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boxing
2006-05-17 - 3:31 p.m. Are you wondering where I am? I am at home, loading all our worldly possessions into boxes, except the ones I will leave behind to make our house look artfully beautiful. Also, our clothes and things. Yes, we are going to try to sell our house while living in it. Anyway. I have to say it's pretty awful, and not really fun at all. And, secretly, I think our contractor is a whiny baby. But I'm not telling him that. And, my niece was here for a few days. She spent spring semester in Hawai'i, and is on her way back to North Carolina. I like her very much. I'm actually sorry I couldn't take more time to do fun stuff with her, but on the other hand, I think she used the time to catch up on her sleep, hang out in the yard and read, stuff like that. She's a great kid. What I realize when I'm around her, though, is that 20 is not really very old. But I also think she's the victim of a kind of bad divorce. One parent, for instance, tells her that she shouldn't go to college because she's not ready and doesn't know what she wants to do. The other says she should go. The poor kid -- how is she even supposed to know what she wants to do, when whatever she does will please one parent and displease the other. It's actually pretty awful -- It's actually pretty easy to blame her dad, who is my stepbrother. He's the one who doesn't want her to go to college. He's the one who whines when she doesn't visit, then spends the time she's visiting sitting at his desk ignoring her. N and my nephew are actually pretty good friends, and last year there were just a few days that they would overlap in MA, and A arranged it so that their whole family (he has remarried, and has two more children -- also a sore point) went on some kind of trip up to New Hampshire for those few days. He could have arranged it for any other time. I would have arranged it for any other time. At the time I thought he was just being dim, but I am starting to think it may have been on purpose. It's not a big deal to me -- I try to stay out of other people's lunacy when I can. I do feel bad for my niece and nephew, because I think A's behavior makes it impossible for my niece, for instance, to know what she wants to do. I don't know whether it will be better or worse for my nephew, but possibly better. My niece is more inclined to try to please people. The bad thing is that it's exactly the sort of thing my mother just can not leave alone, and it's all twisted together because there's money involved -- money and custody and family trusts. If I were her, I would just stay out of it. But I don't think she's actually capable of that. So there's likely to be a huge explosion at some point, and I'm hoping not to be around at that point at all. Anyway -- just the kind of terrible family dynamics that might cause a person to move 3,000 miles away to a godless heathen wilderness. Ugh. Now I return to my boxes. Save me.
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