Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Point: I mean thwhat I said in the title both as an insult and literally. When my grandmother was getting close to giving birth she was given some drug to stop labor until they could get her to the hospital. The child already had it's head in the birth canal so it ended up being squished like that longer than it is supposed to and then my aunt had some light mental retardation.

When I was young my aunt lived with my grandmother and my great grandmother lived with my grandmother as well. I spent alot of time in that house because both of my parents worked twelve hours days to support the family and try to get some nice stuff because... well that's what they thought would improve their lives.
Anyway-
As time went on some family members died. My great grandmother died peacefully in her sleep and some distant relatives died of old-age or the related effects thereof. A few years passed and then my grandmother experinced a nasty car wreck. She was plowed into by a semi but luckily after they cut up the car enough to get her out she was only a little bruised. They took her into the hosptital to make sure that everything was fine and let her go.
Well, everything wasn't fine. Among the medications she took was one that made her blood very thin. I think it was for anti clogging because of the insulin but I'm not sure.
Several days after the accident she lightly bumped her head getting out of a car. This wouldn't have been a big deal except for the massive clot that had formed after her accident (her earlier trip to the hospital hadn't included any of the brain scans, otherwise things would have been quite different for us...) and she started hemorrhaging. A few hours later my perceptive aunt noticed that she was loosing conciousness.
-My grandmother's room was a good distance from my aunt's room (Aunt splet in the basement,) so I'm unsure as to whether or not I should blame my aunt for this or just emmanate hatred out to the rest of society for the chance happenings that allowed this in the first place-
From here there was the common summoning the family to the hospital so they could be notified about their loved one. We sat there while time passed waiting to hear about her conditions and hoping for the best. It was probably only an hour but the struggle to keep my thoughts in control lest they tell me what was had happened and let my unrest spring free and errode the same battle going on within the rest of my family.
I tried the religous route but from what I've said I'm sure you can tell there wasn't a happy ending to this.
This is was the day I turned away from Christianity. Probably the day I became an adolecent...
The following years became a hell to me. I had frequent anxiety attacks in public places and fell into depression.

Depression is... a pain in the a**. It's not devoid of happy and warm...y but it's like you're getting them through semi-opaque glass. With as little time spent with a pleasant mood I got the feeling that I had felt drained, bored, and cold for months but knew that I had done at least one thing I enjoyed in the past two days.
... uncertainty about whether or not you're sick is worse than being sick when you have depression...
Along with this I developped the sense that I was the picked-on-out-cast but later found out that most people I knew were pretty amicable to me.
The depression eventually started to recede (perhaps I actually did fold 1000 paper cranes... I should have kept track of them,) and life was settling out but by this time my aunt had squanderred my grandmother's fortunes used up what money my grandmother had saved up and ran the house into disrepair.
...She has always worn down whatever car we give her really quickly so I'm not sure why anyone expected her to be able to maintain a house...

The house was well on it's way to becoming like the house my father lived in when he was married to his second wife. It's like when an egg goes rotton, you'd have to tear out everything on the inside to gain any hope of getting it to how it was. I could probably write a formula for what it takes to spoil a house like this but there are two major things I've seen in all of them. The first is a pet that you can't keep clean. In the case of my father's ex-residence the pets were an iguana and a trio of parrots. To keep animals like that clean you have to clean out their cages and anything else you let them walk over frequently.
With my aunt the pets were just a pair of medium sized dogs (Miniature American Eskimos. They look like Samoyas that are just a little too big to carry.) Dogs are much easier to keep clean, even when they have longer hair like these ones you only need to clean them when they become very dirty and the rest of the time they'll be relatively clean. This was too much for my aunt so when she had enough money she took them to a dog groomer and just had most of their fur shaved off. This was alright so long as she had the money to do it. By the time her money problems started to affect us it was apparent that they hadn't been shaved for ages. While the word filth is a bit too strong to describe their condition the dirt they transferred to the floors they frequently ran over had accumulated to such.

