Posted by fxckfeelings on February 18, 2010
If about half of all marriages end in divorce, then, say, a tenth of marriages end in nothing short of open warfare. In a marital battle, some people fight by keeping the verbal (and legal) bombs flying, others hide face down in a fox hole, but both of those tactics only serve to make the war intensify. A better battle plan is to give up on any control of your opponent’s forces (or feelings) and, without too many words or too little action/open fire or fatalities, figure out what you think is right and calmly begin peace talks on those terms.
–Dr. Lastname
My husband always saw himself as the righteous protector of our daughter and, after our divorce, he got into the habit of dragging me into court to force me to pay for some super-costly treatment or schooling that was always no more than a little bit better than what was available for free, but he’d look like a hero to our daughter and the court and the social worker, and I’d look like a miserly shit, and I’d complain bitterly, which just got everyone more on his side, and I was screwed. My daughter bought the bullshit, which meant she and her father shared a tight bond based on hating me, the Scrooge. But I thought the court assaults would stop when she turned 18, until yesterday, when I learned he’s suing me, once again, this time to pay for our daughter’s college tuition, even though she never asked me, she’s over 18, and, with her history of alcohol abuse (and no attempt to get sober), paying for her to go to college without going to rehab first is a waste of money. I think they’re both just scraping the barrel for reasons to drag me into court and I’m getting flashbacks about being raped by the judge. I don’t have any illusion about all of us getting along, but I think it’s fair to want this craziness to stop.
Like it or not, it’s your ex’s legal right to haul you into court at his whim, force you to hire a lawyer, and make you look like a creep. As a reward, you get to give him a good chunk of your savings to pay for something you don’t believe in, to someone who’s out to ruin your life.
Say what you will about justice, but most of the time, it isn’t very fair.
There’s no way you can avoid feeling helpless and outraged, and there’s no shower long or hot enough to make the violated feeling walk away. If, however, your goal is to stop this from happening again by repeatedly venting your outrage, you’ll actually make it worse. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by fxckfeelings on February 15, 2010
As Valentine’s weekend comes to a close and the Holiday Death Triangle of Christmas-New Year’s-Valentine’s once again completes its cycle of horror, it’s time to reassess what makes relationships last. Sometimes Mr. Right doesn’t have a connection with you that makes you see fireworks, while a connection with Mrs. Wrong does make you see fireworks, but only after her left hook connects with your face (and your family disconnects from your life). Valentine’s Day might be about love, but there’s a reason why good relationships last for years and Valentine’s haunts our lives but once a year.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m in my mid-30s, about to have my first child with my husband of about a year. My husband is a solid guy—he’s steady, and very caring—but deep down, I know a big reason I married him is because I wasn’t getting any younger and wanted to start a family. I dated a guy in law school that I was really in love with, but he was a lot older, made it clear he never wanted kids, and was your basic passionate, unavailable nightmare. I admit, I’m hormonal, which means my husband’s been getting on my nerves a lot lately, which just makes me obsess more and more about how I’ve settled for a life without love. My goal is to figure out how to get through the next stage of my life and live with my decision.
Don’t get superficial and compare the Valentine’s Day smiles at the next bistro table to your current mood and nostalgic memories of past lovers. In my experience, finding the love of your life isn’t too difficult, but finding a good partner is a real pain in the ass.
By “good partner,” I don’t mean someone you’re crazy about, under any and all circumstances, forever and ever, amen. I mean someone who is strong, easy to live and work with, accepts you during your weaker and less likeable moments, communicates on your wavelength, and picks up the load when you can’t. As well as someone whom you can put up with most of the time.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on February 11, 2010
Parents instinctually want to protect their children from distress, but that doesn’t mean that help will do any good; some kids run to their parents in a panic at every loud noise, some kids are too thick to even know they’re in trouble. Either way, it’s the parents who have to be more practical than sentimental before they jump in. If only more people did that before they decided to have kids in the first place, I’d have a lot less business.
