2:57 p.m.||||2003-04-02

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OK, I know this isn't the most exciting stuff I can write about, but I am truly livid and instead of putting my fist through a wall, I'll unload.

According to the tenants of Christianity, do unto others.

If we did unto MIL the way she continuosly and evily, like a viper in the weeds, she would have no choice but to call unfair, foul, and write us off as unforgiveably disrespectful.

Because he is her son, and they have some communication issues, she thinks nothing of treating him like an asshole, over the stupidest non-issues, on a regular basis she can drum up. I realized today that she is the source of every self esteem issue he has.

Seriously. She's a ballbreaker.

So.

This morning, at eight o'clock, she came downstairs with the stinging glare already present in her eyes. I had gotten up promptly with Josh at seven, turned on tv quietly, made him breakfast and was beginning to resume the task of the prior day, namely washing all his old clothes and toys in order to sell them. The living room was only slightly disordered and I had planned on getting it cleaned up the rest of the way long before noon.

As I said good morning on the stairs she was already unsmiling and weird, although we had talked amicably the night before; she was taking today off to work on a dinner for church tonight that had her a little worried, but she was happy and talking, to me, like she always seems to be able to do with me, at least to my face, which keeps giving me the errroneous impression that I am keeping house well, am showing adequate adoration to my own son (her terms are cloying and desperate and different than my own as far as my relationship with my own own own child are concerned, and I feel as if I am always having to be always on for her sake) and am doing my poker face well enough to keep the peace, and hopefully, Dave's ass out of any new and unsolicited trouble.

So the look on the stair was troubling. After Josh's breakfast I left him sitting happily and contentedly in his chair watching a video to dart downstairs and switch loads. Dave had come down at this point and was washing up dishes while I did this. Josh had a bottle in his hand.

Now, he does equally well with sippy cups and it's often about half and half. An incredibly irritating thing he does with both, however, is, once he begins to lose interest, he gets a mouthful of whatever it is and lets it run down the front of his shirt, onto the floor or chair or wherever gravity takes it. He is obsessed with liquid and making puddles in which to dance, and does this thing sometimes a dozen times a day. It's messy, it's irritating and what's worse, the fact that he keeps it up is our fault, because we have each, in our individual and unique ways, overreacted. No in this context means absolutley nothing to him so we can either remove the offending bottle or we can insist that he then sits on our laps for the remainder of it. It happens to all of us and unless we are superinsistent that he never has a bottle on the go, the so be the instances of this. It's happened to Linda plenty and she has always said no and removed the bottle, etc. When it happens to her it's par for the course. When it happened to Dave when he was briefly in the kitchen it was, of course, because among the litany of things she finds wrong with him - it is because he is an incompetent and retarded parent.

While I was still downstairs she yelled at Dave, and began stomping around, slamming shit, vacumming like a vicious viper, and generally acting like a motherfucking third grader.

Now since I was downstairs when she launched her attack - quit trying to hide the bitch you are, it always comes back to me, through a cause and effect I know you love, you mindless Republican, the "TRICKLE DOWN" effect - I had NO IDEA what I was walking into; all I knew was that last night my explanation of why there were a few more things in the living and dining room were sufficient and now she's on a fucking tirade, vaccuming angrily.

So I flipped.

I took my laundry and quite obviously stomped my own damn self to an area where I wouldn't have to look at her. I quickly and loudly cleaned every single thing belonging to us out of those rooms and I asked Dave loud enough for her to hear if I could drop him off at his job because, quite frankly, I didn't want to be around this drama today.

Let's see - the short list of our evil misdoings this week:

a crooked painting, proof that we are rotten parents.

a wrecked cookie sheet that cost her 17 dollars that was not washed in the dishwasher or cut upon with a knife but which was ruined BY ME when I cooked a steak on it, having no idea that such a fancy pan couldn't handle it.

garbage collecting in the unhooked up drain downstairs because she refuses to fix it but insists we are still using the garbage disposal.

Those are the things I am aware of...but every single day she picks and picks and picks on Dave to the point where he won't talk to me either.

The other day. my favorite was when Josh was having a tantrum upstairs with Dave because he was overtired and about two seconds away from his nap. She raced upsatirs, snatched Josh slef righteously and brought him back down with her...then returned to another room to work on her bills. In that second he wacked the mini stereo piece of shit off the top of the tv and broke it (IE put a dent in it...works fine I found out later, after the hullabaloo). Her exact words to Dave were (redfaced, yelling) "well, maybe if you wouldn't let him get into my stuff all the time!" EXCUSE ME? Have you seen what my days are like tring to keep him from doing exactly that? Has she even met this kid? What the flying hell is wrong with her?

It's like, if Josh acts like a normal toddler around her it's either cute, acceptible, can happen to anyone OR it's proof that we're bad parents. If it happens to us we're just bad parents.

She has a boyfriend of 14 plus years who last year at xmas called her "DARTH - 'her name'" - who refuses to marry her. Does she wonder why?

My big beef is that she is two-faced, manipulative and a liar. The gift I thought she was giving us of letting us live in her falling down house is completely overshadowed by the fact that she has made Dave her whipping boy and she is not honest about resolving any issue she might have with the way we live, while we are continuouly walking on eggshells, trying to anticipate what she might want (that she won't let us know til we already done fucked it up); she acts one way to me and another to Dave and then sits back while there's fallout in the relationship she seems hellbent on destroying.

She's the least spiritually balanced Christian I eve met and she stinks of hypocresy.

It has never been that I mind criticism or requests and rules on how we live there. It's that she acts like a fricking martyr when no-one can live up to the imaginary standards she fails to set. It makes me want to vomit.

I know she has no idea how she comes across....I know she finds no fault with anything she does. It's so funny to me. She cannot figure out how to do unto others because she obsessed with how they all do unto her.

Thanks for listening.