Okay, I need to get it off my chest. In general, this is quite a long story, but I’d do my best to at least cover the relevant context. Because, otherwise, that could have been a fucking book, if not two.
We’re on our way to Metro, a supermarket somewhat close to our home. It’s within a walking distance of approximately half an hour, most of which is through the largest park of Lviv, which is right in front of our window. So, naturally, that’s quite a good destination to buy something, and go back. That way, we spent a couple of hours, and our weekend at least more socialised.
I’d leave the detail that the fuckers hadn’t left Ruzzia. On the other hand, this detail contributes quite alright into the entire story.
Before, when my wife was very dependent on her idiot mother, she begged the mother to help her go there, and bring products back with her (mother’s) car. That was a source of numerous conflicts between us, on multiple levels. One of my arguments was that we don’t need her fucking mother lurking around all the time, and we’re perfectly capable to buy ourself fucking products without her supervision.
‘Ah, but we don’t have a car!’ she says.
In the very same time, she’s against the car, and while just a couple of weeks ago I offered her to get a nice car from a friend, who has two now, and their family just doesn’t need the 2nd one, she refused. ‘Car is too much trouble!’ And I agree, that’s why I don’t have a fucking car. Living in the city centre, and having everything in a walking distance is a bliss, and I have a strong revulsion towards locals, who fucking buy overly expensive cars for no fucking reason. Our apartment block is packed with cars more expensive than the flats! It’s fucking ridiculous, it’s just beyond me. Solomia says some of these people are surely getting credits to buy those cars, and that’s fucking cherry on top. I afraid, it would take Ukraine generations to brush off these barbarity Russia brought here through their centuries-long occupation. Fucking savages. I hate cars in the city, to find like-minded people, find any fuckcars subreddit or better Lemmy community, to get a grasp of what I want modern cities to look like.
Perhaps, that’s the reason I have never had any illusions about the United States. The country has no fucking infrastructure, it’s a wasteland to some significant degree. Great that their democracy works! Yay for that!
‘We can grab a fucking taxi’ would my reply go, because fucking taxi costs a dollar or two. It’s a 2 minutes trip, if you’re lucky with the traffic. If you’re not, it’s five minutes tops.
We were tolerating her mother for quite a long time, because I behaved like a civilised intelligent person, who respects his wife. Or so it was in the pre-times.
Her mother was a source of huge amount of stress, and it’s a miracle we did not divorced. If it’s not for kids, we’d not make it that far. I had thoughts of abandoning that ship even before Nadia was born, but decided to make an effort to make this family work. Everyone who knows me personally, knows that the source of all my frustrations in this marriage is her fucking mother. And her relationship with that mother.
In the early times of our marriage… well, maybe not just early, maybe right before her getting the psychoterapy sessions this summer, she used to say ‘it’s always you vs my mother, and I had to choose side.’ That way, she tried to tell me I shouldn’t have conflicts (and avoid them as she does all her life) with her mother. I tried my best all this time, before this July. After my wife went to therapy (right after that said conflict), the therapist communicated her that she doesn’t pick fucking side, she picked one already. It’s me and her who’s the family, not her and her fucking mother.
I hate this garbage person. She’s abusive idiot mother, and she’s the source of a gazillion of mental issues my wife has. Yep, there are things the wife could do differently, as her 7 years younger sister did. But she did them differently, as she saw the damage Solomia went through. The therapist told her that I’m fighting her mother, because she doesn’t fight her herself, and I’m protecting her, my wife. Which is true. I’d prefer not wasting a single joule of my energy on that bitch. I wish her dissipate. At least from our lives.
That’s my mother’s place in our lives. Solomia thinks that my mother isn’t part of my life because we live in different countries. Part of the reason I live in a different country — and it’s the primary reason, not just some side-effect — is me unwilling to communicate with my mother. We’re distant, and she did alright damage to my psyche as well. (And not just mine, but my first serious relationships as well.) I made a huge effort to work through all this, consuming a huge amount of psychology books, to the point I’m afraid to attend a psychoterapist, thinking (wrongly, I hope) that they could have research the entire topic less than me. I am not trying to say that all psychoterapist are worse than me, surely there are many various levels of knowledge and expertise of psychoterapists on the planet Earth, but I’m slightly afraid to bump into one who would have a shallower knowledge on the topic.
One of my favourite books so far is The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. When I was reading it in 2017, a year before we married, I saw myself quite a lot, but also Solomia and her mother even more. I tried to communicate that to her, mostly in vain. At some point I realised I should get her out of this fucking family, as far away as I could. Unfortunately, I failed at that, and instead, they’ve sucked me into the lore. Which made a significant psychological damage. As if I wasn’t traumatised already, on my own and independently.
