this just in: gingerbread cookie dough looks like a big fat bowl of dogshit. no lie.

had super-speed xmas during lunch break today... which meant i had to call my mom's house to let her know the box got here okay and to thank everyone.

i talked to her yesterday, dammit. this every day contact wears me thin.

maybe she feels the same way? after ten minutes she passed me off to danielle. which is not the reason for the post. danielle's passing the phone to brittanie. that's the blog fodder.

she's doing better. she sounds better. she's more talkative about the shit that's going on at home. therapy is helping. a lot. and it's only been two weeks.

i'm jealous of her and i feel like a complete and total jerk for it.

while i would never go back and change the things i've been through that have made me as self sufficient and strong as i am today... at the same time i would.

b tells me therapist told her she's different from the rest of us kids in that she wants to go out and be social and things and go to parties and such and that it seems like michelle and i didn't really have much of a social life outside of high school. i told her that we didn't have that kind of life - that was true. but not wanting it was never the issue. we did want to go out and do things all the time but for the most part we lived in fear of our parents. we let so much slide because they constantly reminded us who held the power. it was easier to not go somewhere, anywhere, than to ask and have to do zillions of chores as some kind of "payment". it was easier to quit band after a year than it was to continue fighting with the parents about leaving drumline to learn the sax. back when michelle and i were kids everything was about our parents tastes, what they liked and what they wanted. and to some degree, i'm sure that's normal. my parents took it to the extreme. frequently.

while i'm really glad brittanie's getting help, there's some really typical mom stuff going on when they're there. like she only really listens to the therapist... all our lives us kids have never known what we're talking about. not even now, with me at 26 and michelle at 28. we're not worth listening to. nothing new.

i'm jealous because i wish i had had someone who recognized the shit i was experiencing in high school when it was happening. i wish someone had put me in therapy. i wish i didn't have all this fucking shit going through my head all the fucking time about things that i resent about my parents and how my sister michelle and i had to grow up way to fucking fast and babysit our four younger siblings starting when i was 7 or 8 and she was 9 or 10. i hate that my mother gossips to her friends all the time about shit we tell her, to the point where i don't want to tell her anything anymore. i hate that because of that i lied to her about my xmas eve plans. i hate that my mother is such a fucking slacker parent now and that in the end if she'd gotten justin the help he needed when the shit started he wouldn't be living with our fucking exdad. while i don't resent the close relationships i have with my siblings as a result, i resent that michelle and i have been put in parental type roles with them over and over again over the years, to the point where we do feel some parental type responsibility for their well being. i hate that my mother has 6 burdens, not 6 kids that she totally digs.

i hate that i am partially responsible for the shitty time i had in high school. i hate how weak i was then, how i just took everyone's bullshit over and over and over again, i hate how i was in brainwash mode until almost the end of college. i hate that i will never get high school back for a do over, and while i am genuinely happy for them i'm jealous that my younger siblings will most likely have goodtime memories of social type highschoolness because the shit's getting sorted out now. and i hate that i'm jealous. and i hate that 10 things i hate about you isn't on tv more often.