Sorry, I couldn’t figure out a comprehensible title for this.
I have this problem that has been nagging me for ages.
I belong to a family that is a little careless and brutal to their own. Luckily, my branch is very separated from that; since my father’s american and this had us to be initially raised in an anglo-centric environment, we moved around in many parts of the world, before settling down in England and living amongst the locals.
So we are very different to my mother’s side; those that still believe that a girl’s life is behind her husband’s, school must be rationed and given to boys, and children should be seen and not heard.
They also never saw outside of Valencia.
My eldest cousin is a product of that. Only that because she had spent her whole life raising her whole family when her mother ran around pretending she was 16 and single, and later pretending to be an executive yuppie with no time for being a mother; my cousin is now running around acting like karma owes her for not letting her have a chance to go out dancing and drinking with her friends.
Unfortunately, she is now divorced and with a 10 month old child.
We didn’t realize this when she called us sobbing that her husband has left her. And that everyone in the family is looking the other way and ignoring her. My mother, having cared and loved her when she was born (her sister, my cousin’s mother, was a teen mom at the time), bought her a plane ticket for her to cross the channel and let us care for her and the baby. Give her a helping hand, and let her relax and realize the fast world outside of traditional spain.
Unfortunately, it turns out she did it to rub it in her ex’s face. She believed we live in high-society london (rather than small town huntingdon), and the moment she came she hardly spoke to my mother. She was also a chain-smoker and took any excuse to go out and eye the local men while having a cig, and more than once tried to drag me to some to translate for her while she tried to chat them up. Several times she’d ask if they can take her to see the night life of the (VERY far away) larger towns, using me as a front even though she was asking this to total strangers.
Shockingly, she also asked me the following night if she can buy her own plane ticket back to spain, apparently saying that she had missed spain already within 48 hours. Behind my mother’s back.
Basically, that’s my cousin in the nut shell. She’s a total chav that has no concept of reality in life. She still acts around like a clueless teenager despite that she’s 30, takes advantage of people and tried to walk out behind the woman who actually gave a damn about her when her own mother was partying. We also saw that her child was traumatised of FOOD, for god’s sakes. Yes, she is a good enough mother to prepare his own food out of good meat and many organic vegetables, but the kid get’s nervous even when he hears the mixer getting turned on, and starts crying and screaming when the spoon comes near him. This is very disturbing as he is a very bright and easy going child. He’s amazing with strangers and is very social, but his mother in countless times admits that she never wanted a child. Some of us wonder she only did it out of sibling rivalry when her sisters started having children, even though she says that her husband pressured her after 10 years of marriage.
Well, sorry for the rant. In any case she finally left a week later to go back to the mundane like of not working and gossiping with her relatives. We’ve heard from her mother that she is now currently trying to convince her younger sister to take care of the boy, saying that she feels too pressured by it and needs some space to breathe.
Personally, I feel crushed. My mother had admitted that she felt a hole in her chest after seeing her niece behave atrociously towards her. To her, it was like deja vu where she had a brief moment taking care of a child that wasn’t hers, getting attached to it, and then seeing the child again in 20 years acting like an exact replica of her careless mother.
I personally felt horrified in how little my cousin was attached to the kid. I feel angry with myself for having to turn the other way since I cannot help. So my final question is this:
Has anyone felt like this before, and how did they cope with this?
How can anyone help by making sure that the child can be saved without involving the authorities into this? how can we influence the kid before it’s too late?

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