I wanted my wife to read the book, but I haven’t found how to make it real. First, she’s not reading books. Mostly. Second, she’s reading Ukrainian language, reading English in these volumes I read, is difficult for her. And at this point in our lives, we’re not really capable of doing significant efforts. Third, I have no idea how to get this book, whether it’s translated, and I can just buy a paperback edition. I afraid it’s too niche to be conveniently available at the nearest bookstore. I did not research this well, because… see the 2nd point: I simply know she’s not at the place when she has any resources to work through that. Even me sending her (or even just reading) the quotes, it makes her tired, she has zero capacity even to think through any of that. That’s a shame, and I can understand it entirely, but still… I think I need to give up here and don’t push this on her. She’d arrive there on her own, eventually. Or she’d die by her mother press, and if so, my task is to not die myself, and hopefully save my own kids from their grandmother damaging behaviour. Thankfully, she makes it easy, she has quite a little number of fucks about her own grandchildren. To her, those are my kids, not her grandkids. She doesn’t like me too, and I’m long at this point of treating it as a compliment. It’s like if Russian wants you killed, perhaps you do something right.
At the end of July, there was this event, when we went to the somewhat recently (a year or two) opened nearby McDonald’s. Which is close to Metro, by the way, so oftentimes we combine: we visit Metro, and go to McDonald’s then. That’s a socialising event for all of us, especially Nadia. She was wild before, and could just grab someone else’s something off their table. Say, Coca Cola. She just doesn’t understand matters like this. So, we do our best to train her to not behave like that, and behave in a civilised way. She’s very good at that, and we’re proud of her to make this huge progress.
Nadia likes Chicken McNuggets, and the new spicy version even more. Hnat loves french fries. And we like cheeseburgers. So, usually, we’re up to some combo, and we not overeat there.
That’s when Solomia’s mother calls and asks where are we. The tone is usually disrespectful, and it communicates something ‘how dare you not to be at home and wait for me to come?!’
Ah, I forgot about the other thing. There’s this cartoon, Tangled (2010) (Wikipedia). It’s a great representation of an abusive mother, and it’s just 1-to-1 Solomia and her mother. In her childhood she thought she was adopted, which is not unusual to kids whose parents are like that. It’s difficult to believe that your very own parents can behave like that, like they hate you, and just fucking use you.
So, you need to watch this ‘Mommy knows best’ cartoon, to get the vibes of how her mother talks to her. I cannot stand even overhearing these communications as I’m getting fucking mental, I want to kick the bitch out of our house (if she happens to visit) or just kick her.
Solomia wasn’t eager to reveal we’re in McDonald’s, yet her mother wants something from her, and so she arrives right to us, right when we’re about to eat. Solomia orders one more cheeseburger, and we all eat. Me, trying to keep calm as hard as I can. As fucking usual.
First thing she comments on is that it’s time for the mother (her daughter) to learn cook already. And stop wasting money on restaurants.
Come on! It’s Mac fucking Donalds!
To which Solomia humiliates once again by train to explain her (once again!) that it’s not about not being able to cook meals at home, it’s about training our autistic child to not be afraid of people, socialise a little, and learn the acceptable behaviour in such places. She needs that, and McDoland’s is a cheap way of getting that, since we’re not really comfortable visiting expensive posh restaurants, especially with little kids.
Then, the bitch starts telling us she found another wonderful house (not far from her), which she wants us to buy. That’s her new idée fixe, we should get a house (ideally, right beside her).
That very case was just hilarious, and I’ve been telling it some friends in person, so I need to write it here as well.
She found a bigger house in the same town she lives (those are suburbs of Lviv, not too far away, by the way), but its new house neighbouring her local wealthy friends. The house’s territory has a tiny pond, with fucking swans or ducks. It’s pompous, and she wants us to live there. Lol, not, of course not. She wants to live there herself. Her idea is that we’re buying her smaller house, and she buys the better one.
Can you imagine that? Just try. Also, a tiny detail: it’s her house. Not her and her husband’s house. It’s her house. She calls it hers, she never calls it ‘our house,’ and the documents are on her alone. It’s that she allows the fucking husband (who paid for the house, and she spent exactly zero cents on it) to live there. If he behaves. Lol.
I’m long at the point of just hysterically laughing at my wife, pointing fingers and telling her ‘fucking genius! Just sell the fucking house to your very own daugher! And buy yourself a better house instead! But own the two places at the same time!’
Of course, we’re not even thinking about this marvellous opportunity. It’s a hard no.
