My family is mentally unwell - part 1: the mother

Now that I have been working and am away from my family most of the day and with the counselling I have been getting and the reading I have been doing, I can see them with more objective eyes.

It's even more apparent that my mother and brother are mentally unwell.

While I am not a psychiatrist or even psychologist, I am quite smart and have been around them for a long time, so know my family and their behaviours really well, so I am in a good position to pinpoint their symptoms and try to work out what is wrong with them. Of course they would never concede to any diagnosis, but at least I will know.

The mother has OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) to a mild extent. She tends to check and re-check everything, even coming back home when she thinks she has left the door open. My mother also has bipolar disorder. She is so moody and can snap at you about anything.

The mother yells a lot, is very angry and upset one moment and the next, she's all happy and relaxed. Something can upset her one day and the next it doesn't. If she wants something from me, she's very manipulative. If I don't give her what she wants, she yells at me and tells me she wont give me xyz next time I ask.

The other day the cat came in with another cats' claw in his upper paw and I asked the mother to get it out while I held the cat (actually it was her suggestion). She couldn't get it out and the cat became very agitated and upset. Finally I calmed the cat and the mother told me to hold it down so she could try again (she was trying to pull out the other cat's talon with tweezers, but all she seemed to be pulling, was the cat's skin and upsetting him). I told her no, that we should just leave the cat for now, as her technique wasn't working and was only upsetting the cat. The mother didn't like that, told me that I just wanted everything my way and that I was so stubborn.

I took the cat to the family room, where he hid under the couch, because he was obviously upset and didn't want any put rough handling.

I had some cold chicken in the fridge, so I cut off a tiny bit and took it to him, putting my hand (with the chicken on it) under the couch to let him smell it and eat it. To try to cajole him out. He did eat it without swiping me. I went back to the kitchen to get some more meat, to try to use it to cajole the cat out from under the couch. The mother started yelling at me, telling me to stop putting meat under the couch (I wasn't doing that, the meat was on my hand and from there it went into the cat's mouth) and that what I was doing wouldn't work, that the cat wouldn't come out from the couch, that I was stupid and stubborn for doing it. So unnecessary and so wrong. The next thing I see, is the cat right next to me, waiting for the chicken I was going to feed him. He is a smart cat. The mother on the other hand, is such a bitch. She wants to force the cat to do what she wants and calls me stubborn for telling her to stop that and to let the cat come out of his own accord (or cajole him with food).

I just shake my head when I think about her and her comments. She always puts me down and says derogatory things about me, for no reason other than to make me feel bad. She just cannot stop putting me down. According to her, everything I do is totally wrong, I cant do anything right. Yet, that is not true. She just tries to make me feel that way with the mean and nasty things she says to me, so needlessly.

The mother tends to hide her nasty behaviours or be on her best behaviour when she is around other people she doesn't know well, or when she is around people she thinks she needs to impress. But, when she behaves as obnoxiously to people as she does to me (these are people she thinks she doesn't need to impress and doesn't care about), they do not like her one bit and tell me how sorry they feel for me that I have a mother like that. Yeah, don't I know it!

These fools dont deserve to own any pets

They are simply abhorrent, their actions pertaining to their cat is abhorrent and cruel.

The cat has injured his paw and cant extend his nails out. The vet thinks it's either a break in the paw or a strain on the tendon that serves the nail in the paw, but that they had to bandage it and keep it stable for a few weeks to get it to heal. In addition to this, they are supposed to keep the cat inside at all times until it gets better.

The cat's bandage fell off a day after it was bandaged. They wont take it back to the vet to get it re-bandaged because they cant seem to tell the vet that they should be liable for paying for it again, after it fell off after just one day, so they left it like that.  I cant fight with them to take the cat to the vet, because they just act even more vitriolic and abusive to me when I have done so in the past, even though the cat had an abscess and had to get it drained and take antibiotics.

Even if they are so petty that they wont take the cat to the vet (it's just a $50 fee they would be charged - which just shows how petty they are) they are supposed to keep it inside, but they don't. It's now two days that they have let the cat outside and he climbs up over the fence and hurts his paw more, so that it's going to take longer to heal, if it does. They just have absolutely no sense whatsoever. Just totally ignorant and idiotic.

This is just cruelty and if I say anything, they tell me to "piss off and mind my own business", to "get lost and go back to bed" or they tell me, "it's our cat, not yours, so it's none of your business". What idiocy is that.

They really don't deserve to own any pets when they don't know how to treat them properly. If I could report them for animal cruelty, I would, but this isn't enough to show animal cruelty because it's not bad enough. But if it were, I would and then they could go to jail. Blood stupid idiotic and cruel ignoramuses.

They're back and the insanity starts again

Unfortunately the respite from the manic behaviour did not last too long. My mother and LayZ boy came back early this afternoon and boy did I know about it!

My mother is upset and pouring her angst in an angry way to my step-father in the sun room. She must have argued with her half-sister (my aunt), as per usual and it must have been nasty, as per usual. So now she is at home rehashing everything to my step-father, telling him how awful and mean her sister was and how she was faultless in it all, yet somehow I doubt that!

Meanwhile, my brother Lazy-B is in his bedroom talking to himself. He's talking about what he is doing as he is doing it, "Now I am turning on the television and I am going to watch something before I put on the video. Then I'll watch the new videos I have before they have to go back to the rental store. Oh, what's this, my writing pad - let me see what else I have underneath it" and he kept on going on with the self-talk for a while in his bedroom. Obviously our mother must have been talking angrily about the experience while they were driving back home and because my brother cant process his feelings (as he is not mentally well), he has to self-soothe by talking to himself about things that are totally unrelated to the experience that has upset him.

The issue with my mother and her sister has been going on a long time.  My mother feels as though her mother (my maternal grandmother) favours her sister over her (sounds familiar doesn't it?) and feels resentful towards her sister. Her sister on the other hand is just as stubborn and wont give in either and is rude and nasty back to her. So there you have it - two stubborn women who wont give in and wont try to get along, most of the time. Now add a very resentful and really nasty ex-wife (my brother's), who absolutely hates my mother and also me, by extension and who has done everything she could to malign both of us to my aunt, which she knows will only make things worse between my aunt and my mother. What other kind of woman would marry someone like my mentally unwell brother than someone who is also really not normal herself? The ironic thing is that LayZ boy's ex-wife is very much a deluded woman, she lies as much as she breathes and she is unbelievably fake - she'll be so nice to you in front of your face, but behind your back, she's just say bitchy things about you. She doesn't understand how to communicate with people so she has to bitch about them behind their back.

I left soon after they came home as I didn't want to hear my mother's angry voice and I didn't want to encounter LayZ boy either. I had an appointment to go to anyway, so it was an opportunity to leave without dealing with either of them.