@Backwoods wrote:
My dear 40 year old is driving me crazy. She is terrible at saving her husband mouches off his family. Daughter had good job paying $140,000 for last year. At end of year they illimanted her job. She got new job paying $120,000 and two months later they fired her for refusing to fire an emplyee simply because he was 65. Her husband until January was only making $40,000 now he got huge promotion to $85,000 She was floating his bills and making all house payments and house expenes. As well as he rcar payment. He wont help her now with car house or her credit cards and just bought a new tesla . She complains daily She about to loose car How do I covicence her to leave? her car is 5 years years old is a small enconomy car. All I hear is daily complaints but no action. She starts a new job lower level week at $95,000
Trust me, it's not your place. It's not your circus, not your monkeys.
Your daughter is a grown woman. Yes, it can be hard to watch a moocher who is freeloading off of her while he buys himself expensive toys use her as a meal ticket, but realize that you can point this out to her, you can tell her what will come of it, but she's going to do whatever she is going to do. It would be great if he left her. At least it would tear the band-aid off, but most men like this realize what they're doing and they'll never do anything to quite push their wife over the edge.
I've seen this sort of behavior out of women before, because my mother acts like this. The more toxic the man, the more all over him she has to be. The more toxic, the more she throws her energy and support at them. It's called a codependency issue.
When her second husband smoked and drank their money away and bought himself a truck and used her to work overtime to take on debt and remodel his house, he just came home drunk and beat her every night as her thank you, and she stayed with him and didn't even try to get away.
In the end, after 7 years of doing this to her, he was too dumb to see he'd never get a better deal than a wife that was being used as a pack mule and mistreated terribly and wouldn't leave him. He decided to file for divorce and then the week after he forced her to move out without two nickels to rub together, he called and complained that he got an electric bill and didn't have her money for his groceries.
Then, to validate herself, she ended up in another relationship with a cheater and a womanizer who was making her work overtime so he could throw his socks and used underwear in the floor, and ask her what was for dinner when she walked in from pulling a double, and he's sitting there flipping through the boob tube drinking another gallon of milk and eating cake frosting with a spoon, next to a pile of lottery tickets (a literal pile of Powerball and Mega Millions) he would buy and then never even check.
She lost another house to that guy. She didn't even fight them for anything she earned in court. She just got another divorce lawyer bill for $10,000 each time and lost 160% of what she put into it.
I tried to get her to leave. Do you think she listened to her son? She threw ME out of the house because the second one told her how that was gonna be and I ended up living in a terrible sleeping room where the people downstairs were making drugs and I froze in the winter and didn't have enough food to eat, and it was $60 a week because there's no way they'd get anything else out of that.
So, family....You know how it is.
She's always gaslighting me telling me how dumb I am. I'm not dumb enough to stick around for 20 years of that and have to file bankruptcy over two houses when one of them died (second one) and $11,000 in IRS debt, and two predatory car loans I took out despite having a functional vehicle with a couple of rust spots on it.
The thing about gaslighting is, most people never realize what's going on here. Gaslighting and DARVO are my mother's main contributions into my life. Telling me how everything I think is stupid and everything I've ever done is wrong when she's conducted her own life ten times worse.
But I told you that so I can tell you this. I could beg her to see things for what they are, I could plead with her not to.
I'll never get her to change her behaviors.
Somewhere in that messed up head of hers, she wants a man who is no good telling her what to do. And if it's not Beavis and Butt-Head (husbands 2 and 3), it's that preacher of her's at church telling her to throw all the money she still has at them, or a used car salesman telling her what a great deal she got on someone else's mistreated bankruptcy repo that never had an oil change and comes standard with a $3500 financed extended warranty that never pays for anything.
She extends this into her politics too, and you know who she supported. I don't even have to say his name. He acted like all of her ex husbands and a used car salesman, so it went to work on that part of her brain.
I will never change my mother, and you will never change your daughter. She's going to have to learn, if she ever does. And all you will get for trying to steer her in a better course is yelled and screamed at, called crazy, and stupid, and ignored while she continues hurting herself, financially and otherwise.
My mother finally decided that getting married was the problem, not the fact that she's got mental health problems and is unfit to recognize which partner would be in her league. She was a nurse for over 40 years and ended up with (other than my dad who was an engineer), truck drivers and maintenence men who flung their used underwear across the room, cracked open a beer, and watched NASCAR while she was busting her butt working doubles all week and making them dinner.
I told her, "You're right. I've been telling you this for 15 years now. If you can't do better than this, stop stop STOP!" and only in her 60s did she listen to me.
I'm not trying to bag on my mother. I've made poor decisions, but I learned something from all of them. I bought a car, it fell apart, I learned that people will try to slip a bad car in on you that they're having trouble with. Thankfully, I was 18 and the car was only $2,000 and that's all it took to teach me the lesson. Unfortunately, it was a hard lesson. At 18, $2,000 was a lot of money to have to come up with again when that piece of junk broke down on me.
There are other examples, but each time, I decided I would never let someone hurt me like that again.