My parents have the great abilty to fix mechanical objects like you would find around the house. Cabinets, doors, the plumbing, if they know what the problem is they'll probably spend the entire day trying to fix it and eventually they'll have success. While a great number of thingsin that house would have easily been within what they could fix my aunt never thought to tell them. My sister and myself noticed handfulls of these problems while my parents were preparing the airconditioner for winter (it was one of those common and relatively cheap swamp coolors but it was installed on the roof and connected to a decent vent system rather than just placed in front of a window. It needed frequent repair.) but we didn't think to bring them to attention because we didn't know how incompetant our aunt was, yet.
By the time my parents found out about these things the dogs had worn holes in the carpet, a pipe was leaking direct sewage into a doorway in the basement, and my aunt's car had nearly ceased to function and was practically missing several crucial systems.
-You know, things like functioning headlights and the things related to keeping the battery charged-

The other major thing that brings ruin to these sorts of houses are when you let other people live in them. Now, charging someone rent and giving them their own room to take care of is not what I'm talking about here, rather, when you just let someone live in a house because they would otherwise become homeless causes this. The fact that they have a place to live doesn't change them at all, you can still tell that they would be a homeless person. They're dirty and most likely aren't wearing clean clothes, perhaps they've only got one set of clothing but it becomes dirty, a sort of sponge that soaks up the dirt of daily life.
While I don't believe this was the case with who my aunt allowed to enter her house letting these people in usually brings in a subcomunity of drug addicts. Now the drugs- ... the drugs are what bring about the final levels of ruin to a house. A filthy place falling into disrepair isn't a crackhouse until the drugs show up.
After a home changes into a drug business what you thought was disrepair seems like it's nearly sparkling clean. If there aren't fist-holes in the wall and rats then it just hasn't been a drug den long enough, those will show up in time for these places.
The previous abode of my father has left a very distinct smell imprinted in my memory and any time I smell a ruined how I want to leave as soon as I can.

Well... it became apparent to my parents that my aunt couldn't take care of herself so they cleaned up the house as best the could and sold it. My aunt packed up- ... well, I guess she only packed her clothes while my parents grabbed the nice and/or antique furniture and left the once nice home behind. Our home wasn't big enough to acomidate so many people so we had to find another. While we had hoped to find someplace that had what I think was called a mother-in-law suite... no, it didn't sound grand but I think mother-in-law was part of it, so that she would only ever need to bother us if it was time to eat we instead settled on a nice newly built house in an area that had been farmland just a year and a half before.

We planned to make the basement into that sort of thing so that it would become the sort of house we had intended to buy but my parents ambitions went down the drain when they realized that thy could just as easily put all of the boxes into the garage and basement. They thought they had only taken what they really needed but a great deal of our posessions are still in boxes and unless I personally start placing them in various locations around the house (with or without great stealth,) there is little chance that this will change anytime soon or even later.

So instead my aunt got a bedroom on the second floor with the rest of us and althought it's very small (a guess room I suppose,) she manages to track a great deal of dirt from the rest of the house into it and right under her bed. I can only tell because one of our cats prefers the bottom of that bed as a hiding place over all places except my sisters room (and now that my sister has actually cleaned it, robbing him of hiding places, that just might change.)

All seemed well enough until my aunt continued to burn up the money we had. My parents let their alchohol problem slip a little further and my step-father suddenly got some ***** urges when my sister invited a friend from school over one night.
-Now, it's not like her threw them down the stairs and raped them or anything but I think he was naked in my sisters room and then they woke up and freaked out.
Or at least the other girl did. I guess it had happened a few times before...-
After this he realized he had a problem with alchohol and both of my parents finally quit smoking and drinking. They're both much better off for it but the whole ordeal has left us somewhat drained financially.

From here we can pretty much move to present time (which gets it's own entry.)