thanks mike...
oddly enough I have gotten some good practice trying to remember and put into practice all that i wrote here... my mantra for the past few hrs has been "he is who he is, he is who he is..."
this morning ah cancelled plans to take the girls to the park bc his brother (also an A, mentally ill and unemployed and enabled by mil and AH) "needed him". turns out that AH decided he is the only one capable of helping his brother out of the funk he is in, that no one else understands his brother like him and as I listened to ah justify his blowing off of his kids and rattle on with his jesus complex i was stunned to find that he sounded just like me 14 yrs ago... i thought i was going to "fix", "save" etc... ah when we met and seeing how sick it is as i hear ah say it all out loud shows me just how sick i was and how far i've come.
but instead of being happy about that right now i am sad. i am sad to see ah so caught up in the enabling (and avoiding of his own problems by focussing on his brothers). i am sad at what i thought we'd be and what we've been and that it took me 14 yrs to get here...
and to be completely honest, i am sickened by how much my in laws and ah enable my bil. ah actually came over to tell the girls to their faces that he'd be blowing them off and explained to D5 that he had to go help uncle J "learn how to be a grown up" and that he "needed him (ah) more than they did". i wanted to cry when he said that. the girls are learning that being a needy, sick individual gets you attn (at least from daddy).
i feel a bit like i'm in a bad dream... i'm standing on the side lines listening to crazy talk (ah talking about teaching his brother to be a grown up with ah isn't yet one?!), talking about what a bad place his brother is in and how he needs help when ah is simultaneously saying he's figured out all the reasons he drank and now knows he can be a social drinker (this being said the same weekend i found an empty beer can at the foot of D3's car seat in ah's car when i got the girls from him)...
i still stick by all i've said earlier in this post-- i have known this is who he was, but that expression of 'more will be revealed' is really really making sense to me now... i used to see ah as not put together but rationalized it by telling myself at least he wasn't as bad as his brother.... now i'm not so sure. ah still thinks this is true but when i look at the 2 of them i see them both as spiraling out of control-- ah just hides it better and it scares me bc i think he's the one likely to lose everything sooner bc of the fact that he hides it so well...
sigh...