Financial abuse coming up got me thinking some.

One of the big pieces of relationship advice my mom had for me was to quietly stash some money away every pay period, just in case I might need it later. Especially ending up way more financially dependent than I ever wanted, because disability.

Not that she ever really accepted that part, but hey. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the earlier experience there helped her keep pushing to stay working when she was just in no shape to. Thoroughly fouling up her SSDI eligibility in the process. (Tip: If you’re too disabled to keep it up and might need SSDI? File as early as you feasibly can, and don’t keep stopping and starting jobs. That can mess up your work credits but good within the specified time period. My mother learned that the hard way.)

But, I can see why she might have wanted to avoid being that vulnerable to abuse in general again.

She had planned on going back to work after I was born, but decided not to once her leave was up with some encouragement. They were pretty financially stable without her income by then, and I suspect some unacknowledged disability stuff made it look more tempting.

To make a long story short: Some existing abusive behavior out of my biodad escalated, after a while she got shut totally out of the household finances that she had been managing up to that point (because culture), and he eventually started getting all important mail sent to a PO box instead of the house. Nothing suspicious there, right?

Yeah, he went through huge amounts of money nobody could quite tell where it even went–including a bunch he’d borrowed without telling her, and/or in her name. He apparently got tens of thousands in “emergency” funds off my grandparents alone within the last couple of years, and she knew nothing about it until after the divorce. (They were also hardly rich starting out.) Gambling? Coke, given the time period and just basically his personality? Doesn’t really matter. He went through all their money, plus who knows how much more, in just a few years time. And got more and more abusive acting.

The end result was that he finally got the house foreclosed on, and she left the marriage penniless and with a really unfavorable settlement because she just wanted away from my biodad’s terrible behavior. (Kinda classic in abusive relationships even without the rest, but yeah.)

Plus of course a 6-year gap in her work history and some extra layers of mental health problems.

I can understand why she wouldn’t have wanted to end up in that kind of position again. Still doesn’t make some of pressure put on me over the years right, though. Besides the ableist denial, a lot of this stuff was very victim blamey. Just makes it sadder that she did also apply most of that to herself. Not a great way to live.

At any rate, I haven’t been following the advice to stash away an emergency fund. I did start out doing that, but stopped after maybe a year–and that mini-hoard got spent on expenses. Call me stupid if you like. I probably would, if a personal emergency fund should ever start looking like a good idea. Probably would have noticed some signs of that by now, but I could always be wrong.

His kind of woman

clatterbane:

I was also reminded of one actually pretty hilarious story. Where the context doesn’t start out as funny.

Anyway, when my biodad was pulling his stalking and harassment shit after the divorce, he was still afraid to lay a finger on her. But, he couldn’t resist running his mouth. And he could really come up with some vile shit.

So, my mom sometimes totally lost it, and made herself easy to paint as a Crazy Bitch. Knowing the people involved, this is not surprising in the least.

But, that worked a little differently on one occasion.

When he drove an hour again for the opportunity to harass her at home, just because. So, she went down to talk to him at the street rather than have him causing problems at the house in front of me.

So, he sat there behind the wheel of his car, and the conversation of course progressed to where he started cussing her and just generally saying vile stuff.

And she ended up taking the bait, lost it, and reached through the window to slam his head against the steering wheel. Bounced it off there several times. With the idea of shutting that horrible mouth.

Not the first time something like that happened, and not the last. But, he kept coming back and baiting her anyway.

He didn’t call the cops or anything (ever), so she didn’t think that much more of it.

Until she got a call from my uncle a couple of days later. He could barely talk for laughing.

Apparently, this guy Johnny he had gone through school with had oh-so-casually run into him, and asked if she were seeing anyone. And if my uncle thought she might be interested in going out with him.

Because Johnny lived across the street, and he had watched the whole thing. And she really seemed like his kind of woman!

