Moj_ Patti
I’ve seen this train wreck before
Apr 11, 2010
Since Friday morning, I’ve had a chance to reconnect with my Chicago cousins. When I was going to school outside Chicago from 1987 through 1991 I spent some time with them. I love Chicago, but these folks are the reason I could never live here.
We met R for lunch. Since the death of her husband about 15 years ago, she’s become a hoarder. She allowed us inside her house where there is an 18-inch stack of mail on her dining room table; entry into her living room is blocked by a 4-foot wall of junk that looks to include a lot of shopping bags with clothing inside, videotapes, junk – but the kind you could take to Salvation Army and donate. Since she only has one chair uncovered in her house, we went out to eat at a Polish smorgasbord. R is probably morbidly obese. She didn’t know about my surgery, so the lack of chow I was putting away meant that I eventually had to explain I had my surgery. Her response was that she wasn’t going to do something that drastic to make other people happy. I agreed with her and explained my health reasons and that it’s a decision that people have to make on their own. I think that apart from whatever mental thing is making her hoard (and my other cousins enlightened me that she had had some issues with credit cards as well), she is the most financially well off of them all. She worked for the state of Illinois. She’s retired now and does some part time work with a local Catholic school. She’s super involved in the Moose. Which means that she doesn’t spend a lot of time at home.
Then I went to my cousin T’s house. She’s living in an older single wide trailer in a town close to the Wisconsin border. It’s older, but it’s clean. She is missing teeth. I’ve spent the whole weekend hearing about every wonderful thing my Ma ever did with her, her health issues, her horrible ex-husband (I couldn’t stand him 19 years ago), her boyfriend who died a few months ago, and her granddaughter, A. I slept here.
She gets somewhere around $700 a month from some government entity. I think it’s disability. She is one plumbing problem short of a disaster. The space rental for her trailer (that she owns) is $500 something. The gas is not included – so she apologized for the thermostat being set at just 65 (not a big deal for me).
I didn’t talk much. She considers everyone middle class to be rich. My husband and I are college graduates and accordingly, we are solidly MIDDLE middle class. But compared to her lifestyle we are the Rockefellers. There were vast differences in lifestyle between R and T’s family and my mother (single college graduate/teacher) in the 1960s; the gulf has only widened since.
I think one underlying theme for her life is that T thinks she deserves to live the way she does. Her father was disabled and died young. She never got her high school diploma. Got married young mostly to get away from her mother’s house. She has actually lived in flophouses at one time (after she finally ran away from her then husband). The last job she had she was getting paid under the table, so naturally, didn’t pay any money into Social Security for the 10 years she worked there. She couldn’t get unemployment when they fired her. She explained the teeth thing, but at first glance, I figured someone broke them out for her when she was living on the streets.
Then there’s T’s daughter, C. She was 11 or 12 when I came out here in 1987. She was really smart – she won the city of Chicago science fair in 8th grade. She was offered a full ride to a prestigious science boarding school/academy out in the suburbs for high school. And my cousin and her husband turned it down because it was too far away from home. Yes, the one act made an incredible difference in the life of C. It meant she spend more time around her not-so-school-smart brother and his friends, and got more mental abuse from her jerk of an alcoholic father.
C dropped out of high school one semester short of graduating to take a lucrative job with Burger King. Then she got pregnant with A. She’s had some adventures since. But she’s now living in a singlewide about 50 yards from T’s with her boyfriend of 10 years and A. She has a crap job that she has to drive an hour to get to. Her boyfriend is captain of a charter fishing boat – nice work when the weather’s good. T said he got screwed out of thousands of dollars driving a snow plow this winter – it must have been another under the table job. I’m not sure he ever finished high school either. She’s still smart as ever, but has a mental block about getting her GED. With her background and the GED, she could be making okay money once the economy gets out of the toilet. I think she might be getting paid under the table as well, and there is no path to bigger and better things where she works. I’ve been real careful about what I say to her because I don’t want to come across as a rich snob.
A I have not spent much time with. She’s 13, so she’s been hanging out with her friends mostly. She was really impressed that I had an iPhone. T thinks she has a boyfriend. She’s getting all As and Bs according to her ma and grandma. She appears to be just as smart as her mother. But I’ve seen the early signs of this train wreck before. Thankfully, her father and her mother’s boyfriend don’t appear to be abusive. Her father might be a little overindulgent, but that’s true of a lot of kids her age. (And I don’t have much room to talk.) Her grandma is making a big deal of her getting her period last month. So I worry she’s going to get herself knocked up and take up the family business of being a loser.
And I wonder – what can I do to help? I tried being a good example to her mother. That fell flat – I couldn’t spend a lot of time with her then because her father was such an asshole. I think just my going to college intimidated him 20 years ago. When I was here before I had less money than they did, so I couldn’t whisk her away to do things.
I’ve offered to host anyone that can make the trip out to my house. I’m not expecting anyone.
I had forgotten what a hot mess they were when we reconnected on Facebook several months ago. Maybe I can send motivational stuff to A through there. It will be hard, because I don’t want to disrespect T and C.
Auuugh. I don’t know what to do.
