What a shame.

I know that this is rather off-topic for my usual bull on here, but I’m worried about my aunt and her kids. I think the possibility of her reading this is more than remote so I will be candid. She and her husband are fucking up their kids. They are 12 years old but I know damn well that when I was 12 (and Marie and Sarah and all my other friends) I was not such a child! Those girls are emotionally stunted. They have grown up in a cocoon of idiocy with their father. Granted, he is not a stupid man, he is very smart—but he’s nuts. He has emotional problems and it has been passed on to the kids. But what is most frustrating about the entire thing is what has happened to my aunt. My aunt is a frighteningly intelligent woman. She’s warm, funny and bright. And her husband stifles all of this. She has become a shell of her former self. He sucks every bit of energy she has. He constantly feels sorry for himself, or is tired, has to rest…”I worked all day and I’m going to take a nap……” ok, fine, but at least DO SOMETHING later!! He does nothing!! And when he does do something it’s as if he needs to make the world aware that he is condescending to do something helpful. Or he pawns it off to the kids. This is a true mini-dialogue: My Aunt: “Hey honey, can you take the trash down to the garage.” Uncle: “*Grunt* Ok.. I’ll do it in a minute.” (seconds pass) Still Uncle: “RACHEL take the trash down to the garage.”
Lovely example, no? Rachel has been diagnosed with actual organic problems that cause her to be a bit of a…handful. But there are also, I’m sure of it, deep-seated emotional problems that are keeping her from developing at a normal rate. They cannot handle any social setting with ease (and there is a difference between being shy and being really, really weird). My aunt and uncle decided last year to take them out of public school and into Catholic school because of “types” at the school. Then the other day my aunt out of the blue said to me that when the girls were taking piano lessons (from the teacher that I went to for 12 years, as did Sarah) the teacher “killed” any desire to do music. So basically, it’s always someone else’s fault. It isn’t the girls! Oh no, never that. Bullshit. Those girls need an intervention, and fast. Time is running out to save them from having a fucked up future. My uncle has two fucked up kids from his previous marriage and I think guilt is making him blind to the kids he has with him now. He can’t bear to believe that anything is wrong with them because he has two OTHER fucked up kids. Pattern, anyone? It’s sad. It’s a shame. And its my fault they met. Sigh…
And I know it isn’t right to tell people how to raise their kids, but someone needs to tell them, or at least make them see that their girls don’t have a future! They can barely sit through a school day! They can’t relate to other people or other kids. And then my aunt blames it on medication!! Medication that is supposed to HELP the problems with school! As if the fact that they can’t make friends has anything to do with that. They cannot cope with people. They can’t because they have no sense of self. They have been fed bullshit from their father for their entire life and they cannot make any kind of decision for themselves. I hope that they get help. And that my aunt does too for that matter to make her see what’s going on without the suffocating presence of my uncle.