Do you have one or more screw-ups in your family?

Question by Seeker2008: Do you have one or more screw-ups in your family?
You know, the people that the sane family members don’t want to be around, but yet the person still seems to f-up everything they put their hand to?

I have an uncle and a grandmother who are like this. The grandmother is in her 70’s, and has lived with us for about 15+ years now. She saw an opportunity for a place to live (she had slept in her car in a plaza parking lot for a long time) after my father committed suicide when I was 10 years old. She has “helped” some…but has f-ed up my family something awful with her presence. She uses more than she pays per month (about $ 300 – no rent is that cheap, no matter how ‘old’ you are). She has no pension from anywhere (just about $ 500 a month from Social Security)…she never held a job long enough to get one. Every “good” job that she had, she made up some ridiculous lie about her employers and quit. When she was a nurses aide, she did the same thing with the people she was taking care of (accusing a lady that she was taking care of, of being a man, for instance). Or she would come up with some reason that she didn’t like the person’s family. She never had a “career” officially – she, embarrassingly, cut people’s grass (with a push mower) for like 20 years for $ 20 here and $ 40 there. At one point she was sleeping in her car. She has bad credit – a school from like 30-40 years ago is STILL calling trying to get money from her. She dropped out of it and didn’t want to pay the bill, because she didn’t want to finish the course.

Now, the uncle. He’s the youngest of the said grandmother that lives with us. My mother, in times past, helped this uncle (who is my mom’s brother, of course) get a vehicle. He didn’t want to pay for it, he wanted his mom (the grandmother that lives with us) to pay for it. Long story short, it got repo’d, they wrecked my mom’s credit for 7 years, we ended up refinancing the house to not lose it, my grandmother was stealing her very own daughter’s mail that was basically threatening lawyers’ notices about possibly trying to garnishee her wages from her paycheck to pay for the amount left on the loan for the vehicle. The uncle lied, the grandmother lied.

I have the absolutely sorriest grandmother and uncle that I’ve ever seen in my entire life. This grandmother starts trouble with our neighbors, saying they are using the bathroom in their yards making it stink (nobody smells anything), saying they trained birds to peck on our house (woodpeckers), and other absurd things. Yes, she has some mental problems (diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic decades ago, she refused to take meds or get help)….but half of what she does seems to be straight from the pure evil and hatred in her heart against other people. She is easily the most evil person I have ever seen. She clearly knows exactly what she is doing and saying against people, and does it on purpose – such as what was done to her own daughter.

She “doesn’t understand” why my mother doesn’t want to talk to the brother that conned her and wrecked her credit. This grandmother has favored this youngest son over the other son and my mom since he was a little child. When he got in jail, he wrote her letters cussing her out and saying she never did anything to him. He has been in and out of jail at various times in his life and I remember we had to go see him throughout a lot of my earlier childhood. He likewise “doesn’t understand” why my mom doesn’t want to associate with him. He owes my mom $ 8,000.

Every little task that my grandmother does seems to be a screw-up, and it has been this way all of her life. I just don’t understand it. She is alert and capable – her mind is not “gone” to the point of not being able to take care of herself. If she washes dishes, she swishes them under the water for a few seconds and crams them in the drainer with grease, dried food, etc. on them and says they are “clean.” She drinks out of filthy cups. She flies apart at the smallest of things. The bathroom will be empty for hours during the night. If she hears you get up and go in the bathroom – she’ll get up and go at the exact same time and be trying to “hurry” you out of it, even though you just went in there. Otherwise, if you didn’t get up, she wouldn’t. The same thing for the kitchen. She never even had her own home in the 70 years of her life – she was always a “renter” laying on someone else and demanding something of them. As her grandson, she grudges everything I do to be productive in my life. She had countless chances to do something with her life, but didn’t. She tries to, instead, worry about every little detail of my life. At some points, even has “followed me to the bus stop” up the street to hide behind a fence and “watch me” until I get the bus to go to work.

Some peo
Some people seem to think I’m not having enough “pity”…but this lady is a freaking disaster. She’ll be laying under my mom’s help until the day she dies, which is a burden for my mom. But of course, my mom wouldn’t put her in a home somewhere and my grandmother is too much “there” to be willing to allow that, anyway. Even though my mother doesn’t have to keep her here in her house, if she didn’t want to.

My mother (in her 50’s) has wanted to work $ 7 to $ 10 an hour jobs for most of her life…never stepping up to get into any kind of management or growth position to do better. She “doesn’t feel like she could handle” anything with more responsibility, so she works a simple job at a grocery store. Without me being here, both my grandmother and mother would basically not be able to do much or financially make it in life. My grandmother relies on my mom, my mom relies (and has relied on me since I was a little child) on me to stay afloat.
Someday I’ll have my own family and won’t be “at home” to help them. I feel deprived as the son in this family of people that never want to grow or do anything, and of course, I am doing everything I can to further my growth and not end up like them. I know that getting away will be the only sense of “freedom” for me, in this situation. Anyone else dealing with something similar?

Best answer:

Answer by Brittany♥Alex
everyone has people like that in there family. At least one.

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