Member-only story
Pushed Over the Edge, I Am Struggling to Hoist Myself Up Again
I can only reason that breaking point had to come, finally…
The ongoing saga of my having opened my home to additional family members has been a major challenge for the last year.
Do you know that feeling when you realise that something has shifted yet you can’t quite put your finger on it? Well that’s what I have been feeling. So I did a bit of delving into the recent events and it didn’t take me long at all to uncover the root of it.
I didn’t realise how precariously balanced on a narrow precipice my jovial self was until my daughter, feeling mad at me for being a bossy parent, said some words to me.
She was talking about her two cousins — the ones whom we have opened our home to and made as comfortable as we possibly could. When I said that they needed to make an effort to make things easier for me while they were living with us, she retorted that they didn’t even want to be living here with us, but they didn’t have any choice.
I was a little taken aback. And there were things I almost said but, more sensibly, bit my tongue and swallowed them back down.
What could I have said? Well, I could have said that they did actually have a choice and that was to be living back in…