i'm naked inside my fear

November 17, 2004 | 10:01 pm
my mom visited my brother in jail today. his wife (who was arrested with him and was also in prison) has been bailed out by her mother (who frantically begged my mother not to bail either one of them out; they would certainly die if she did) and his wife has been on the visitation list but has not visited him yet. that's not encouraging. so my pseudo-step-father went to her house to contact her and ask her to contact my brother, wherein the wife person proceeded to hide from p-s-d and not answer the door. wonderful.
so it's looking now like when he gets out not only will he not have a car (wife's psychotic mother told my mom it was sold for drugs, but we're not sure if there is any truth in that) he might not be able to obtain a drivers license (he has outstanding warrents for tickets and when he went to court recently, he was assesed a fine over 1700) and now, it's not looking like he is going to have a home to go home to. which sucks, because wife person bought the house with an insurance settlement she received shortly before marriage. my brother has supported them in some ways, when he did work, but for the most part, everything belongs to her.
i feel like i'm in some movie that a person like myself shouldn't be in and i don't know how to escape it. i have learned my lesson on looking down on families that are going through what mine is, as i am now realizing it is not only uneducated families, but very educated ones, like my own. it is not always the poverty stricken drug addicted permissive parents that lead their children into these instances, it can be middle-class drug-free authoratative mothers who see their children do these things.
but you know, this is a lesson i am learning at a huge cost, and i hate every day that my family is going through this and we couldn't watch it in a movie to learn the lesson. i hate that my mother is stressed to breaking point with wonderful (but stressful) changes in her life and she cannot even start to enjoy these changes because her second-oldest is in jail. and for the holidays, you know?
and she has the choice to bail him out, but she was informed that if he did not show for court she would have to pay a "bounty-hunter" 2,000-3,000 to find him and bring him to court. he's twenty-six, and i just don't think she should have to pay a total of $6,000 to get him out of this trouble that he got himself into, especially since he's done similar things before and has not seemed to learn his lesson.
i suppose the only thing that allows me to be angry at this point is that i am no longer worried about his immediate health. by that i mean he is healthy enough at this point to live and in jail, he will not have access to the drugs he was taking before he went to jail.
the most shocking thing?
he told my mother he's been "sick" for almost a year.
it seems like i should have seen, since i know him the best, and i relate to him the most. i guess i'm even blind at times.

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