A view of relationships, and the turbulence they seem to be undergoing and...

.....the opportunity for learning and emotional clearing.  And to learn to watch out for drama queens, they can be hard to spot.  And they can sure make a relationship hard.

       I seem to be noticing the people around me caught up in this or that kind of relationship struggles.

       This is a hard time, things have certainly speeded up - ascension wise, and yet there are so many who are not coming to grips with why they seem to be having all this strife in their lives.

        Is it due to the fact that all the leasons they were supposed to deal with are piling up top of them in their daily lives, just waiting to be cleared out.  Allowing their DNA to start to function as it ought to?

         I am not going to set myself up as some kind of holier than tho expert on this.  But I will point out some situations in my own family that may show how things are coming to a head for us.

        Now I have a sister, who has lost her house, gotten tagged by the IRS, and had to give away her cats, but when helped out by other family members  who moved her out, kept her two big older dogs and one little dog.

        Another sister graciously offered to watch the big dogs.  And both of them it seems had cancers. 
One had a very obvious cancer of the jaw, and the other had a very large lump on the leg.

         The one with the bad jaw has to be euthanized, and the other remained at the home of the sister who was watching the dogs.  But, then the dog began to escape, run all day all night, and lost 20 lbs. 

        The homeless sister made the assumption that the children of the other sister were not making sure  the dog was being fed, or that their own dog was eating all the food, so they were neglectful and allowed the dog to starve. 

          She said and did this and that, a bit sharply, and the sister who had been watching the dog told her to take her dog, as they would not care for him any more.

           So, this is where I come in.  And where I have had to really work hard on my emotional clearing.
As it gets, as in most families very convoluted.

          Me, I am stupidly sympathising with the homeless sister, untill I do a very not so smart thing.  I am having lunch with her and my elderly parents, and she has an opportunity to go to a large city and work for a few months.  My parents are elderly, and they have really small back yard, are leaving town themselves and this is a really large dog.  They get this deer in the headlights look, so I offer to watch the dog.

             Well when I get the dog, I try to teach him to come back when called, which he does not do well at all, if at all.  Then I try a whistle, and he comes finally three days in a row.  Untill he comes across a deer, a pregnant doe.  And he runs her at least a half mile down my canyon, and I am running down the road hearing him barking insanely while chasing her.

              The doe crosses the road in front of me, and he runs by and I literally tackle him.  And believe me, he was very feral at that point.  He did not want to go hoome with me, kept looking for the deer and to add to all that, so lame on that bad leg of his, he could hardly walk.  A true disconnect in his head and the wild thing in him coming out.

               The does at that point in time were all ready to fawn, or had fawned.  He never got off the leash again the rest of his time with me.

                 The lump on his leg kept getting bigger, while my household settled into a rountine.  A couple of times I aciddentaly bumped that leg and he would cry out or growl at me.  I knew this was very serious by then.  So I wrote to my sister, and tried to talk to her about taking him to the vet she had taken him for his shots.  A reasonably priced vet, who had looked at the leg before.  And she told me they didn't think it was anything to be too concerned about.  She told different things to different people also, and that is where it starts to get confusing.

               I saw he had a worm infestation, so I tried a homeopathic rememdy, and oh my, the tapeworms that poured out into his stools.  This is gross, and for that I apologise.

                So I got some wormer from the vet, and a week later they just kept coming out.  By that point I had some dialoge with the sister who had been watching him earlier, and told her that he really wanted to just go running constantly in the woods, and I really didn't think that she and the kids has neglected him.

                 To which she let me know, she was feeding him in the morning,standing there watching him eat, then when he was done, she would go get ready for work and he would have already gotten over the fence and was gone.  She also told me that our sister, whose dog it was, kept telling her that she should put up a hotwire to keep him in the fence. 

                   Well, she didn't have a charging unit, they are expensive, and being on a tight budget, she couldn't afford the extra electricity.  But she had felt very badly about his weight loss, untill our sister had shown up with a case of canned dog food, slammed it down on their counter and very unpleasantly told her daughter she had to feed her dog this food, then left.

                      So the please come get your dog ulitmatum ending eventually in my caring for the dog.

                     Now he was nice dog in many ways, I quite liked him, but he had been allowed to run for so long, and most likely had killed deer, and had killed many small animals in the woods that he craved it.  And gotten a very horrible tapeworm infestation.

                     I wormed him again and finally the tapeworms stopped coming out, and he gained weight back, all twenty pounds he had lost.  But the lump on the leg got bigger and bigger.

