Having six people under one roof, two of whom being extended-stay houseguests, makes for a lot of stress, frustration, aggravation, and occasionally, downright ugliness.

Something’s gotta give.

My mom is upset with me for being unavailable to “face the music” when she breaks the news to my youngest brother, A, that the belongings he had stored in her apartment were disposed of. This is taking place tonight, when she picks him up from the airport at midnight (he’s flying in from Job Corps for the holidays).

My reasons for being unavailable are irrelevant. Here’s what is relevant: carry your own damn bag. And conduct your own damn symphony. It isn’t my responsibility to face music that isn’t mine. Besides, she’ll have a much easier time throwing me under the bus if I’m not there to defend myself. *insert eyeroll emoji here*

Tonight my mother endured a long phone call with my middle brother, Y. Y is both schizophrenic (delusional / delusions of grandeur) and a complete asshole. The former makes him difficult, but it’s the latter that makes him impossible. In any given situation, he makes himself out to be the hero or the victim. And he is never, ever wrong. And when he is, he simply pretends he isn’t, pretends he never said or did whatever it is he is wrong about, or finds some way to move on from the subject by being offensive and hurtful. I’m torn as to which is more offensive to me, personally: being accused of clogging his toilet with needles full of heroin I never touched, ever; or being accused of selling my body for Oxy. It’s a toss-up, I suppose.

To say Y has burned his bridges with me is the understatement of the year. He may very well end up in a shelter or even on the street before the year is out, and I won’t sleep any less soundly at night knowing I’m all that stands between him and a warm place to lay his head.

But you want to know something? I truly grieve for the sweet little boy he once was, and for the decent human being he is clearly incapable of and/or unwilling to be.

For reasons I won’t get into, in October of this year my mother had to move out of her apartment – it was an eviction. She had another apartment lined up to move into, but because the tenant of that apartment refused to leave and was causing a mess of legal issues for the management of that apartment building, subsequently my mother had nowhere to go for several weeks.

So she has been staying with us. Believe it or not, because we’ve all been through so much in the past several years, including a decent amount of therapy, having my mother stay with us for an extended period of time has not been an issue.

It’s what she said to me the day she found out items she had left behind in her apartment had been illegally removed and disposed of:

“When your brother finds out, he’ll never speak to you again.”

He’ll never speak to me? To me?
I’m not the tenant who got behind on her rent.
I’m not the tenant who failed to pack so much as a single box, thus forcing her daughter, son-in-law, grandson, and their friend to hastily scramble to empty the apartment of most of the furniture and leave it up to her to figure out the packing and removal of the rest.
I’m not the tenant who didn’t even rent a storage unit for her belongings until that afternoon.
I’m not the tenant who didn’t even pack an overnight bag, also leaving it up to her daughter to scramble to throw together clothing, toiletries, medications, and supplies and a transport carrier for the cat.
I’m not the tenant who then failed to make an execute a firm plan of action for obtaining the rest of her belongings.
And I’m certainly not the tenant who pissed off the management to begin with, which is surely what drove them to illegally empty out the apartment.
(Yes, it truly was an illegal dumping of my mother’s belongings. The ball on litigation is already rolling.)

But sure, my brother will never speak to me again. Because like I said in my last blog entry, my role for so long in life has been that of rescuer or scapegoat. And even though I now recognize the behavior, it doesn’t stop others from casting me back into those roles.

But this I know: it is not my fault.