She never went out with Johnny, though. And I don’t think the 5 or 6 year age difference was that relevant. Though I doubt she would have had the same set of troubles dealing with him… 🙂

clatterbane:

I’m also just remembering again before I moved, when a friend of the family felt a need to have a talk with my mother. She’d grown up in NYC, and ended up at I think it was University College London for some postgraduate work in the ‘80s.

And she ran into enough mostly casual antisemitism and xenophobia–including some dog whistle references to Zionism in lectures–that it helped her not stay any longer than she needed to.

And also feeling a need to warn non-WASPy people who were not Jewish, 20 years later, because of how closely the social acceptability of that and more general xenophobia tend to run together. And some of what she and friends had personally encountered. She didn’t figure that things could have changed so significantly in that time, and she was honestly concerned about my possibly going into some not so great situations unaware. The change had been enough of a shock to her.

So, yeah, that’s one perspective.

The last bit of commentary here got me thinking more about another side of the “Enough In Atlanta” factor with some differences in social norms. (Major prompt there: “Speaking as someone who was raised in New England but went to college in Virginia, I was more at home in actual England than I was in the South because of the lack of talking to strangers.” As a transplant from SWVA to Greater London.)

Before, I focused more on the fewer actively unpleasant casual interactions out in public part of things, because that was heavily on my mind when I started venting.

Now, I am a fairly reserved person,at least by the standards I was raised around. And I definitely don’t have anything like the same gift of gab as, say, my mother. (Tbf, not that many people do. She was toward one extreme there.) And I realized going in that there are some pretty significant cultural differences going on there–as with so many other things–and try not to take it personally.

But, it can still mess with your head after a while, when the negative casual interactions are nowhere close to getting balanced out by positive ones.

Maybe especially when that pattern is sufficiently far off the norms you’re used to. Hard to imagine that wouldn’t apply pretty much across the board, but who knows. 15 years is apparently not enough time to get used to that imbalance.

(Not to say that pleasant casual interactions never happen. Just not as often as the other kind. And the people bent on acting gratuitously nasty out in public don’t seem to get a lot of feedback to discourage that. Not sure how many fucks a lot of them would give anyway, but hey, it seems worth a try.)

Just thinking, with the Fake Doctor Incident that came up in tags earlier. That was another thing which turned out more humiliating than it needed to, in a taking kids seriously kind of way. (As is unfortunately common.) Enough that I even remember it after all these years.

Based on my limited experience up to that point, I was very concerned that this random white guy in the ER was impersonating a doctor. And somehow my parents didn’t seem to notice or care, which was extra worrying.

(I don’t even recall why we were there that time, though I may well have knocked my head on something again. I ended up there a lot, because nervous mother. And I had seriously never seen a non-Asian doctor in that hospital before, in 3 or 4 years of my little accident-prone ass getting hauled in enough that the regular ER staff were probably sick of us.)

It seemed like a much better idea to pull one or both of them aside to raise these urgent concerns. Not only had I already learned that it might be very rude otherwise, I’d watched enough movies and TV to know that might not be safe. What is this person likely to do if he’s exposed as a fraud in front of a whole ER full of people? We just don’t know, but it’s unlikely to be good!

(The whole situation seemed creepy enough already, but this guy had also somehow managed to fool a whole ER full of professionals into thinking he was a doctor when he clearly was not. Someone to watch out for.)

Anyway, it was extremely worrying when nobody was willing to talk privately. Granted, my communicative speech was not up to much then, and I was very prone to having meltdowns and getting wrestled down in medical settings. (Which–surprise!–did not make me less terrified or prone to meltdowns in those settings. Kinda the opposite.)

In retrospect, my parents probably assumed that I was “just” trying to leave because it was the ER and I really didn’t want to be there. No doubt also true, but not even the most pressing motivation in that case for getting well away from Dr. Fraud.

