The fuck do you care you abrasive shitnugget?

And maybe you missed the part where I said the whole goddamn world is fucked if I'm a "paragon of success".

I gripe because I haven't "made my life", either for myself or with anyone else's help. I'm still struggling to do so and had just barely secured slim hope of eventually doing so somewhere a decade or two down the line when this bullshit happened. And four months my rent money all at once is not exactly "a little money".

Yes please, she won't stop fucking whining and if she's in the hospital at least I know she isn't fucking anything else up.

Our generation is definitely screwed compared to recent past ones, but I don't know enough about the younger kids to say if they've got it any better than us.

I am gauging my success and the world's fucked-ness on age-independent statistics though. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I make a mean income for an American, as in, GDP per capita in the United States is about the same as what I make; but the median income is about half of that (so half of Americans make half or less of the theoretical "average" American), and the mode is in the lower part of even that range (I have trouble finding data on that, but websites discussing it seem to think it's less than half again of the median, maybe even a quarter... or in other words, an eighth of the "average" or mean that I make).

I don't know how those income ranges correlate with age, but one way or another it's clear that most of the country averaged across all ages is pretty goddamn fucked compared even to average just-barely-has-hope-of-someday-being-middle-class me.

The pet thing is right. What I really want is for her to be in like an assisted living center or something, but that would cost even more money that she already doesn't have. The happiest I've been all year was when she was at an extended stay in the hospital, because I knew she was being taken care of and watched over and couldn't screw anything up while she was there.

(Then, as it turned out, her shithead housemates ransacked her room and stole her pills while she was in the hospital, so even that brief moment of happiness was unwarranted. But if her room was in a place as secure as the hospital, and not somewhere else, then I think I could feel safe... but I don't think that's really possible).

Thanks for the support. I've already decided that it's not my responsibility, and really my only care at this point is to extricate myself from the situation so she doesn't drag me down with her. If she wants to fight me every time I try to help, then she can ruin her own damn life, just so long as she leaves me out of it.

Thank you for the kind words, and best wishes with your own situation with your daughter.

With my mom, the relationship is pretty much already shot. When I hear any phone ring or text message come in or anything like that, I jump and start to stress because before I can process it some part of my brain thinks it's my mom. I have nothing left but bad feelings about her, am coming to realize that she has always been this terrible and I just didn't have to deal with it before so the mom I thought I had never really existed at all, and at this point I just want her to go away and leave me alone. Ideally I'd like to know she's well, wherever she is far away from me, but that's mostly just so I don't feel guilty about it.

I thought about the bank loan idea and checked with our bank and they said they don't give out personal loans. Although... it just occurred to me to try another bank, and they said they do, and will have a banker call me back later about it. She claims her credit is currently pretty good (which is why she didn't want to just walk away from her debt to the payday loans places), so if that's true, and she could get a loan sufficient to pay me back on her own credit, then I could just walk away from her and let her deal with them and be done with it. That would be amazing.

I've already resolved that I'm never giving her anything ever again, because you give her anything then she just wants more and more and more forever. That's a part of why I'm being such a hard-ass about being paid back. I want to be very clear that I. Will Not. Be. Taken. Advantage. Of. That her choices have consequences, that borrowing costs and makes you worse off in the long run (today she asked me if she should get a credit card... mother of all terrible ideas for a person like her, second only to going to the payday loans places), and the only possible long-term solution is to make more or spend less... and since she can't make more, she has to spend less.

The phone is definitely good leverage, and I've decided that if she can't pay me back on schedule, that I'm just canceling her phone, because it's costing me more and more money every month. I used to be able to afford it, with grandma on the plan, but then she backed out and suddenly it's like I'm having to pay interest on a loan I gave... I couldn't make mom pay for her own phone I suddenly couldn't support, because she had to pay me back and couldn't handle both burdens, so every month she takes paying me back costs me money.

