Thanks again guys. I feel a little better today and a little more focused. One thing I find is that after contact with my family, I get very nervous and have a lot of anxiety. For example, yesterday morning, I got up at 5:00am and ran down to the basement to check the calendar for anything I've forgotten. I start my last semesters for nursing in the fall and it is not until July that I have to have some documents submitted. I don't know how to describe the anxiety. I have dreams that I forgot to go to class and missed an exam. It wakes me up and it always takes a few seconds to orient myself and remind myself that I'm not taking classes right now!! I guess the fear of failure is another one of the effects of my family.
Now, however, my kids keep slowly telling me things that my mother and sister in law said to them. You see, when my sister in law started yelling at me she decided to leave....they came from Canada, their flight wasn't leaving for 2 days and she started running around the house packing and my mother followed suit. To be honest, I did get upset, but, I handled it better than I would have a couple of years ago. Then she started putting all of her stuff on the front porch with her 11 month old child, called a taxi and sat on the porch with my mother crying......At one point (I am Catholic and she kept knocking my palm off the cross over my door because she kept swinging the front door open and closed so hard) so I had the door open trying to put my palm back up there and she started telling me how I was 'being so irrational'.....I looked at her and said "You are sitting on a porch with all of your belongings, with an 11 month old child...you're flight doesn't leave for 2 days....you are in another country.....that fits the definition of 'irrational'..." Then she just started yelling at me to close the door and they would move to the curb.....my mother sat there crying. The kids told me my sister in law was crying. My husband tried to get them to calm down, then just left the situation since there was no reasoning with them.
The point I am trying to get at is that my mother told my oldest son and daughter how she didn't want to leave(implying I was making them leave)...that they would never see her again, until they're 18. But she "is so glad that the baby got to meet them" (like the baby will remember). I am again getting so angry....she played the victim and I don't know what to say to my kids. My oldest son tends to get angry with me because he has grown up watching this crap and they have always gone behind my back to him being the victims telling them that it is me....The other children are 8, 6, and 4. The 4 year old doesn't seem to care...but my 6 year old was hysterical. I don't want them thinking their grandmother's behavior was ok. The last summer I went home she sat by my dad's side while he wouldn't talk to them (By the way, her reasoning for putting up with my dad is that she is not 'giving up her home'(they are affluent) in other words, the material things meant more than the emotional health of her children). That summer, my oldest was hysterical because my dad took off drunk off his a** one night with the car and my son was saying "He is going to kill himself..he's going to get arrested" (My father is a convicted felon for DUI) Then my mom plays the martyr and I don't want them accepting that dysfunction. I want them to know that she could have stood up to my sister in law and not left. I want them to know that there is a reason my sister is 350 pounds, that there is a reason why their Uncle is so closed up. I want them to see the dysfunction and not fall for how my mother is trying to plant it in my children's head that I am being a 'bad daughter'. Like I said in another post, she said to my daughter: "Don't ever do this to your mother"...... Any suggestions on how to talk to the kids about this?