                      So I tried to press my sister ,whose dog it was,to please call the vet, I would take him, I would do the rest.  After two weeks or so, she called me one morning, still hadn't called, kept saying she was so "busy". Not too busy for FaceBook but too busy for a suffering dog.  I was really fed up.

                     She did however tell me the name of the clinic and I got him in the next day.  The prognosis was very bad, either my sister had lied about what they told her, or simply didn't understand.  But after I had a meeting with the original vet and another vet, and they werer reading the chart, it appeared that the first vet had told her that it wasn't too "involved -yet".  At this point in time it had become so involved there would be very serious muscle damage, it would most likely come back and the only possible thing with still no guarantee's was that the leg could be amputated and maybe he would have a chance.

                     I was pretty sad.  They gave me pain pills to get him through till she could see him the following weekend.  She was coming down to do a walking part of a marathon race that is held in my area every year.
So she could see him the following weekend.

                    No easy way to say it, I called her late in the day on her cell phone, not knowing if she was at work or not, and to be honest, not caring.  Hard to say, so I was blunt and out with it.

                      I got off, she was stunned I knew and then just the wait.

                       Now the interesting thing was, many other emotional upheavals involving this sister erupted during this period also.  Seems like there was a lot of fodder for drama with her.

                         After she came the following weekend and said goodbye to the dog, and I had to take him in with a friends support and had him euthanized, well let's just say things broke loose.

                          I had told her something my husband had said in confindence only to find she had taken it, twisted it around on me and told it to others.  And that was not the only thing she said about myself personally.  I was a loose woman and a hoarder to boot.  But she did the same for every one in our family, twisted, told tales behind their backs, and generally acted like the most ungrateful person I have ever known.

                           She was even calling one of our nieces brand new baby the most homely baby she had ever seen.  And the niece's husband really controlling, etc.  Hey , a brand new baby, whoa huge change for everyone, loss of sleep, wow. Maybe not in our best foot forward.

                             I was stunned , angry, and then this sister's daughter starts asking me what her mother has been saying about her all these years.  I couldn't bear to say.  But started asking her questions about certain incidents that had occurred over the years.  Way different versions. And one seems like some alcohol use comes into the mix, something I have noticed before.

                                The daughter and her 13 year old son are in therapy together.  So, I came to see that there was a pattern, and between my sister and her daughter there was a pattern of drama that seemed to be
generated by either one of them calculated to cause a fight.  My sister who likes to see herself as the wiser one is not actually in reality.  She is as big a drama queen or bigger than her daughter. I also have heard her declare herself an expert on personality types.  And she is in some ways, but then again she uses the knowledge to manipulate people.  And she does not see herself as ever being wrong, and has a very blown up opinion of her ability to be in charge.  Though she really doesn't know herself well, or the effect her behavior has on her closest loved ones.

                                I was angry, but came to see that no one can help the sister and her daughter.  They have to help themselves heal by dropping the egos and seeing a counselor together.

                                 After reviewing the whole almost lifelong combat between them, I worked on myself.
This is a mental health issue for both of them,  I have seen that I have let myself be sucked in and bought into the sister's versions.  Not that the daughters are any truer, but I cannot do that anymore.

                                 I can however learn from this.  To keep a very discerning ear to what I hear from them, and not engage.  This hopefully lets me see in an objective way.  A hard painful lesson, but one I should have learned years ago.  I knew down deep my sister can be a very controlling person, who in reality is very quick to undermine people, and has been very rude and dictatorial to me while on joint family trips, where she used her vehicle, or reserved a camp space, and in her mind putting her in control.  She wants to be the " Boss". And becomes in her mind one in charge of people who can't do anything without her telling them to. And lacks a lot of mindful thought when she talks to them.   So with this in mind, she will not hold any power over me. I have refused to co-share cars with her on the last trip, and if there are anymore trips, which I do not feel like being involved with, I will not share a motel room either.  Long story there.

                                And I told her daughter that if she feels so threatened by her mother, then she should keep doing therapy with her son on her own, and keep her own life more private from her mother for a while.  If she feels her mother takes any tidbit of information and twists it to make her look like a crazy person, then no private stuffl.  The son of my niece has expressed his discomfort at his grandmothers prying for information.  This was rather sad, but a drama junkie will go to extremes.

                                So I also need to practice this close to the chest behavior, as will my other sister the first caretaker of the dog.  We have been upset when we heard what was said about us, but it was lesson and a chance for emotional clearing and understanding of the nature of what is a mental health issue in our family.  Once we had to face up to that, and hopefully the rest of the family will in time, then healing can come.