It's been nearly three years since I've written in this blog. I expected that I would have written in it a few more times, and then perhaps deleted it. But I've found in the interim that narcissism is forever, and I'm still having to live with it.
Three years ago we were preparing for an unwanted eviction action against my husband's brother at the county court. Neither of the two local judges were going to be available, since one of the judges was my husband's golfing partner, and the other was wife to Brother Twin's attorney. So we had to wait a few weeks (after waiting a few months, after waiting a year or two,) for the out-of-town judge to appear via video cam, who was not happy to be there in the first place.
We had spent several years in negotiation with Brother Twin, who is on record saying things like, "I knew when we first came here it was a mistake," and "We thought your son could move in here when we move out," or "Give us six more months," or, "Give us another 12 months," and we did. What precipitated the action after believing lies like these, was Brother Twin telling us he was going to be gone for two years on a job in Texas, (a job that never materialized,) leaving his children behind to trash the place unsupervised. His wife had taken a job as a traveling nurse several years earlier and was in the home maybe 2-3 weeks in the year. My husband and I wrote a letter and hand-delivered it, asking him to clean up or move. Once that ball started rolling, we had to follow up on it--something unexpected in this family of rants, raves, threats, intimidations, and cowardice.
He did hire his youngest son and a friend of the family to clean up somewhat, mostly because they needed the work. The friend of the family told me the condition the yard was in, how he had picked up 200 three-gallon buckets (and how Brother Twin had hollered at him for disposing of them), how after days of cleaning his arms were black with grime. Some of the more valuable vehicles outside the fence (and on our land) were towed off to the metal recycler for the value of the metal in them. Other than that, it was hard to tell any cleaning had taken place. I had a bird's-eye picture from Google Maps of the two acre dump, and it was hard to look at. What couldn't be seen was where, outside the fence, Brother Twin had buried two chest freezers full of rotten meat since the electricity had been unplugged.
More negotiations. Our nephew desperately wanted them out. They threw trash, made faces, hollered at us to get off their road, let their dogs out to chase our cows (ten died, nine in a frozen pond and one run into a wire fence by a chasing dog), gave us a tongue-lashing when we complained about the dogs, and trashed the road with gigantic muddy ruts by running up and down at ninety miles an hour in four-wheel-drive vehicles. When the bridge over the ditch needed replacing, Brother Twin did not contribute, as he promised he would; the farm paid for it. When they let the fence around their house fall down and our cows got in their yard, they called up Grandpa and complained that we weren't feeding our cows well enough.
We were worried about Grandpa getting involved. Even though he promised several of the sisters that he wouldn't, it was something tailor made for him to imagine himself important: mediating his quarreling sons, prodigals both, needing his wisdom and steady hand; nothing about how he had spent the last 25 years hollering at one of them for making a huge mess, violating the covenants in the lease agreement, and not one word about how he had skirted the laws of the state in order to make the lease in the first place. How he and his wife had enabled a son who proudly wore the Black Sheep label by tempting him with a sick, insidious dependency, imagining that they could gently guide him into a better life and church attendance, when BIL's real intention was to make his father pay.
Three years ago we were preparing for an unwanted eviction action against my husband's brother at the county court. Neither of the two local judges were going to be available, since one of the judges was my husband's golfing partner, and the other was wife to Brother Twin's attorney. So we had to wait a few weeks (after waiting a few months, after waiting a year or two,) for the out-of-town judge to appear via video cam, who was not happy to be there in the first place.
We had spent several years in negotiation with Brother Twin, who is on record saying things like, "I knew when we first came here it was a mistake," and "We thought your son could move in here when we move out," or "Give us six more months," or, "Give us another 12 months," and we did. What precipitated the action after believing lies like these, was Brother Twin telling us he was going to be gone for two years on a job in Texas, (a job that never materialized,) leaving his children behind to trash the place unsupervised. His wife had taken a job as a traveling nurse several years earlier and was in the home maybe 2-3 weeks in the year. My husband and I wrote a letter and hand-delivered it, asking him to clean up or move. Once that ball started rolling, we had to follow up on it--something unexpected in this family of rants, raves, threats, intimidations, and cowardice.
He did hire his youngest son and a friend of the family to clean up somewhat, mostly because they needed the work. The friend of the family told me the condition the yard was in, how he had picked up 200 three-gallon buckets (and how Brother Twin had hollered at him for disposing of them), how after days of cleaning his arms were black with grime. Some of the more valuable vehicles outside the fence (and on our land) were towed off to the metal recycler for the value of the metal in them. Other than that, it was hard to tell any cleaning had taken place. I had a bird's-eye picture from Google Maps of the two acre dump, and it was hard to look at. What couldn't be seen was where, outside the fence, Brother Twin had buried two chest freezers full of rotten meat since the electricity had been unplugged.
More negotiations. Our nephew desperately wanted them out. They threw trash, made faces, hollered at us to get off their road, let their dogs out to chase our cows (ten died, nine in a frozen pond and one run into a wire fence by a chasing dog), gave us a tongue-lashing when we complained about the dogs, and trashed the road with gigantic muddy ruts by running up and down at ninety miles an hour in four-wheel-drive vehicles. When the bridge over the ditch needed replacing, Brother Twin did not contribute, as he promised he would; the farm paid for it. When they let the fence around their house fall down and our cows got in their yard, they called up Grandpa and complained that we weren't feeding our cows well enough.
We were worried about Grandpa getting involved. Even though he promised several of the sisters that he wouldn't, it was something tailor made for him to imagine himself important: mediating his quarreling sons, prodigals both, needing his wisdom and steady hand; nothing about how he had spent the last 25 years hollering at one of them for making a huge mess, violating the covenants in the lease agreement, and not one word about how he had skirted the laws of the state in order to make the lease in the first place. How he and his wife had enabled a son who proudly wore the Black Sheep label by tempting him with a sick, insidious dependency, imagining that they could gently guide him into a better life and church attendance, when BIL's real intention was to make his father pay.
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