Major family drama - Should I feel guilty?
I apologize for the length, but please bear with me. Lots of potentially interesting drama ahead!
Me: 24, married, own a home with my husband very close to my parents’ house.
Mom: On disability for the past 15 years due to a back injury, along with a slew of other problems, including some mental health issues such as major depression, anxiety, and general craziness. Her entire personality has changed over the last 5 years and she’s extremely hard to deal with. Home life doesn’t help much.
Dad: Owns his own business. Diabetic that had a recent heart attack. History of anger issues, but no physical violence up until recently. Developed a narcotics addiction and detoxed this past week. Miserable and clearly does not feel the same way for my mother as he once did. Also a bit of a jerk in general.
Sister: 31, lives at home with 10 year old daughter, and works with Dad at his business. Has been addicted to narcotics for 7 years. History of stealing mom’s and grandmother’s medication, ODing (at my bachelorette party, in fact), lying, etc. Recently admitted she was back on the pills and detoxed with dad this past week.
The “Incident”: Two weeks ago, sister and niece were out at the movies when a huge fight erupted between mom and dad. Screaming, breaking things, etc. – the usual, to be honest. Sister shows up at my house because the fight got physical when dad shoved mom onto the ground and put his fist in her face. She taunted him (because that’s the smart thing to do, of course), but it didn’t go further than that. Sister and niece stayed at my house while mom refused to leave her house because dad might destroy more of their belongings. Awful things were said from both parties, including “I don’t love you,” “I love everyone in the family but you,” and “everything about you gets under my skin.”
The Result: First, dad was leaving to another state to stay with his mother and taking the business with him, leaving sister unemployed and mom with a house she can’t afford. Next, they agreed to live together until they can sell the house (never going to happen in its current condition) and then go their separate ways. Now, mom went to visit her mother to “clear her head,” sister is not looking for another job, and things seem to have gone back to normal with mom gone. In other news, mom is talking crazy and saying really odd things on the phone. Not sure if the plan is to work on the marriage or just have an arrangement until she can support herself without him.
My mom says she’s staying because she has nowhere to go. She once asked me when my husband and I bought our home if she could live with us, and the answer was no. I told my husband we’d probably end up divorced if my mother lived with us. She’s a completely different person than the woman that raised me and our personalities clash big time. Now I’m getting a passive aggressive guilt trip without her even asking if she can stay with us for awhile now.
My husband and I got a call from my mom this weekend asking us to take my sister to the hospital because the detox prevented her from keeping anything down and she was severely dehydrated. We were told she’d take a cab home, but got a call from her later saying the hospital wouldn’t allow it (not sure if that’s a lie), so we went back to the hospital and had to wait several hours before we were able to leave. Come to find out dad was asleep in the house and she refused to wake him and ask him to take her to the ER. He also offered to come pick her up, but she made it seem like he refused until he called me himself. I’m livid with all of them. If they want to screw up their lives with pills, that’s their business and not my problem. I want nothing to do with it.
It’s getting exceedingly hard to remain a member of a family I have nothing in common with. I feel sorry for them all in a way, but they’re adults and they make their own crap decisions that I shouldn’t be responsible for. My mom doesn’t deserve to live the way she does and I feel bad that she feels she has nowhere to go and that she can’t support herself on her limited income, but I simply cannot live with this woman.
Should I feel incredibly guilty? Am I a selfish monster? Like I said, they’re all adults. The only one I’m genuinely empathetic toward is my niece, who unfortunately knows no better and thinks everything going on is pretty normal. It sucks, but it’s not as if I can snatch her away and raise her myself. My husband feels the same as I do and we discuss this often, but I just want some unbiased outside perspective. What is my responsibility here, in your opinion? Any advice at all would be great.
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