he moved in with me.  My brother and I wound up fighting, and I kicked him out, because he started slanging out of my house and inviting whoever to my house whenever without asking if it would be alright; as if I would be fine with him snorting cocaine on my dining room table and dickin’ randoms on my hide-a-bed.  For some reason the food stopped showing up as well.

             He then went to stay with my mother, and soon after she was against me and my wife for breaking up the family.  I told my brother, and mother that if he kept going the way he was going, that he would wind up in prison.  All in an attempt to wake him up so that he would see how he was drastically endangering his chances of getting his daughter back (this is another story in itself).  My mother’s defense to this was simply that “he has to do what he has to for his child”; like the courts are going to see drug trafficking as a worthy career goal to possess while raising a child.  We didn’t talk for a year after that, until a while after he was sentenced to prison.

            This for some reason, this was a perfect chance for my mother to seemingly put the past behind her and accept me and my fiance at the time.  The quarrels seemed to have stopped and we were all pretty much getting along.  Then it came down to the final trails of my brother getting out of prison, and slowly my mother started to get weird again.  She would say that my wife and I are abandoning her and that we were saying things that were never said.  Now that he is out of prison, my family has stopped talking to us again, and they have become a pretty tight little group.  We just went to see my sister and found out that the entire family had went to get pictures done (mother, brother, sister, and all three nieces).  For some reason we seem to be outcast from our own family.

            The only thing we’ve ever done wrong is try to have a better life.  We’re both going to college and trying to maintain a respectable lifestyle that would be ideal for raising a family.  Since school has come into the picture, life from their point of view has for the most part, become straight sour.  I am learning in school that as I learn more and see more and more faults in the way of my family, that I will be forced to make a decision.  A statement that a student in my English 201 class wrote really connected with me.  She presented the dilemma of “do I denounce my upbringing and mold myself to fit this image of what it takes to be (powerful and privileged?) ‘Do I support my foundation and let that be my standard of success?’ or ‘Do I find a way to incorporate my background with society’s success and make my own path?”  This is what I’m fighting with.