‘Do you understand what’s happening?’ I ask my wife. ‘Are you aware, it’s her letting us to live in her house, and for the privilege, we’re buying her a bigger one. So now, she’s having two houses.’
Of course, she understands that. Thanks, God: she’s not blind here!
‘Do you have money?’ she asks.
‘No, we don’t’ we reply.
‘We have money, but we don’t want to give them to you’ she says to her daughter. ‘When are you going to work?’ she attacks me. That’s the middle of the summer, both kids are free from their schools, and I’m desperately tired from this non-stop marathon of kids. She was boasting about how kids would spend the entire summer at her place, only to take them for a couple of days here and there. She does the absolute minimum a grandmother can, she prefer to appear like she’s some successful businesswoman (which she’s not) or at least a wife of a successful businessman (which she’s also not).
And so, here I am, speaking to this sucessful businesswoman, who hadn’t work for like 30 years or something. And life off her husband’s money. (He’s not even rich, by the way. But he works all his life.) She treats them people who work as losers, and the goal of her life is to never work, and she’s pretty open about it. Or mostly open. Depending on whom she talks to, obviously. It’s hard to describe this golddigger type, I may attempt at that the other time.
Her husband reminds me of Pete Martell of Twin Peaks (1990), in a way. But, weirdly, far more intelligent.
First, I start to speak, with an attempt to explain the bitch that if she’d involve more like a grandmother, perhaps I’d have some more time to earn money. Which I’m currently fail at, for numerous reasons, but mostly kids. Not only she does not help, but she actively involved into making our life more difficult.
Then, very quickly I understand that there’s nothing to talk about. We’ve been through this many times before, and it’s not productive at all. It’s humiliating, and is just a waste of time. I realise that this is not her fucking business, of which I plainly communicate, in these precise words. ‘Not. Your. Fucking. Business.’ I tell her that it’s me and my wife’s business, and if she’s dissatisified with me anywhere, we communicate that. She’s not part of our family, and so who the fuck is her for me to even know what’s my financial status currently.
It’s not great, but to my defence, often I work just a few hours a week these days. I’d happily make even 100× of what I make today, but I need resources for that.
‘Do you understand the concept of the personal boundaries?’ I ask instead
‘No, I’m not’ she replies sincerely.
‘Then I’ll make you understand’ I say, ‘Our communication ends here. Get the fuck out of here.’
By the end of the communication I meant not just that very conversation, but my whole relationship with her.
She’s offended, and leaves the restaurant, with Solomia making a clumsy attempt at softening this whole thing and behaving like adults. She forces her mother to take the kids (which she sincerely doesn’t want to do; which I communicate again and again).
That’s where the communication ends.
I went through some deep internal research. How the fuck did I even ended up there? I mean, of all people, I have quite not many issues with showing people the door. I ended up my relationships with many people, and I do not afraid conflicts. I don’t seek them, and I don’t like them. But I don’t afraid them. And I’m good in being angry. I’m fucking experienced in that. ‘You think this is a bad neighbourhood?’
I realise that I wasted so much energy on that bitch, and I’m now released from that shit I voluntarily joined. Fuck her.
I haven’t spoken with her since then. And I don’t plan to.
Her new marvellous idea is for us to buy the house that neighbours hers. The price is tolerable (less posh than that one she wanted to move to), but the house needs repair work. It’s just a village house, not really great condition. It’s ideal representation of what she thinks of her daugher. He daughter is her ugly girlfriend, and so she shines nearby her.
We discussed this with Solomia, and actually that house is good enough for us. We can live there as-is, and invest money to make it truly great house. However, there’s one issue: her mother. If they were giving us the house for free, we’d have just hard time actually living there.
It’s genius too, I thought. ‘Look,’ I tell my wife.
‘She’s having you at her disposal, all the time. You’d help her do all the chores around the house. But you’d not be at her fucking space all the time. However, she’d visit you any time she wants. Unannounced.’
It’s just genius. She’s getting all the benefits of us being around, without any commitment from her side. She’d just point us at the house, we’d buy it with our own money, she spends nothing, and she has her slave daughter back. Genius.
We tried to discuss that, and Solomia considers that option. I formulate the question that way, to keep money out of the question, whether she’s happy about this. ‘Fuck no!’ her reply.
‘We’re not that miserable for you to get into this’ is my point. ‘We’d buy ourselves the house we want, and it’s cheaper than dealing with that fucking bitch.’ As if she even helped us with anything. She just wants to commit as little as possible.
