Blindness

My mum's a great person. She's kind, loving, warm-hearted, a very good listener and a very very caring person - actually she's even TOO caring. And that's her biggest problem. She's feeling responsible for everything any family member does wrong and always tries to make up for him/her...

My older younger sister (I'm the eldest of three) is the personification of the term "trouble-maker". She's constantly throwing out money and somehow always manages to load it upon my mum (and thus US, since the family budget and my mum's budget are somehow the same...), she's not doing anything you ask her to, but if she's asking for something, my mum's jumping on the spot since she doesn't want her to get into trouble "because of her"... besides, she's living in an own flat with her boyfriend and thus doesn't ever get asked for anything anyway... that's only me - but I'll come to that later...
My dad's almost the same... he's got a job he hates, but doesn't even TRY to get a new one. Problem is, the less he likes his job, the less he earns with it since his boss starts to notice and doesn't assign well-paid tours to him (he's a transport guy driving to different coutries all around Europe), which on the other hand hurts his pride cause my mum's the main earner of the family and demotivates him even more. When he's home all he does is sit in front of his computer and play online chess (that's NOT exaggerated, he really doesn't do anything else - it's crazy, really... he's sitting there playing, watching TV in the background, and we "aren't allowed" to talk around him cause he won't be able to hear the guys on there then... which is a problem, since he's sitting in the living room and there is no other room we could sit together and talk...) Family life is not existing here... and honestly - is it normal for a wife to wish for her husband to be gone rather then being at home for once? My mum does. He's never helping her out with anything, besides cooking once in a while or changing a bulb, and if he does, he afterwards walks around prancing about how great a guy he is, spitting out things like "ain't I good" or "well, how did I do - great, hu?".... praising himself like he'd saved us all from starving... pathetic. And they're fighting all the time... but if I tell her to get divorced she just tells me she can't and that he just is like that - "like that" meaning, he's shouting at her, never saying sorry, making jokes about her that only he finds funny, having his "nice" moments now and then trying to make up for everything, just to start shouting again within hours... he's not really "bad", just really frustrated, since he seemed to have imagined his life like "everything will come to me without me having to do anything for it" and - surprise - it just didn't. And now he's starting to realise he's never going to be rich nor famous nor anything else too special and hates it. A sad fate - and unfortunately not only his but also the one of the ones having to live with him since we have to bear the consequences...
Last but certainly not least is my little sis. I love her, honestly, and she's great - but she's just 14 and not able to do anything to help me except for sometimes spending evenings with me watching TV or the like. She's in a bad situation as well having a familiy like this and still being so young... and she's having troubles in school which leads to - again - troubles with my mum... She'd need what you call a "strong hand" which, however, - as I made clear before - my mum can't provide due to her philosophy of "being nice" to everyone...

Yeah, and then there's me - watching all the madness day by day and getting more insane with the situation as time goes by... What I do? Try not to make contact where I can avoid it with my dad, talk to my smallest sis and try to make her see where she's going wrong as good as I can, reduce the contact with my older younger sister to a minimum (did I mention she's constantly lying to and nicking things from me? I'm talking nice here...) and helping my mother where I can.

"Where I can" - that's the point. I'm listening to my mothers problems with her company (I hadn't even mentioned them, right... she's been working overtime for almost two years constantly now since her company keeps expanding and she and her colleague - yeah, ONE colleague - are getting more and more and more and more to do and still there's no end to be seen... you can imagine the condition of her nerves just because of that...), and it's getting me down... there's never a day I can come home to be surprised with good news or happy faces - it's always just more troubles and my mum being angry or down as well or - in the worst case - my dad shouting around for nothing again. I'm doing the shopping for her, I'm helping out with my little sis (driving her to wherever she needs to be taken, picking her up again, tidying up behind her so it'll be alright when my mum comes home, telling her to do her homework, helping her with it and so on), doing chores from time to time, doing the shopping, and anything else she asks me to do... and I'm never telling what I do without her noticing just to get a thanks. I just want it to be nicer here, I want her to have less stress with everything, not to be praised or something like that. And then there's days like today and I just can't... I need to have one evening off, just being at home, able to do what I want to... and then the catastrophes happen...

I have 4-6 jobs depending on the week. I'm a journalist for about 30-35 hours a week and I'm doing small jobs (always the same five) on the line on weekends and in the evenings, like writing from tape for a guy, working at the local soccer ground's cafe, helping out in a shop not far from here and so on. Besides that, I'm trying to do my bachelor's degree in informatics (I'm almost finished - yeah) and studying Japanese as a second subject. That's just MY stuff. Demanding enough without all the stuff I do here, really... So today, there's this one day I want off and my mum still asks me to help her with this damn 5kg of boletus my dad bought yesterday and left for US to cut and deep-freeze since he had to go on another tour again before he could do it... I agree - not happy but willing to release her of "having" to do everything on her own though it's not her fault and she had had a long working day as well - BUT want some time off first (I'm talking about 2-3 hours...) - and she goes havok, telling me I'd be like my dad, never doing anything in this house and leaving everything to her though she'd have no spare time already.
That's were I got angry... I called here a silly cow (wasn't nice, I know, but telling ME I'd be like my dad...!?) for not noticing what's really going on here and that it'd be her own fault that she'd always feel responsible for everything since no one could ever cope to do that. I also told her I'd have thrown that damn boletus after my dad telling him to do his stuff himself once in a while which only resulted in yet another "you know I can't do that" from her... why not? I'm really getting crazy here...

I hate running away but what has been a feeling of need for some months now finally also became a wish today... I want to move out here. I hate leaving my mum... I know the only reason she's like that is because she can't handle all the pressure she loads upon herself anymore... but she won't listen to me or anyone else and I can't do anything else than try to make her see... I just can't go on like this... it's too much for her and it's definitely also too much for me. She needs to learn to let people feel the consequences of their deeds themselves instead of taking them onto herself to "protect" them - even if she loves them... and I need some space for myself... especially since all this is just one part of my freaky life and not even the most complicated one... my friends reading this will know what I mean.

So... I'm looking for a place to move to now. Flat share would be cool but I'd need to know people that I could share the flat with for that and I don't... so I'm gonna go looking for my own place. I can't afford something too special, but I have to afford something or I'll be going nuts... I would have already if it wasn't for two very dear friends of mine... unfortunately one's living hundreds of km away and the other one's just moved to his own place with his girlfriend... Life's not easy, but, as weird as it may seem, the "even more complicated" part of my life - though actually not really making me happy the way it is now... - keeps me reminded of what's really important... and that makes everything bearable one way or the other...

Sorry for the never-ending rant - it's pretty unusual for me to write posts like that, but the last week's been simply too much and since I had to write that down somewhere I thought I could just as well post it... but you don't have to read it anyway, right? At least it's been raining again - I love that...

So far...