I dislike family politics

[omimouse]

warinbear's grandfather sent him an e-mail. He wants to come and visit.

The man is a known child molester. catchild's journal holds more info on the subject.

Old New England family. He is the family patriarch. The whole family knows that he likes little girls, and most of them carefully pretend that the problem doesn't exist.

Old family, old blood, and he has the family estate. According to his eldest daughter (warinbear's mom) who also happens to be the executer of his estate, he has a right to have access to every member of his family. Quoting: " That was a long time ago. He knows what he did was inappropriate; he doesn't do it anymore. Besides, he only did it to his own daughters, and only to make them better wives. And he has never done it to anyone else." Direct quote, to the best of catchild memory, from four years ago.

If you do anything that upsets her, you get cut out of any will that she has any control over, and she does his books and estate for him. And not letting him have access to his kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids upsets her. And she still believes that he has a right to see his great-grandchildren, even after one of her sisters sent a letter to every family member that she had an address for. Said letter was a copy of one that she had sent her father, and listed what he had done to her and to her older daughter.

Our daughters, catchild and myself are, to the best of my knowledge, the only female family members that he has not molested in some way.

I despise family politics.

Comments

[catchild.livejournal.com]

note to folks;

my entry is friends locked. if you go to my journal you will not see the post or responses unless you are on my friends list.

Ummm

[mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com]

I would be unlikely to consider money from any will a concern at this point. I would consider it appropriate NOT to visit.

Re: Ummm

[catchild.livejournal.com]

it isn't clear from either of our posts but. . .

our family doesn't consider the money aspect worth anything. the rest of warin's relitives do. they pressure him to visit and to bring the girls to visit. he occasionally visits to shut up his mom. the last visit was 4 years ago and started a huge argument because we left the girls with my folks and adamently refused to allow that man to see them.

warin tries to keep some sebalance of peace with his relitives, but his mom has already cut him and all his siblings and all his kids out of her will. because we are poly and won't teach the kids to lie about it. (she claims she cut his siblings from the will because she couldn't be sure they would follow her moral values either.)

Re: Ummm

[mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com]

Good for you guys for sticking to your guns.

I am HORRIFIED that the will is an inducement to permit visitations among Warin's relatives. (I mean, it's gross, but ain't that pimping?)

This is Warin's mother's father, right? I find it curious that she's all down with this, unless she does not believe that the abuse has actually happened.

Re: Ummm

[omimouse.livejournal.com]

unless she does not believe that the abuse has actually happened.

Oh, she believes that it happened to her and her sisters, not that she calls it abuse. She calls it 'preparing them to be wives'. She also refuse to hear any evidence that he has ever done it to anyone else. She flat out states that he hasn't done it to anyone else at all, full stop, end of story.

She has yet to be budged so much as an inch from this stance.

And, with Kathy, money and appearances are the be-all, end-all of existence. Literally nothing else matters, including what's actually going on, as long as the family looks good and is wealthy. Including telling Catchild that she was lying when she told Kathy that she caught dear ol' Grampa with his hand up a four-year old's dress at Cathild's wedding. After all, that would have caused a fuss at the wedding.

Yeah, this is Warin's mother's father. The woman is poison. She learned it at her father's knee, I guess.

Re: Ummm

[odanu.livejournal.com]

Not that this is your problem in any way, or that I disagree with you and your family staying away from the bastard (wholeheartedly approve!)....if it helps, it might be good to remember that she was abused, and all the crap she puts you through, including and especially the attitude that only appearance matters, is all about her own defenses against what was done to her. If nothing else, it might help to make interactions with the bee-itch bearable. Not to mention, suddenly treating her with compassion and/or pity would knock her off balance and probably piss the hell out of her.

(I discovered a long time ago that the best response to truly poisonous people is to be consistently nice, and firm with my boundaries, and uninterested in their drama, no matter what....it drives them batty, and gives my sadistic little heart a thrill -- and eventually they stop trying to get your goat because they're not getting anywhere)

In any case, ya'll know I'm here, I care, and I'm rooting for all of you.

Re: Ummm

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

Far be it from me to defend Kathy -- I don't play that way.

However. I do actually love and appreciate Grampa. I think he's too fond of patting girls on the bottom as they go by, and I've felt uncomfortable about it a couple of times, but after I established with him that I didn't like to be touched that way, I stopped having a problem. I know that those who don't live in his vicinity probably don't have the chance to establish such baseline rules, and I know it sucks that they have to be established. But the man isn't just someone who abused his kids and feels so guilty about it that he can't deal with it. He's also the man who supported my right to never see my father again, even if that meant uninviting my father's family to my graduation and now the wedding so that I wouldn't have to deal with that crap. Grampa was the only one who said (and loudly) to Jim's face that my father was a con man and an asshole.