And yeah, your last advice is good, and what I've known (and told her) that a therapist would tell me if I could afford the time and money to go see one (which is one of the many things on my own to-do list that I've put on hold while dealing with her shit all year). I'm thinking, unless the bank loan thing comes through, that I'm just going to cancel the phone, take it back and sell it to cover the cost of doing so, and just tell her I'm not speaking to her at all until she's paid me back. Apparently I'm the most important thing in the world to her, or so she says, so it's time she puts her money where her mouth is.

Moving her in with me is the worst idea imaginable, and I think you misapprehend just how little space I have. I live in a one-bedroom trailer. When my girlfriend visits for the weekend, it already feels too crowded. What would be the living room of the trailer (the only space besides the bedroom and bathroom) is my work space (like for the work I do for a living), so she can't live there without putting me out of a job and making us both homelss. Her living here would mean her sleeping in the bathtub or something.

That aside, I have taken control as much as I can, and tried mentoring her simultaneously so I could eventually hand control back, and she both doesn't want to be told what she should and shouldn't spend money on, and doesn't want me to just limit how fast she can spend. I try to help and she fights every step of the way so if it weren't for her owing me back for money I could only afford to lend, not give, I'd be happy to just let her fail at this point.

And I guess you missed the part of the post where I said I already paid off her loans. That's why she owes me money instead of them. I can't afford to just lose that.

And as far as I'm concerned I've already lost my family. The mom I thought I had is gone already, and worse, I'm realizing that she was never really there to begin with, I just didn't have to look too closely at what a mess she's always been and could imagine she was something better than she really is... a lying cheating mentally incompetent goddamn addict.

I think you missed a "not" in there. "...except NOT spending money I don't have." And yeah, that pretty much sums her up. The only solutions for her are to spend less or make more. Since she can't make more, spend less is the only solution remaining, and it's the one thing she's not willing to do.

This exactly.

Freedom of religion, separation of church and state, means that "But my religion...!" should neither be a reason for a law nor an excuse from the law. The laws should not respect (in the sense of "regard" or "concern themselves with") religion in any way at all. The law should be blind to religions and not care who is what if any religion.

California is a microcosm of the United States as a whole: liberal around the coasts, except for the south coast; and conservative inland, except near the large body of water on the border.

They also tend to run liberal in federal elections and conservative in state elections.

This split personality is behind a lot of California's budget problems, as one part of the populace with a majority vote has mandated spending on certain programs, and another part of the populace with a majority vote has prohibited raising certain taxes, leaving the legislature tightly bound between the rock of having to spend money and the hard place of not being able to raise it, requiring them to borrow it.

Which, come to think of it, is another microcosm of the United States as a whole, and the reason for the constant debt crises we keep having. Congress mandates spending, doesn't authorize the necessary taxes, and then blames the president for coming to the unavoidable necessity of borrowing to pay for what they've required him to spend and not allowed him to raise.

You know what makes me wary?

The thought that a lot of well-behaved people out there only don't do bad things because they are happy friendly people and don't feel like doing bad things.

Because that implies that if they felt like doing bad things, if they had enough shit that made them upset enough, then they would do bad things, because they are driven by their emotions.

I'd rather know that people had the ability to do what they think is the right thing to do regardless of how they feel about the situation. That is a much higher form of morality than the vapid and selfish "I like people and want them to like me" that seems to drive a lot of people.

If she were retirement age it would be something different. If I were middle-aged and well-established in life with a house and a wife and kids of my own, and my aging parents needed some help getting by, that's not ridiculous to ask for. Parents care for kids when they're young, kids care for parents when they're old.

But no, she's at least a decade from retirement age. I'm barely over thirty, and have just barely secured a course in life that might have me, in a decade or two, to the kind of place in life she and dad were (before they threw it all away) when they were almost a decade younger than me, with a house and marriage and all that. (We don't want kids, but I'd want the house and marriage before the kids even if we did, for the kids' sake as much as my own).