–Dr. Lastname
My daughter drove me and my husband crazy the other day. She’s a great kid who does very well in school, but at the beginning of every term she calls us up in great distress to tell us she can’t figure out what courses to take because the ones she really wants to take aren’t available and it’s impossible to make a decision about the others. So she did it again, and, as always, when we asked about the courses and made recommendations, she told us we were doing nothing but making her more confused and then broke off the conversation. I talked to my wife and she agrees we were careful to listen and we weren’t overbearing. P.S., the next day my daughter made up her mind and found a perfectly good group of courses to take, as usual. How can we help her get less distraught and see that we’re just trying to help?
Nobody wants their child to be in pain or agony, but it’s important to ask yourself whether it’s important if your daughter is…distraught.
Yes, her panic hurts her and it hurts you, but life is pain, pain is often unavoidable, and it’s not getting in her way, so why make it more important than it has to be?
It’s hard not to come running when a kid is crying, but this is a situation that’s familiar, always turns out well, and can’t be helped with a band-aid and a kiss on the boo-boo.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on February 4, 2010
If someone’s related to you, there’s no guarantee they’re going to be honest with you, or even honest about you to anyone else. You can try to get them to own up to their problems with anger, eloquence, and/or the help of the court system, but the smarter choice is to stop pushing them towards the truth and hold onto the facts yourself. As long as you’re calm and factual, people can draw whatever conclusions they want and your relatives can stick to their version, but your part in the family affair is settled.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m fine now (I’m 14), but I’m trying to figure out how to deal with a crazy father who physically abused me until a couple of years ago—that’s when my mother finally figured out what was happening and had me come live with her. The trouble is, I guess you could say my father doesn’t see reality the way other people do and he never remembers hitting me. In his mind, when he’d hit me, it was because I was trying to destroy him, so what he tells the judge is that he loves me and that my mother is a raging alcoholic who has brainwashed me to hate him (my mother stopped drinking after the divorce, years ago) and he really believes what he says. My goal is to get him to stay away from me and convince others that his version of reality isn’t real.
Kids aren’t the only ones who have trouble accepting the fact that we often can’t protect ourselves from scary crazy boogeymen, particularly when the craziness isn’t obvious, and the boogeymen are family.
We’ve said it here before: certain crazy people are not obviously crazy and are particularly good at persuading other people to see them as injured victims because they truly, truly believe they are, no matter what really happened. It’s a kind of sickness for which no one has the cure, and nobody feels sicker than the victims in the wake of these sickos, who don’t necessarily feel sick at all.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 25, 2010
If you hate someone or something for reasons beyond your control, then those feelings are, in essence, beyond your control, so resistence is essentially futile. Hating something is one thing, but then feeling guilty for hating, then angry for feeling guilty, depressed for feeling angry…so it goes down the feelings spiral, down the emotional toilet.
–Dr. Lastname
When I broke up with my girlfriend, I felt like I didn’t have a choice; she was smothering me, she made me feel guilty and like a bad person all the time, and I just couldn’t take care of her anymore. We’d been together for a relatively long time and I had reached the end of my rope (she’d even started hitting me and breaking things in our apartment). The problem is now that I feel even worse because, in the months since I ended it and she moved out, she’s started getting high a lot and has threatened to kill herself more than once. If she goes through with it, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself. My goal is to feel less awful about breaking up with her (which I did to feel less awful).
As a not-sociopath, you can’t feel less than awful about your ex-girlfriend’s drugging, depression, and self-destruction.
It’s the feeling responsible, as well as awful, that will not only do nothing to help her recovery, but will also turn your sorrow into well-entrenched, call-the-doctor depression. So…Dr. Lastname here, how can I help you?
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 21, 2010
In-laws are classically seen as a pain in the ass, but when your in-laws’ offspring becomes your ex, and your own offspring remain, that pain doesn’t go away. Sustaining relationships with exes is hard—especially when those exes are drunk, crazy, and generally impossible—but when you have kids, you’re forced to sustain those relationships, with parents and grandparents, like it or not.