I understand your concerns, and I share them. I agree that you can't take Kathy's word that Grampa would be okay to visit with the girls. However, I also think that you would really like Pat, Grampa's new wife, and you would be impressed with how well she has trained him. Pat is absolutely incredible, and I like her a hell of a lot. :)

Nobody needs to actually DO anything here, as far as I can tell. If Grampa actually were to visit, you could send the girls away for that time. You could also just explain that you (singly or collectively) are just too ill for him to come to you, but he could visit with Scott if he wanted to meet somewhere. I honestly think that Grampa is interested in how his extended family is doing, and he considers you all part of that because you're part of Scott's life. That's how he treated Mom's live-in boyfriend, Doug, before he died a couple of years ago. Grampa has been treating Steve as family for about a year now, even before we got engaged. Grampa has mellowed from his hidebound views, and may actually (gasp) be trying to get the real scoop instead of hearing his news alternatively from Kathy and me. (Not that I pass a lot on, but I do correct him whenever he tries to figure out the situation and gets confused about how people could possibly be poly and be happy about it.)

That's my $5.00, anyway. YMMV.

Re: Ummm

[catchild.livejournal.com]

i know he is actually interested in warin and warins life. i also know he genuinely cares about his family.

but his molestation goes beyond a pat on the bottem as you go by. it includes things like putting his hand up the dress of a four year old girl. caressing the breasts of barley pubesent kids. pulling not yet pubesent girls into his lap and kissing them with an open mouth while running his hands over thier bottoms. and this is all things i've seen him do with my own eyes. some of it at my wedding some of it when we went up for gram's memorial service.

i can assure you if he tried any of that shite with my children he'd be dead. if he tried it with any of the adult members of sanctuary he'd be in jail on sexual assult charges. his name and money would not protect him here.

axis of evil, anyone? =(

[dimers.livejournal.com]

note: I'm a little late making these; please see also my response to catchild's previous.

And no, with Kathy money and appearances are NOT everything. She cares about education -- moved to bass-ackwards Alabama far from any family to get it for her kids, and by goddess, it worked. She cares about the environment, for its own sake. She cares about her children's happiness and well-being, though her worldview insists that we'll be truly happier as strict modern Baptists.

Neither "appearances" nor "money" have to do with the letters and phone calls we share sometimes. She didn't lead Girl Scouts for umpteen years to get into the society pages. Her stamp club and canoeing aren't part of some dark plot to preserve the family's status and influence. She's a real person. I think the worst problem between her and the rest of the world is that she tries to share her values too hard and too blindly, which may be idiotically short-sighted but isn't evil.

*shudder* It feels weird defending my grandfather and my mother to the rest of my family.

Re: axis of evil, anyone? =(

[warinbear.livejournal.com]

It feels weird defending my grandfather and my mother to the rest of my family.

I know the feeling . . . My comment (at the time of this writing, the last one on the page) includes something that may not be very well phrased, but is intended to say that Grampa did a lot of things in his life, and some of them were bad, but not all of them were. The same applies to Mom.

Re: Ummm

[catchild.livejournal.com]

I am HORRIFIED that the will is an inducement to permit visitations among Warin's relatives. (I mean, it's gross, but ain't that pimping?)</i? i cannot speak for the rest of the relatives only kathy. i do know it is not an inducment to at least one of warin's cousins or his brother. i don't have much contact with anyone else. comes of not being willing to play family politics. the closest to political kissing up i do is i try to be polite. but then i try to be polite to everyone. not that i suceed all the time or even all that often IRL but i do tend to vent my spleen in my lj first if possible. that does tend to make it easier to be polite in person or in letter.

Re: Ummm

[catchild.livejournal.com]

blast it only noel's comment was supposed to be like this

[warinbear.livejournal.com]

Actually, my mom is not the oldest of her siblings. She has an older sister S, who lives in the same state Grampa does (I don't recall whether she still lives in the same town).

I wonder whether my mom's attitude about her dad's actions has changed at all since seeing the letter my aunt V (one of her younger sisters) sent out recently. V explained therein her stance on Grampa's actions while she was a child, and what she will permit now (as far as visitation and the like), and specifically stated that while she does not like what he did, she still still loves him. The things he did wrong were far and away from the only things he did, to her and to others.