Older chest

This time separated from anyone my age and chuck full of "family time" gives me a lot of time to think -- and get depressed. How will the monotony not drain me with apathy and frustration? All of the stuff bubbling under the surface, all the stuff we'd like to avoid comes out and taints our emotions and darkens our time together during these long stretches of time together.

1. By all accounts, I'm a failure. Academically, I turn everything in late and oversleep instead of going to class. I show up late for tests or never show up for quizzes. I'm not the successful, straight-A student that many people assume, and my future is in jeopardy.
a. Financially, I spend more than I make.
b. I show up late for work and don't get all of my tutor reports in. I don't fill things out in a timely fashion at all.

2. I'm angry at my dad for the divorce; I blame him for it, and I don't trust his honesty with himself or others after "the Loris." And his attempts to control my life (which arise more out of love than they seem to, I realize) sometimes seem ludicrous, even laughable in his hypocrisy.

3. I don't like Lori. I see her, in part, as a catalyst for the divorce, though I don't think she was as aware of what was going on as my mom thinks. I hate how my dad treats her, and I hate that she gets mad over little things, but puts up with the biggest crap he dishes out.

4. I don't like my mom. I haven't felt closeness or affecton to or from her since I was little. She doesn't like kids, but she's always pretended to. For some reason, she stopped or gave up on being supportive at times just because she didn't like our ages. Except that kids don't work like wine -- you can't just cast us aside for years until you decide we've reached an age in which you can now enjoy us. She's so stern and correctional most of the time, and has been for so long, that her kindness, generosity, affection, and interest now seem somehow false.

5. And I don't really trust her. As much as I don't trust Dad's judgment, I don't trust the strength or stability of her love -- she's just as unreliable as one of my dad's moods. She has taken out her frustrations on me and thus taught me that some truly beautiful, but complex things are ugly punishments (like femininity, for example), and she has told both Cody and I things about ourselves that stick and cling to us with such great force, hurtful things, that her attempts to affirm us seem fickle and feeble at best. Plus, she hasn't treated Cody, especially, in the way a loving, supportive, understanding mother -- someone she wants and claims to be -- should! We are not toys tht can be picked up again whenever someone so chooses.

6. Bob is not our father; his kids are her family and not ours; and their house will never be "our" home, nor would I ever desire to make their home my own. I want to support her in her new life, but she does not get to decide that my life has to suddenly tuck and roll into this nice, neat little package of Family Suburbia. I don't want a new life, complete with prepackaged step-siblings and step-nephews. I'm happy she's found someone who makes her happy & vice versa. I kind of miss our past life as our family, and maybe that's why I'm so critical of the past -- I don't know if that even makes any sense. I guess it's a paradox. But the best I can do is create my life -- not my mom's chosen new life or my dad's, either; not some combination or hybrid of the two; just my own life, which includes the same people as before.

7. I'm incredibly self-centered, and this divorce/remarriage thing has only served to heighten this. Whereas the center of my life once included a whole family unit, replete with traditions and conflict, that family has been torn, and its members now spread away from the center. While there are new people at the periphery, those new people in the lives of my former family members, there's now no real, emulsified (that's non-glued-together, for all of you non-sciencey folks) family at the center.