And she has the gall to tell me that kids taking care of their parents is the normal course of things, despite how terribly off-schedule we are even given that. And when I say that, she says I should count my blessings to be doing as well as I can to live on my own, as many of my generation are still living with their parents in their 30s. And I tell her that that's not a blessing, I mean I am statistically doing better than my peers but I wasn't happy to move out on my own when I did, and I really couldn't afford it back then (I'm paying the same now making 3-4X as much as then and now I can reasonable afford it). I just didn't have parents I could live with. Staying with mom would mean sharing a bed with mom, and staying with dad meant living in a tool shed next to his trailer, and then he dared to start charging rent for that, at which point if I'm paying rent I'm going to get a real fucking room for it, and moved out.

What I wanted back before everything went to shit, when I thought I had a loving supportive middle-class family (somehow they put up that illusion, no doubt by living beyond their means), was to live at home through college (we're within commuting distance of my university) plus a little bit longer, just enough to save for a down payment on a house and then start buying my own. Instead, having to rent and work my way through school, I was three years late graduating, couldn't afford to take any risks in my career living check-to-check afterward, and am tens of thousands of dollars behind schedule on saving to start buying a house. I'd love to have had the option those 30-somethings living for free with their middle-class parents are taking advantage of. When it came time that I briefly couldn't make it on my own, I didn't have that option to fall back on. That's why I fight so goddamn hard to make it on my own. Because if I fail, nobody else is going to save me. I'm sure mom would if she could, but she can't even fucking save herself, and dad's the same way.

And yeah, "ridiculous times" indeed, that so many of my generation have to fall back on that option. I gripe constantly about the impossible uphill battle to secure a place in life I have ahead of me, but then I look at the statistics about how well I'm actually doing compared to other people and it's just like... jesus. We're fucked. We are all fucked. The whole goddamn world is doomed, if I'm a statistical paragon of success.

This analysis is spot on.

I go one step further and willingly admit that I should not have been born. Not because I hate my life or I'm a monster that shouldn't exist or any self-pitying/self-hating stuff like that, but because if you gave me a nameless description of two people matching the circumstances of my parents at the time of my conception and asked me if they should have had a kid, I would say "no". Then as a consequence of that general judgement, I'm forced to accept the more specific judgement in the case of my parents who matched that description and say that they should not have had a kid, both out of their own individual self-interests and out of the interest of the potential child (who cannot be harmed by not-existing, but who can be harmed by existing in bad circumstances, and whose existence can be harmful to others).

But then again, I'd say that most people match the criteria for "probably shouldn't have kids". Not because of the people themselves, but because of their circumstances. Serfs should not be bringing new life into existence in serfdom, both out of their own interest and those of the potential children, and further still out of social interest, because if everyone who's too poor to really support kids does the smart thing for themselves and their potential kids and doesn't have them, then in a generation or two you've got a world where everyone's rich (because the supply of poor people ran dry) and it's better for everyone. The upper classes want a teeming mass of poor people to slave away for them.

This is not at all to say that anyone should be prohibited from having kids, mind you. Just that for most people, the smart and right thing to do for themselves and their potential kids is not to have them, and that that would incidentally have great social benefit in aggregate as a side-effect.

I don't know that it'd call it guilt, but definitely more obligation than caring. I don't feel "oh no! that would be so terrible for you, let me do anything I can to make it better!", though I do recognize that it would be terrible for her. I feel "sigh, I guess nobody else is going to fix this, so I have to...". But I'm like that about most things. I rarely feel emotionally motivated to do good things or not do bad things; it's more of an intellectual sense of duty. I kind of think that's a better motive for good behavior anyway, because it means I end up doing right even by people I hate, so long as I think they objectively deserve such treatment, even if I feel like letting them hang and watching them suffer.

You're right about letting someone fail being good for them sometimes, though. And now that I've witnessed all of this I'm coming around to the opinion that that might be what's necessary here (and I said as much in my first post). At the time that it all started though, I didn't have the information I have now, and as much as I wish I could go back in time and leave her hanging in January with foreknowledge of everything that would be to come, in January, with the knowledge I had at the time, that would have seemed unjustifiably callous.