Inner thoughts and struggles

What are the fears surrounding your departure from Isabel? I fear she will be heartbroken and lonely, and her anxiety will triple, and her mood will reach new lows. I fear that she won’t be able to cope and my baby will suffer as a consequence. I fear Vangelis will be left to be as undisciplined as never before. I fear I will be alone in the world. I will miss them. I will feel selfish after Isabel has given me the best in the world, a beautiful and healthy baby, having deserted her when she most needs me. I feel my family will be against it since it will mean that Esteban will not be close to us. After all, she’s his mother and kids go where moms go.
PLAUSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Logically, Isabel will suffer and you will suffer as well if the separation becomes a reality. But the more you sit around and wait for the inevitable, the more pain that will be accumulated and the more you’ll both suffer in the end. The real question is not whether you guys will suffer but what will you guys suffer for. Being apart from her will signify a personal growth on your behalf and maybe later on with a clearer mind you guys can go back together if things apart don’t work out. But do so as a conscious choice and not out of need and dependency. Yes, the baby will suffer if you allow it, not if you stick by the principles of sanity which demand that we first make ourselves happy in order to spread happiness all around. How can you make him the reason to be stuck in a relationship that no longer functions? Work on the relationship by taking her out, buying her a thoughtful gift here and there and making time to strengthen the family bond. Take them out and spend time together. Challenge yourself by being the person you can now be and stop complaining so much about the things you can’t achieve right now. Instead of thinking yourself stuck in a hole, make plans to fix the things that are under your power to implement as of now. Exercise again, eat healthier, write with a lot more discipline as of now, cancel cable, save more, pay your bills on time and look for a place to start anew. Later on you can worry all you want about living the single’s life which is really not nearly as satisfying as it is believed and more troublesome than your imagination paints it.

Mother's adventures in the Big Apple

My mother’s idea of protection is blind submissiveness. In other words, she thinks that since so and so is a son or a daughter of hers, then all behaviors are acceptable. That sure is a way of raising loud-mouth and abusive kids. Paola, my sister, may not see it. In fact, she may have at her disposition all her wits and cleverness to see just what her eyes want. We all have, to an extent, such mechanism. We all, more or less, think that we’re right in doing what we do and that there is no other way of being aside from the way we adopted to be.
Everything we think or hold for true is vaguely so. Knowledge is an illusion: it is just a matter of time to prove a theory wrong or, better yet, to surpass it and implant in its place a much brighter and dynamic one. How boring things would be otherwise, that is, if perfectation were truly attainable. Hence, we can perpetually strive to be better. The thing is, as individuals, we tend to be very good at some things and not so good at others. Some are great gardeners, others painters, and many architects. We all do what we find pleasure in doing and our habits reflect just that. If something has given us results in the past, then we continually reinforce such behavior.
Paola was a whiner and it brought her results. Mom would just love the way in which her little one would complain and many times yield to her demands. A quarter of a century later, she still does. Instead of molding her, not allowing her to mistreat her in every other phone conversation they have, mother defends her blindly and mildly. It is the same thing mother does with her other protégée, Laura, an abandoned daughter of a brother of hers who was put under mom’s wing at a very tender age.
We had our verbal altercations over it. But since I understand that the effort to learn and adapt is ever so great, one ought to give up completely on anything not worth our time. And changing my mother’s ways is one of those things.
Let’s review simple examples: my mother thinks I’m evil for not including her in my plans to move. In other words, she wants to come and live with me and she makes it a given that such is the case without even considering talking to me about. How does she imply so? Well, simply put, she’d be rambling about one thing and another and then in between sentences add something like: “When we move together” or “As long as there’s a little room where I can camp.” Have I told her anything about it? Yes, on a couple of occasions, I have calmly stated that yes, mom, I love you and all but the idea of you and I and my wife and my wife’s first marriage kid and my own kid moving in together doesn’t sound too bright to me. Not because I don’t care for you but because I simply have a plan of my own. I mean, after all, is my life. I guess I have a saying on it. Don’t I? She’d cry on those two occasions, call me evil and threaten to tell my sister back in Colombia that I am a heartless beast (or some other mythological and demonized creature) and then a day or two later go about saying the same thing: we’re moving together and that is that.
I stopped trying to tell her. Let her think whatever she wants.
It’s not that I don’t feel for her. I do. I help her in whatever way I can. But if I’m not mistaken, the idea was for her to move in with my sister Paola, who lives in Miami. And after Paola made all the runs and put in the requested leg-work and money to bring her here, my mother simply refuses to go live with her. Paola still harasses her over it every single conversation they have.
I don’t want any part of it.