–Dr. Lastname
My ex-wife cares about our kids, but she’s always been overbearing and intense, which is why I ‘m very happy not to be married to her now. Her latest rage, in both senses, came from her new therapist, who persuaded her that she’s depressed and has bad dreams because she was neglected and maybe abused by her alcoholic parents, so now she wants our kids to have no contact with them, their grandparents, at any time, whether the kids are staying with me or with her (we have joint custody). Now, I’m not crazy about her parents and they sometimes drink too much, but they never did anything unsafe and the kids love them, so I was shocked to hear from the kids that they miss their grandparents (my wife never informed me about her new policy). I don’t want to trigger a court fight with my wife—I can’t afford it, and neither can she, but she spares no expense when she feels her kids are threatened by the forces of evil—and I’ve got no great wish to put myself on the line for her parents, but I don’t like having her tell me what the kids can do when they’re with me and I don’t think losing their grandparents is good for them. My goal is to send her a message that she can’t control what our kids do when they’re with me and protect the kids from losing their grandparents.
The short answer is, you can’t win a pissing contest with a fire hydrant.
Yes, your ex-wife has no right to tell you what you can and can’t do with the kids when they’re with you, and yes, it hurts them to be cut off from their grandparents, and yes, in the short run it’s entirely within your power to facilitate grandparental visits.
No, none of this matters in the big picture.
If your wife is the kind of self-righteous, crusading, angry asshole you describe her as being, then you have very little power to make things better and many, many opportunities to make things worse.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 7, 2010
Being a single parent comes with an infinite number of challenges, but a main source of complication is reconciling the dual identities: “single” and “parent.” Possible new partners shouldn’t see you as just an individual, but as could-be future family. At the same time, when looking for new partners, you should be able to see beyond your parenting responsibilities, lest you lose the ability to manage a search of any kind. For a lot of single parents, even more miraculous than children is the ability to find a way to make a relationship last.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve always been a restless guy, so I got a job working for a consulting firm that sends me to jobs all over the country, for months at a time, though I often get home to see my folks. During my last visit over the holidays, I ran into an old girlfriend from high school, and it was like something out of a movie; we clicked instantly and have been acting like lovesick teenagers ever since, like nothing had ever changed, and I think this really might go somewhere. Of course, two big things have changed since high school, namely that I’ve left town and that she now has a kid that she loves to death (and she’s on good terms with the dad, who lives nearby and shares joint custody). I’ve made plans to spend a weekend with her later this month, and I want to keep our good thing going, but my sister tells me I’m an idiot because, unless I’m willing to move back to my hometown and act like a dad, I’m wasting my ex’s time and setting myself up for a big hurt. I don’t want to do either of those things, but I really love this woman and know she loves me, and her kid already has a dad he sees all the time, so if I stick around for the long term, would it really matter if I’m not physically around that much? My goal is to be with the woman I love, even if I’m not always there.
Despite what every pop song has ever said, love is not all there is; it’s just the initial glue (along with sex) that binds us together, regardless of whether we can possibly live together or meet one another’s long term needs.
So don’t listen to Celine Dion, because your goal isn’t to find true love, but to find a love that won’t lead to heartbreak, ruined finances, and a messed up kid (and I’m not talking about you).
Now, it’s possible that your girlfriend doesn’t want or need a full-time partner, and that a steady guy-on-the-side is perfect. like Oprah’s Stedman or Dolly Parton’s hubby. Your job is to figure out whether that’s the case now, and how long it’s likely to last, because there aren’t many Oprahs and Dollys in this world, and Oprah and Dolly don’t have kids.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 28, 2009
Most people don’t wait until New Years to make resolutions about the bad behavior they’re going to stop putting up with next year; usually, things get bad enough by Christmas Eve that we’ve already started our mental lists of “never again.” The problem is that the worst kind of bad behavior can seldom be stamped out; it tends to exist all the time, for all of time, amen. Aiming to start 2010 by confronting that bad behavior is a bad idea; finishing 2009 working around that behavior is a better start.
–Dr. Lastname
I don’t know where I failed as a parent, but my daughter announced over Christmas that she’s leaving her perfectly nice husband after cheating on him, and it’s the last straw in terms of me wanting to just ask her why her behavior is and always has been so self-destructive. These aren’t the values I taught her—for one thing, I’m still married to her father after 30 years—and I’ve always pushed her to follow through in life and work, but she seems incapable of doing anything but sabotaging herself. My goal is to get my daughter to tell me why she feels she has to mess up her own life.
If your greatest joy as a parent is to see your kid happily married off, then it makes sense that one of your greatest sorrows is to see her unhappily divorced, particularly if she’s messed up and there’s nothing you can do to stop her.
