Image via Wikipedia

Here’s one that started out kind of funny, but makes me really wary of “Tiggers”…

UPDATE: This story is NOT about me, gang… your advice giving is nice, but I personally am not struggling with this issue - it’s a story I found on the site mentioned above. Seriously… :)

“About ten years ago we noticed that our family could be split up perfectly into the characters of the 100 Achre ((sic)sicWood. My Step-Father is Owl. My Mom is Eeyore, my baby sister is Piglet, my baby brother Tigger, my other Pooh. My eldest brother Rabbit and my self Kanga. Our personality traits match exactly with the traits of these animals too. Its insane.

My youngest brother is the one I am here to complain about. He is a manic bi-polar and he is very hard to live with. It is very hard to live with a manic. The grandiose trait is probably the most difficult thing in the world for me to cope with. The spending, I am almost always broke, can I get 50 bucks from you?, is a close runner up too though. He is up all hours, always out of a job, loud and obnoxious, rude, sexist, ignorant and in general hard to live with. That is before you get to the Tigger behavior!

I love him… as he is. It is living with him that I can’t do.”

So what would you advise for this person? I’m an only child, but I have many friends who have dealt with siblings and family issues, but I can’t speak for anyone really.

Personally, I’d probably try to help him get a job (not where I work, but by teaching him), teach him about finances/managing his money, stuff like that. He IS the baby brother, so it’s likely he’s just really young and really not sure about who he is or where he’s headed in life.

A little guidance is so much better than a handout… for all involved!

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Stepparents

One of the biggest struggles with stepmothers or stepfathers is when the children use that famous line, “You’re not my mom, you can’t tell me what to do!” Or, “My dad is a better baseball coach than you are!”

These lines can be quite hurtful, for both the adult and the child involved. What I think sometimes goes unrealized is that it’s something kids say to try to get out of a situation they’re unhappy with. Much like feigning sick to avoid a test at school, this is a ploy to get what they want - even if that “want” is to make their birth parent uncomfortable.

Kids need to learn to respect people as adults. It doesn’t matter who the birth parent is, if there is an adult put in place to care for a child, then bottom line the child needs to honor and respect that adult. They don’t go to school and tell the teacher, “I don’t have to listen to you, you’re not my Daddy,” do they? No.

So as a stepparent, it’s your responsibility to have a talk with the birth parent about things like this. Learn what the rules are that have been put in place for the child, and respect the wishes of the birth parents (yes, both of them) when it comes to discipline and rule enforcement.

I found these magnets and thought they were a cute way to let those special family members in on your inside joke:

Available at CafePress.com (image: CafePress)

The cool thing is that you can get this 10-pack, but you can also get coffee mugs, t-shirts, and much more. I love the creativity found over at CP, some people come up with really cool stuff!

Check out FUN in DysFUNctional Family Movies for a great list.

Children growing up in a dysfunctional family have been known to adopt one or more of six basic roles:

* “The Good Child” – a child who assumes the parental role.
* “The Problem Child” – the child who is blamed for most problems, in spite of often being the only emotionally stable one in the family.
* “The Caretaker” – the one who takes responsibility for the emotional well-being of the family.
* “The Lost Child” – the inconspicuous, quiet one, whose needs are often ignored or hidden.
* “The Mascot” – uses comedy to divert attention away from the increasingly dysfunctional family system.
* “The Mastermind” – the opportunist who capitalizes on the other family members’ faults in order to get whatever he/she wants.

They may also:

* think only of themselves to make up the difference of their childhoods. They’re still learning the balance of self-love
* distrust others
* have difficulty expressing emotions
* have low self-esteem or have a poor self image
* have difficulty forming healthy relationships with others
* feel angry, anxious, depressed, isolated from others, or unlovable
* perpetuate dysfunctional behaviors in their other relationships (especially their children)
* lack the ability to be playful, or childlike, and may “grow up too fast”
* may be unpatriotic to their hometown, state, province, or country, and often yearn to live far away from their families

(source: Wiki)

Then, baby sis Jamie Lynn goes retarded and screws up her “awesomely perfect” career by getting knocked up as a teen.

Now, we have the story that Jamie Lynn has sent a gift to VP hopeful Sarah Palin’s pregnant teen daughter.

Not for nothing, but since when has it become okay to reward this kind of stuff? I mean, there were those girls in Massachusetts who all got pregnant together so they could raise their kids together, and now this? Are you serious?

I don’t understand the philosophy that it’s okay for teen girls to get pregnant, and that it should be acknowledged and supported. I mean, sure, there’s not much (that I’d approve of anyway) that can be done about it now, but how the hell is this becoming the “norm”? Even my godson’s got a 13 year old girl in his class who just had a baby, and she couldn’t be happier about it. (Fortunately, my godson thinks she, and the fact that she had a baby, is utterly gross.)