So, I ended up having to blurt it out in front of everybody, including him. It wasn’t only that I didn’t want to go back and get treated by Not A Doctor, I was also concerned about other patients and felt like I needed to speak up before something bad happened.

That went over about as well as you might expect. Complete with all the adults present going into laughing fits and talking like I wasn’t even in the room. While admitting that, based on the limited information at hand? That conclusion made a lot of sense. (Among themselves. Not to me.) Which made it funnier, in the laughing at and not with sort of way which is somehow acceptable dealing with kids.

The laughing at didn’t make me trust that doctor more, I tell you what. And nobody apparently considered that if a little kid did not trust a particular doctor for whatever reason, maybe they should find another one.

I can kind of understand the laughter reaction, because that situation is pretty funny if you’re not the frightened small child in question. But, there are ways of handling it, and then there are ways. The way that was handled would have made me hesitate to say anything in the future if I’d seen Jason Voorhees doing rounds with his machete.

And that does seem too common, dealing with kids. Who are, indeed, usually doing their best to make sense of the world around them, based on the sometimes very limited information available. Ridicule doesn’t exactly encourage that.

Climate differences can seem pretty weird.

I grew up somewhere that actually gets decently higher annual rainfall than the British Isles. But, it doesn’t come in the same near-constant drizzle format, for a lot fewer rainy days. The end result here feels so much wetter, with less water involved overall.

(For that matter, it’s apparently not unusual for the nearby city where we lived when I was a little kid to get more total snowfall than Buffalo. It just rarely stays on the ground for more than a couple of weeks before melting off. )

It can still startle me some when there’s no rain for, say, a couple of weeks in the summer here, and that means drought. I guess so, when it’s the equivalent of a huge mist irrigation system over the island breaking down with everything adapted to frequent smaller amounts of water. It’s still disconcerting if you’re not used to that.

So right now I am blathering about weather, instead of putting on some more waterproof shoes to head out to the store ☔

Just reminded of one Irish friend years ago talking about her surprise after she came to London, at just how differently people here tend to handle death.

Apparently, funerals tend to be much smaller and more private affairs. And she was amazed to run into actual adults who had never been to one.

Same, tbh. I can’t even remember the first funeral I got dragged to as a little kid. (The first would have been an uncle who had a motorcycle crash when I was maybe 4 months old, though obviously there’s no memory there.)

I’m more used to pretty much everyone the dead person has ever known being obligated to at least make an appearance at the viewing, unless they’re half-dead themselves. Usually a little bit smaller crowd for the actual funeral service, though not necessarily by much. Also closer to what that friend would expect.

That conversation didn’t go around to how people talk about death and people who have died, but I would be surprised if there weren’t also some significant differences in social conventions there.

It is pretty interesting, just how much attitudes and conventions can vary depending on the culture. Definitely including around death and dying. I can’t help but favor some more matter-of-fact approaches, which isn’t that surprising considering.

I really don’t need to get started on wheat breads getting pushed hard as superior to and so much more “civilized” than corn, within the past 100 years or so.

Fine if you can digest it properly and it doesn’t set your immune system on the attack, but yeah.

Actually, my biodad apparently got pulled over by the cops multiple times over suspiciously slow driving around in the middle of the night.

I was a colicky baby–or at least that was the explanation they settled on for the persistent fussing and crying fits. And riding in the car was one of the few things that would get me settled down and sleeping for a while.

So, plenty of crawling around in the car in the wee hours. And he was usually the chauffeur.

My Mamaw grew up in a pretty abusive situation. Between some of the things her younger sister has said and some things she let slip after the dementia set in, it sounds appalling.

Anyway, one of the ways she dealt with that was by concluding that people just didn’t love their children back then, as a matter of course–but things have totally changed since she was a kid. Which is honestly pretty upsetting.

I just saw another post that struck me very much the same way. It sounds like the OP has had some terrible experiences, but I don’t think it’s really a more generalized common thing. Thankfully.