I’ve been so wrapped up thinking how much my life totally sucks arse that I honestly thought I didn’t know anyone who’s having a worse run of it than me lately. I don’t know if that’s because I’ve been ridiculously insular or if it’s just a willingness to accept the appearance of normalcy in the people around me. Either way I hadn’t thought any of my friends or family were facing any particularly difficulties… that is until this afternoon when I got a swift reality check upside the head in the form of an unexpected visit from my cousin and his wife.
Everyone has a favourite cousin or relative who they got along with really well growing up – well Erick The Half-A-Bee was my least objectionable relative and he’s just about the only family member on one side of my family who I willingly keep in touch with. He and his wife live up the coast, their children are now grown and have families of their own now and they’ve got a handful of grandchildren who they dote on and an even larger handful of step-grandchildren who receive their equal share of dotage too. Unfortunately for them, with the beautiful grandchildren came not one… not two… but three psycho hose beast daughters-in-law.
I will state up front that I’m not making this shit up… I don’t think I could if I tried.
DIL#1 (a very fitting abbreviation) has accused the Erick the tee-totalling Half-A-Bee of sexual harassment after SHE was observed having gotten blind drunk and started suggestively draping herself all over him and sitting on his lap at a family function. Whereupon her husband had to drag her away from her embarrassed father in law’s lap and bundle her into the car to take her home.
DIL#2 has five children all to different fathers, one of whom has been removed from her care as he has special needs (and who she selectively fails to acknowledge the existence of, depending on her audience) and has yet another little one on the way. She has 4′ tall gates made of steel bars put on the entry doors to her children’s bedrooms and she locks the children in their rooms every night. If they need to go to the toilet at night they have to call for Mum to unlock their gates and take them to the toilet. This particular DIL also has a propensity for sending the children to bed (locking them in of course) at 3pm without dinner if they annoy her. She is also fond of sending them to bed without bathing them and sometimes in heavy wet nappies.
DIL#3 also has issues… she has four children (naturally none of them share a father either) two of which are on medications for hyperactivity and antidepressants. Her elder children (the medicated 7 and 5 year olds) are routinely encouraged to physically discipline their younger 3 year old brother by smacking him with a wooden spoon in her absence. When she is in the proximity she has been heard to say ‘Smack him again he was very naughty’ as it appears she can’t be bothered getting up off the couch. 😐
The three sons in this picture have become hollow henpecked versions of their former selves and two of them are under psychological counselling themselves for depression and stress related conditions which have been so severe as to prohibit them from finding and keeping gainful employment.
Last year Erick The Half-A-Bee and his wife (seeing the writing on the wall) decided to become foster parents to 1) help the local community and 2) be in a position to take in their grandchildren should the need arise. They’ve provided emergency accommodation for a number of children since then and about four weeks ago DoCS contacted them to see if they would take on a 5 day old detoxing infant whose mother is a drug addict that at 21 has had four children all of which have been removed from her care. It’s a huge undertaking – agreeing to foster an infant knowing they could be with you for 18 years or they could be taken back to their mother at a moments notice if the mother cleans herself up.
Anyway…. skip forward to last Friday, baby is now six weeks old, and we find representatives of the Department of Child Services on Erick The Half-A-Bee’s doorstep at 5pm to remove the baby from their care. It turns out that DIL#2 and her children were staying at Erick the Half-A-Bee’s house for a while and during their stay, Erick and his wife had finished making dinner and were about to put all the children the tub after an afternoon playing outside in the mud and with the horse to get them ready for bed. DIL#2 said the children were fine to go straight to bed and they didn’t need a bath. Erick pointed out they were pretty dirty from playing outside and he thought they should have a bath before going to bed on all the freshly washed linen. DIL#2 then launches an attack about his implication on her parenting skills and the following day they all pack up and leave.
Shortly afterwards DIL#2 and DIL#3 (who owes Erick The Half-A-Bee money) get together and decide to tell DoCS that Erick The Half-A-Bee was a danger to the baby because he had lost his temper and drove off his car in a fit of anger. This did occur. He did lose his temper. With one of his sons in a totally unrelated incident. And yes, he did indeed drive off in a less than impressed fashion on the occasion in question – however, the foster baby was with his wife. At home. Not even in the same town as Erick The Half-A-Bee at the time.
So DoCS take the baby away after hearing such an accusation- naturally they have to err on the side of caution in situations such as these which then necessitated Erick The Half-A-Bee driving three hours to BrisVegas to sort the matter out with DoCS. The claim made by DILs#2 and 3 were taken very seriously… until another relative who had seen them directly after they had contacted DoCS decided to contact DoCS herself and let them know that the DILs were laughing and gloating about how they’d ‘fucked over Erick The Half-A-Bee with Child Services’. And then of course other details began to unfurl when DoCS found out the maiden names of the DILs. It seems they had no knowledge of this pair because they had called in the information and left their new married names. Upon investigation it turns out that in the past they have done this to other people… made false claims of child neglect AND (this really boggles the mind) they had EACH made claims of child abuse and/or neglect AGAINST EACH OTHER in the past when they had fallen out with each other at various times.
Needless to say, the baby has now been returned to Erick The Half-A-Bee and his wife and the whole affair has done naught but add fuel to the fire for when Erick The Half-A-Bee might have to pursue grandparents rights to gain access to their grandchildren. So yeah… while my life is somewhat fucked by circumstances beyond my control, at least I don’t have people (family at that) trying to fuck my life up by maliciously slandering me and setting Govt departments onto me with fabricated stories of deleterious encounters.
Erick The Half-A-Bee is trying to be philosophical about the situation and said to me all families have problems… like bullshit. Not all families have problems like these!
You can not choose your relatives too carefully.
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