If it hasn’t already occurred to you many times about parenting your daughter, this is certainly a good time to realize that you have no control, and that parents with good values and solid self-control can, and often do, have fucked-up kids and lose sons-in-law they’ve learned to love.
The gene for fuck-up-edness can skip a generation, or lay dormant until fed with alcohol, or it can wave a bright red flag in the form of the names “Randi” or “Amber.” Or it can just come out of nowhere and make parenting really hard, which is what it’s done to you for years.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 21, 2009
Even if none of us has spent Christmas with our entire families, most of us feel like we should help make it happen and feel terribly guilty if we can’t (I just feel guilty for taking their money, but only a little). We have some illusion that the holidays are the time for our criminal or alcoholic or crazy relatives to put their behavior aside, slap on a Christmas sweater, and join their loved ones around the tree and we feel bad if we can’t make the reunion happen, or even let it happen. But fear not, there’s a way to make excuses tactful and blameless without bringing down everyone’s holiday cheer. Gaw bless us, every drunk and lawless one.
–Dr. Lastname
Please note: There will be no new post on Thursday, 12/24, due to the holiday. Please continue to write in, however, because there will be a new post on 12/28. Thanks, and happy holidays!
My ex-wife was always a wild outlaw in high school, (I got the kids), she’d show up from time to time, but rarely when she said she would, and you never knew when she’d be high, so the court imposed supervised visitation. I want my kids to have a mom though, but when she no-shows, the kids are crushed. Of course, the kids want to see her, particularly for Christmas, but what they don’t know is that she and her current boyfriend were caught on video robbing a liquor store, so if she’s going anywhere, it’s probably straight to jail. . My goal is to figure out a way to break this to my kids so that they don’t hate their mother (even though I sort of think they should).
You can’t protect your kids from the hurt of loving an outlaw mother, any more than you could protect yourself for falling for her years ago. Telling your kids that she’s a bad person inflicts a worse kind of hurt, because it devalues the love you and the kids have given her (which, as you know, you can’t get back).
Even if you can’t protect them from hurt, you still can and should protect the value of their love for her and whatever is meaningful about hers for them.
To begin with, don’t buy the idea that outlaws are regular people who make bad choices. That’s one of those stupid, false-hope ideas that assumes that everyone has the choice to be good or bad and can redeem themselves by making better choices. It’s sort of a hybrid of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Santa’s “Naughty/Nice” list…and it’s bullshit.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on December 17, 2009
We keep saying that Christmas is hard on everyone, but that’s because religion is hard on everyone, no matter who or what you believe in, and religion is around all year long. Just because religion is hard, however, doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s good, actually, because it expresses essential differences and gets people upset, confused, and heading towards my office.
–Dr. Lastname
I recently had to relocate my family for work, so we were forced to move from a fairly large east coast city to a small town nowhere near water (unless you count the great lakes). My wife and I are Jewish, and we’re raising our kids in the religion, but that was much easier where we used to live than where we are now, where our 12-year-old son, who was always a bit of an outsider, is now facing a lot of teasing at school for all the ways he’s different, which includes his religion. It’s been especially bad for him lately, given that the town is very Christian, with prayers before high school football games and lots of school-centered Christmas activities, and he’s even further on the outside of what the other kids are doing. As you may or may not know, Channukah isn’t Christmas—it’s a minor holiday—and we don’t try to pretend otherwise by giving smaller gifts and not playing it up so much. My son is younger than his age, though, and he likes to tell everyone he’s not interested in Christmas and then they pick on him and he accuses them of anti-Semitism and it’s a mess. My goal is that he should be proud of being a Jew while getting along better with people at school.
It’s painful to watch your kid get picked on and called a dork, particularly when he is a dork and does dorky things that you know are going to make his troubles worse.
If you tell him to shut up and keep his opinions to himself, you may be destroying the paltry remains of his self-esteem. If you try to get his tormentors to stop, you may stir up additional trouble.
You could argue that it’s your job, and society’s, to give him a positive school experience that supports differences in religion and personal style. I would argue that’s bullshit. It’s not in your power and idealistic expectations will often make things worse.
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