Today, we’re having this occasional Sunday stroll to Metro. It’s 3 PM and Solomia says she wants to go there. ‘We need to go right away then!’ I reply, ‘as it’s getting dark in an hour’
And so we go. They go first, me closing the doors, and doing something at home (collecting bags, getting my rucksack). I’m right behind them, coming at them, and Solomia speaks with someone, being so fucking sweet.
You must understand the context, Solomia mostly doesn’t have any close friends. No other girlfriends of her own age. Only the mother. If she speaks over her phone, it’s 99% she speaks with her mother.
I’m snarky about it. ‘Ah, you’re best friends again, don’t you?’
‘She called, the fuck you expect from me, not to answer?’\
We’re walkling and she attacks me all the road, to the point I tell her I don’t want to walk with her, and I go home. The stroll is just to walk anyway, we don’t need anything serious to buy there.
No, she doesn’t like this, and so we continue our stroll, with her continuing attacking me. I’m not making many thing at home, and right now we have some issues in our bathroom, and I’m not too eager to solve them. It’s stressful, and I have very little capacity right now. She’s correct, that these are the matters I could be focused on. But she doesn’t realise how little energy I have, and how much energy her mother steals from us both. I have an impression I live with a fucking teenager girl, who’s besties with her (abusive, actually) mother.
A few days ago, I brought news to Solomia: our neighbours are coming back from Canada! ‘A reason to call your mummy!’ I joke. ‘Yeah, yeah, call her right away!’ she replies seriously. And she talks to her mother, like it’s never before. She made this effort of detaching frolm her these 3 months, and it wasn’t me who forced her to do that. It was her own decision after almost ten psychoterapy sessions.
That’s why I was obviously dissatisfied with this.
You see, instead of marrying a young cool sexy girl, I married a 90-years-old nun, who just loves and adores her mother to an unhealthy degree. And the mother is—
Oh! I found a nice reference!
The protagonist girl’s mother, Honey Hatter / Fanny Hatter from Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece.
Solomia is the pretty young girl who turned into a fucking old woman, and her very own mother living her best life. I woudln’t be surprised to learn that her mother’s having much more sex than her own much younger daughter with her much hotter husband (me!).
(Otherwise she’s of no real use to her husband.)
And living her best life, parasiting off others. That’s quite telling too.
It took some time for us, me and Solomia, to stop fighting. What initially was over her mother.
We’re leaving the shop, and on our way back home we see little Solomiyka, Solomia’s cousin’s daughter. She planned to visit us today, but her mother is ill. They live with the grandparents (of the little two year old girl, hence parents of her mother), as her father serves in the army at the moment. (Fucking Ruzzianz!)
The little girl walks with her grandfather. The feat our kids only grandfather never did. He’s pretty consistent with that, he was giving almost zero fucks about his own daughters, why would he care about the grandkids. The grandfather Paulo, he’s a truly great grandfather, and we’ve seen them together multiple times around. It’s obviously challenging for him to endure the tiny kid, but you can see it with a naked eye he enjoys this role, and he loves his first (and only so far) grandkid. If you have this love, your behaviour is just different. My wife’s parents are mostly indifferent. One Christmas Solomia returned home wiping and sobbing, as her own parents behaved in a way ‘the fuck you and your kids are here?’ Yeah, being friendly and smiling on the outside, yet ignoring and belitteling in reality.
We’re discussing the route back home, we have multiple options: enter the forest right there, a bit later, or walk our entire way through the streets. It’s dark already, otherwise jumping into the forest would be the most obvious option.
That’s where the wife’s grunting ‘oh, no, not again’ and picks the phone. Mommy’s calling! She’s brining us vegetables, potatoes (I’ve bought 20 kg just this week), some cabbage (we just trashed a huge jar of 3L), and some really ugly apples (we’ve bought 20 kg of wonderful Apples, and also pears that I love more). And a few cakes off her table.
Turned out (I wasn’t aware of that) she invited Solomia and the kids to visit her mansion, as she was having guests today, and wanted to show off how great of a grandmother she is. Normally, she mostly gives zero fucks about the kids, and doesn’t really want them to be there at her place.
That’s not something I even need to know, but hats off Solomia for declining the kind generous offer, to pose as a nice loving family to other people.
She’s on her way, like 1 minute from us. And instead of walking back home, we’re staying and fighting each other.
Hnat doesn’t understand why we stopped. ‘Go home!’ he says to the both of us. ‘We’re awaiting granny’ Solomia or me, some of us, or both of us, say.
‘The fuck you expect me to do? Not reply?! So she’d go back home?!’
‘YES! That’s what I expect! She comes unannounced, she enters our space, without any attempt to actually find out whether it’s OK or not! She fucking goes back home!’