Yes, people make mistakes. Yes, people do things that others wouldn’t do. But damn, at 16, my goal was to get the hell out of high school and off to start my life! Not get carelessly pregnant and wind up in a situation that there was no way on earth I’d be mature enough to handle.

I just don’t get it.

She’d gone through some really major issues with her marriage and divorce, and had been awarded a very large sum of money in divorce court. The first issue is that the family thinks she could’ve gotten more had she done things differently, but the bottom line is that she blew through every penny in no time, and then found herself in a really bad situation with income tax and debt she couldn’t pay. This had happened a while before, so the very thought that it was being brought up at that particular moment made little sense to me, but there I sat, the only “outsider” to the family, watching this woman get mangled over her poor choices by the people who you’d normally think would’ve been her biggest supporters.

Sure, she made some mistakes. She was now in a really bad position, and I can even understand the whole “tough love” idea, but there was absolutely nothing she could do to reverse things. You can’t go back in time, right?

At one point during the night, she went outside for a cigarette and asked if I wanted to come with her. There weren’t many smokers in the family and at the time I was, so I went. I felt so bad for her… she had tears in her eyes and she was mortified that the first time she met me (she lived out of town) that her whole story was laid out there like that. I didn’t have anything to say to her, really. I mean, the truth of the matter was that I wasn’t at all concerned with how what I’d heard may or may not have been a true character reflection. I’m the kind of person to judge people not by their whole lives, not by their mistakes, but by the way they treat me personally. Maybe that’s wrong, or maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.

She wasn’t crying because of the embarrassment, but rather the situation she was in and the fact that her family had hammered her so much about getting her act together and how they wanted her to move back home. But her kids were elsewhere, and even though they lived with their rich father, she felt like coming home would be abandoning them. I didn’t know what to say except, “You have to do what’s best for you, and your kids. But if you’re not doing the best for you, you absolutely CAN’T do the best for your kids.”

So later on that night when we were alone, the then boyfriend asked me what I thought of the family. All I could say was that I hoped that none of them ever got to know enough about me to be able to put me in that position at a family dinner like that. I assured him that he’d never witness something like that at any of my family events, and I was grateful for that, because I wouldn’t want him to see that! All he could do was laugh a little, and tell me, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

If you’d like to ask for advice or share a dysfunctional story, send an email to me at lara.kulpa@b5media.com. Again, I guarantee you strict confidence and security here, so just tell it like it is when you’re with the family at a holiday dinner and drop me a line!

My hope is that this might help people realize that there are others out there going through things that are far worse than their own problems (or in fact, equal, and they’re not alone).

[…] OK here is my disfunctional (sic) family tree…
**Had a mother that allowed my father to sexually abuse me for 10 years and claims she didn’t know. OK How do you NOT know when ther (sic) Father was picked up (but not arrested) on molestation charges before I was born and then SHE made me sleep with him in their bed while she got blasted on Valume (sic) and hid in the extra bedroom.
** She called me the other woman and blamed me for the divorce
** When I had a boyfriend she would have me dress in sexy nightgowns and go sleep with them.
** I smoke weed with my oldest daughter (she is 28)
** My sister (she is my father’s off spring not my mother’s) sleeps with her brother.
** My uncle tried to kill us all over the estate of my mother
** I have siblings I have never met […]

If you’d like to ask for advice or share a dysfunctional story, send an email to me at lara.kulpa@b5media.com. Again, I guarantee you strict confidence and security here, so just let go of the fact that your brother used to make your Barbies do dirty things and drop me a line!

My name is Lara, and I want to take the readers here on a snarky, humorous ride through the world of family dysfunction.

Whaaaa-t?

Yes, you read that right. I’m going to rip apart the world of dysfunctional families to see the funny side of the stories. The world is full of dramatic situations, and let’s face it, NO FAMILY IS PERFECT. We’ve all got crazy relatives, family members we’d really rather not ever run into, and funny uncles who speak with “no filter” at the holiday dinner table. Why take it so serious?

On top of that, I’d like to offer up a place where you can anonymously ask for advice. My advice, and the advice of fellow readers, on how to handle a particular situation you might be facing in your family. I assure you that all identifying information, including even your general location, will be kept strictly confidential. I won’t even put your city and state or anything like that. But while I want to take a lighthearted look at some of the “insanity” in families, I also don’t want to diminish the necessity for really getting some good, outsider’s advice sometimes. Don’t ever underestimate the value behind a stranger’s interpretation of your situation, with or without a doctorate to support their advice, okay?

If you’d like to ask for advice or share a dysfunctional story, send an email to me at lara.kulpa@b5media.com. Again, I guarantee you strict confidence and security here, so just let it rip like your Uncle Barry did at your wedding and drop me a line!

So let’s work on all of this together, shall we? Let’s learn to not take things so seriously when it comes to family issues, and let’s learn to deal with problems objectively and fairly. Personally, I love the idea, but then again, I’m the blogger here.