greenrene
Member
Thank you guys! Just the commiseration is so uplifting!
About sister in law - that's a hard line to draw because we are a very, very close family. Very involved in each other's lives, our kids all go to the same school (except difficult child, which is yet another way I'm sure she feels "different," but there's no way she could attend the school that the others do with her issues). She really is a fantastic person, she loves difficult child very much and wants so much to help make things better, but I'm coming to realize that this particular aspect of our relationship is actually making me feel worse. She and I are very close, BFF-close, so very much alike in some ways and SOOOOO very different in others...
I'm going to have to figure this out for my own sake, because these guilt feelings are coming up to the surface again after I've tried so hard to get past them. There was a point a few years ago where I told myself that I HAD to forgive myself for whatever mistakes I've made with difficult child, that I did the best I could with what I had to work with at the time, and her issues are NOT MY FAULT. I was eating myself alive with guilt, and that was not doing anyone any good. It doesn't help that difficult child really does blame me for everything. She thinks that if her dad had never met me, her life would be just dandy. I shudder to think of what her life would have been like if she'd continued living with biomom. by the way, biomom lost custody of her other child, a little boy who is now about 6 years old. She told her caseworker that she had tried to drown him and couldn't handle being a mom anymore. The state took custody, and last I heard he was being adopted.
So yeah, difficult child, life would have been SO much better living with your piece-of-work mom, who literally was whoring herself out at the bus station and caught VD, who has never held a job longer than a few months, who doesn't have a place of her own to live, who can't even take care of herself much less a child, who has no skills, no education, no real life. Sure.
About sister in law - that's a hard line to draw because we are a very, very close family. Very involved in each other's lives, our kids all go to the same school (except difficult child, which is yet another way I'm sure she feels "different," but there's no way she could attend the school that the others do with her issues). She really is a fantastic person, she loves difficult child very much and wants so much to help make things better, but I'm coming to realize that this particular aspect of our relationship is actually making me feel worse. She and I are very close, BFF-close, so very much alike in some ways and SOOOOO very different in others...
I'm going to have to figure this out for my own sake, because these guilt feelings are coming up to the surface again after I've tried so hard to get past them. There was a point a few years ago where I told myself that I HAD to forgive myself for whatever mistakes I've made with difficult child, that I did the best I could with what I had to work with at the time, and her issues are NOT MY FAULT. I was eating myself alive with guilt, and that was not doing anyone any good. It doesn't help that difficult child really does blame me for everything. She thinks that if her dad had never met me, her life would be just dandy. I shudder to think of what her life would have been like if she'd continued living with biomom. by the way, biomom lost custody of her other child, a little boy who is now about 6 years old. She told her caseworker that she had tried to drown him and couldn't handle being a mom anymore. The state took custody, and last I heard he was being adopted.
So yeah, difficult child, life would have been SO much better living with your piece-of-work mom, who literally was whoring herself out at the bus station and caught VD, who has never held a job longer than a few months, who doesn't have a place of her own to live, who can't even take care of herself much less a child, who has no skills, no education, no real life. Sure.