If that was my own mother, she’d go home, and no manipulation would make me easen the conflict. It’s not me who initiated all this in the first place. The fuck should I care?
‘If only I picked up the phone 8 minutes ago, she could still be at home!’ Solomia’s beats herself.
That makes me even angrier. ‘It’s not your fucking problem!’ I almost yell at her. ‘It’s her, and her alone! You have the right to not pick up the phone!’ I tell her when we’re at home, eating the fucking cake, half an hour later. This is alost a rocket science to her, and she was so puzzled, deeply thinking, and replying with ‘wow, yes, you’re right.’
It was a fucking incredible red flag, when we were fucking having sex some almost ten years ago, she’s almost reaching orgasm, her mother calling, and she just stops everything, picks up her phone, and speaks to her mother. It was so fucking big, the red flag, that I couldn’t ignore it. But, I did. I did ignore so many red flags, that at this point in time, I feel like I simply wasted ten years of my life. Lots of nerves. And it’s all a sysephean task, I won’t commit into. I dumped people from my life for less. That cries ‘run away, she’s having a million issues with her mother!’ And oh boy, she did indeed. She does still! I am not certain she’d work through all this.
‘You see, I’m making an effort’ Solomia says.
‘No I don’t’ I reply. ‘It all worked only after I told her to get fuck out of here, in a very rude way, and that made her actually understand I fucking meang it, don’t you see?’
‘I’ve told them so many times we don’t need these [fucking cheap] gifts to buy off us’ she’d say. ‘I told them I want them to be the grandparents for the kids! Our kids need grandparents!’
No, they don’t. It’s OK to not have grandparents. It’s not OK to not have parents. These grandparents makes us less parents, by stealing our energy (which we have very little of). They’re net-negative. They show our kids they’re not wanted. They are not interested in them.
What’s better: to have parents that don’t love you or not having any parents at all? Or, said differently: the alive parents that don’t care about you at all vs the dead parents who loved you and cared about you deeply? The Harry Potter shit we’re having right here.
Solomia’s anrgy. She wants to call her mother tomorrow, and explain her yet again that we don’t need these things she brings us. We can buy fucking apples, they’re fucking cheap. The bitch just generates too much noise and the illusion (for herself, and everyone else) that she helps us. With bringing us fucking kilogram of apples. I don’t eat those, as I’m very picky about apples. I don’t like apples, and if I eat them, I’d prefer them to be perfect, and like reaaallllyyy tasty. Those are not. The previous batch of apples, they were so bad that we literally throw them away, as they’ve been mostly rotten. The bitch expects us to just cut the rotten part and eat the rest of the apple. Does this communicate the respect she lacks for her daughter to bring all this to her?
Here, I tell my wife, ‘you see, you tell one thing, and behave another. Wasn’t the therapist telling you that you have to stop taking anything from your mother? Aren’t you taking something from her right now? Especially given I’ve literally bought like a huge box of much better apples, potatoes, and so on. Just days ago.’
She came unannounced. Would she call you if we were living right there, right before her? In that subpar house worse and older than hers. Being at her disposal all the time. That’s an obviously rhetorical question.
I’m so fucking tired of this shit. I literally told my wife perhaps she should find herself a 16 years old girl friend that has same mommy issues, so they’d live through them together. I’ve commited so much, that I’m no longer capable of such a commitment. My mommy issues aren’t longer relevant for like a decade and a half soon. I’ve seen my mother a few times over this last decade. She thinks it’s not an adult behaviour. But it’s just simpler than that: you cannot control other people, and you cannot simply make them understand. ‘If only I was able to express myself better!’ It doesn’t work like that. The other side is just not listening. Don’t waste your life, move further. And second, you have to leave the toxic people. This relationship is extremely toxic, and I’ve moved away from it.
It’s incredible that Mina, my Japanese friend—
Whom I miss these days. But I afraid I’m not having any energy for her anyway.
It’s incredible that when she first saw the photos of my wife’s mother from our wedding, she asked me ‘who’s that woman? Stay away from her!’ she told me.
I would remember that phrase so many times, so many times. You cannot imagine how many.
They were born the same year, both being almost 50 that year. Yet, so different. (Not a surprise, obviously.) Mina is a great person, and a great friend. Living her bright and interesting life. And my wife’s mother, being the fucking toxic imbecile, not even living her own life, and poisoning her daughter’s life—
Or her daughters’ lives, I’m not aware of what’s up with the other daughter. She made her both daughters enemies. And while my wife, being 7 years older, does not treat her younger sister as an enemy, however, she assembled some self-respect to not humiliate herself all the time to attempt at being friends with the sister. Who’s clearly not interested.
…and others, those who did not escape too.