My family? Oh, they're great. Couldn't be better thanks.

Or not.

It starts with my brother. My brother suffers from acute social anxiety disorder, we found out last year, after he checked himself into rehab to kick his addiction to the drugs and alcohol he'd been self-medicating with for twenty years. Rehab went well. While there he received much-overdue medical attention, therapy, and most importantly a diagnosis of his illness and a prescription for the anti-anxiety medicine which would make it possible for him to lead a normal life. When he left the hospital we were introduced to a man we had almost forgotten existed. He was lucid, funny, sharp, curious; had his trademark mischievous twinkle in his eye. Within a few days he hooked up with a family friend (also recovering) who ran a trucking company, and began an apprenticeship to acquire a commercial drivers license. He'd start a new career. A new life. He was assured by his psychologist that social services would help him in that endeavor.

However he was denied medicaid to pay for rehab or to cover his then current prescription costs --any public assistance help at all-- due to the fact that he owned a small parcel of essentially worthless property. A property upon which his house sat. A property that was promptly taken by the bank for the back mortgage payments and overdue taxes he accrued while in rehab. He got the news on the road, in Florida, still completely sober and weeks away from getting his license: he'd lost everything. No house, no land, no income, no medical insurance, and ten thousand dollars worth of rehab debt on top of what he owed the bank. Then his meds ran out, then his anxiety returned...then he got really, really fucking drunk. And stayed that way.

So he's homeless now. Living in a truck.

My mother, who owns a home in the same town as brother, cannot help him financially; but would give him a place to stay if her boyfriend (with whom she lives and shares a mortgage) hadn't banished him from the house. He's not one to go in for all that sympathy or empathy crap, no sir. He's all about the pulling one's self up from one's bootstraps. Even if you don't have bootstraps, because the bank took your boots.

Mom wants to leave the boyfriend, but can't. They both share the title to the property, and neither one can afford to buy the other out. He ain't leaving, he's proven. She has nowhere to go. So she sets up her own space in a back room, waits for him to pass out drunk each night, and cleans up where he's pissed on the rug and puked on the couch in the morning. Oh, and sneaks out an extra bowl of food next to the cat's behind the shed, so my brother can eat.

And that's only a fraction of the shit that's going down.

Mom and I talk on the phone every night. At some point we discovered we had run out of potential remedies for any of our familial problems, and decided all the venting and bitching wasn't helping matters-- it was only making us sick. We agreed we wouldn't say anything at all...until we had a plan, or could come up with some solution, we'd talk about the weather.

So...How's the fucking weather?

Posted by Antigeist at October 5, 2004 11:04 AM