walters little world

Okay, I’m sorry – but I have to get this off of my chest.  It’s about familial issues, and mentions some dark issues I’ve faced.  Feel free to skip along to happier stuff.  Hell, I’d just stare at the awesome picture of Jack & Ianto kissing if I were you! ::grin::

<lj-cut text=”It’s all under the LJ Cut”>So I got my work ethic from my mother.  We’re both hard workers, always needing to have a job/something to do to keep us busy.  We have a sense of responsibility to our family, to our loved ones.  Even to those that we owe money to (our creditors, etc).  <br /><br />It’s obvious that this ethic has skipped several people in my family, including my nephew.  He was thrown out of his house when he was about 16 years old because his mother is mentally unstable.  I can say this with much authority, since she’s the same person that tortured me for years and almost drove me to suicide when I was a youngster.  So anyway, he went to live with my mother and eldest sister, and has for the last 12 years or so.  And in that 12 years, he’s barely held down a job; he’d rather sit at home, smoke cigarettes (at $6/pack – and they wreak havoc with my mothers severe asthma – but don’t ask him to go outside!), play video games, or go 4x4ing with his buddies.  In doing so, he asks my 80 year old mother (who’s on social security and VA survivor benefits totally $2,000 a month) and my eldest sister for money.  And they’ve bitched up a storm because of it.<br /><br />So his buddy is going to get married in Vegas, and asked him to come.  Of course he still doesn’t have a job.  So he went to my mother and eldest sister, and my sister came to me expecting me to hand over airline miles and hotel points for him to go to Vegas for a week.<br /><br />In a nutshell, I said no.  When she wanted to know why, I said that he’s 28.  That she bitches to me all the time about him wanting money from her.  I said the last time I bought him an airline ticket, he had to EARN it; I made him patch the leaking deck and repair some stuff around my mother’s house, which he only did because his friend made him.  He’s not doing anything to earn it now.   He tinkers with cars in the yard (their yard and the dump of cars and parts has caused them fines from the Municipality – but he won’t do anything about it, and my mom and sister won’t make him).  <br /><br />If I, at 28, was holding down a good paying job and had a car and house that I and my partner paid for, WHY shouldn’t I expect another 28 year old to do the same?  Or at least have more ambition than sitting around in dirty underwear playing XBox?  So now, just so you know, I’m being cast as the pariah of the family – because I refuse to help him out.<br /><br />::sigh::</lj-cut>