But it is no small trouble. It is actually making me want to raise my son somewhere else, away from the gossip and speculation, somewhere away from all the mean-spirited bullshit that keeps getting hurled my way.
It started before we even moved here, because of a house that was bought that we were told we were moving into. But it wasn't a house for us it was a house we were supposed to keep clean and pretty so it could be sold. Us who have never been able to keep a small apartment presentable are supposed to keep a two-floor 2400 square foot house pristine so that it could be "flipped" (it didn't need to be flipped BTW) and sold again.
So of course I told my future husband my misgivings in detail. But it didn't matter everyone thought it was a great idea and my then-fiance convinced me that we would not be expected to keep the place "pristine" or keep the yard nice etc. But of course this was completely wrong. We were supposed to water, mow, weed, put out poison for pests, edge, fertilize, clean, dust, vacuum etc. All while trying to find jobs. So we did. Of course finding jobs was our priority so much of the rest got done irregularly.
It started only a few months after we got here. We started getting visits from a sister-in-law who would bitch us out for not "finding" jobs. Of course we were applying for multiple jobs every day and not getting any call backs. Then as it turns out she had a position at her office that my husband asks her about. He is informed that she "doesn't hire family." That is unless that family is her other brother and sister, both of whom she had let work for her when she needed extra help and they needed extra money. This just happened to be my husband's back-up plan in case he couldn't find a job, working for sister temporarily. I was led to believe he had that kind of family that would look out for each other when things got tough. She informed us early on that she couldn't and wouldn't employ us and that she was upset that we would even consider that an option and that we shouldn't have expected anything of the sort.
That would have been fine if her mother hadn't tried to get me to work for her multiple times when I was visiting them on vacation. That is the only reason we thought it was an option, but never mind that. Meanwhile we have even dropped down to applying at places like wal-mart and are still not getting any call-backs. It takes us 9 months to find jobs, and we are pretty much humiliated and treated like crap by his family the whole time. His sister visits about once a month to yell at us for not keeping the place clean and tells us to get jobs. I am spending hours a week weeding by hand because I couldn't afford to buy chemicals to kill the weeds, not to mention hours mowing and dusting. In the meantime every local family member decides they need to have us over to dinner at some point or other to talk to us.
We were informed that x sibling knew it was a bad idea for us to be in that house because we weren't "responsible" enough to handle it. We are informed that we are costing his parents hundreds of dollars every month, as we are spending the last of our savings to pay for food, electricity, and the other utilities in a house that was too big to afford. Then finally his mother decides to issue us an ultimatum. She basically says that we have to find jobs within the next week or she is going to kick us out.
She presented it like it was an "intervention," and like we were intentionally taking advantage of her and weren't even trying to find jobs. Well we had already joined a local UU church and had been talking about our job difficulties there for a while. We went to church after the "intervention," and told them we had a week to find jobs when suddenly two of them appeared thanks to the urgency.
Turns out they were some of the worst jobs imaginable. My husband had to completely drop an independent study program he was working on so that he could work 60 hours a week selling vacuums door-to-door and making lets see. Pretty much nothing. $400/month was the biggest paycheck I think he ever got. Plus he got lied to continuously, promised salaries and commissions that never materialized. He had to transfer to the kyle office to avoid getting laid off which is an hour drive away and he still gets paid nothing. Meanwhile I found a job for $7 dollars/hour working 6pm-6am in a clean room with dangerous chemicals and almost no safety equipment. I started breaking out after my second week.
I spent the next four months spending half my money on my own equipment to try and counter the rashes that spread from my arms to my face and lips. It was nightmarish. But back up just a bit because when we got the ultimatum I was so pissed off I wanted to move back to Georgia and I was ready too. After the hours I had put in to weeding by hand, and pulling weeds out of the sidewalk, mowing edging, vacuuming. After all I had done, all the conflicts we had already been put through, and all the humiliating conversations where we were informed that we weren't responsible enough, tidy enough etc for the "house." and then the ones where we were told that we weren't really looking for jobs or we would have found them, that we were trying to live off of my mother-in-law, that we weren't good enough to work for his sister etc. Meanwhile I applied at every graphics design job (I was coming from a job designing ads for a magazine), every magazine, newspaper, and then every receptionist job, cashier jobs, every classified job that I had any experience in, and then finally even walmart, lowes, and starbucks. Billee went on multiple interviews just to find out at the interview that the place expected him to bring in the clients not the other way around or that while he would be a financial adviser in theory he would only get paid on commission when he sold mutual funds. Or that he could have x job as long as he took y 500 dollar test that would take several months to study for, and oh BTW he would get paid on commision selling insurance, mutual funds, services etc. But we supposedly weren't trying.
Our whole experience the first year in Austin was just a long humiliating nightmare, where we were treated not as equals who had hit a difficulty but as deadbeats, we were told we were lazy, irresponsible, messy, poor, and basically not good enough. I was also informed that my writing career that I had gotten paying work in wasn't a real job. After we finally found jobs my fiance's parents decided to sell their house and move in with us while they were having another house built near my husband's brother. Of course we were told we had to clean the master bedroom out which involved hours of work, and hours scrubbing the bathroom and shower so that his parents could have the master bedroom for the short time that they were there. Meanwhile when the new house was finally built we were informed that we had a week to find an apartment and move out. Why had we not found a new apartment yet? Perhaps because I was working 50 hours a week doing a graveyard shift with perpetual medical problems and my husband was working 60 hour weeks... thats why.
I went with my father-in-law on my day off and signed a lease with the first apartment complex that I liked. It was small but clean, bright and pristine. I was actually looking forward to having a space that I could manage and keep clean. Meanwhile I had applied at massage therapy school and signed up for a loan to pay tuition. I found a job working as a cashier at homedepot, with better hours, better working conditions, and more benefits and it was just in time to. My rash cleared up only days before starting massage school. I was a few weeks into my massage training when I discovered I would have a week to get out of my home and into a new one. Thanks a lot. I had close to full time hours at work and another 12 hours a week of school. I had to spend every waking moment studying and packing. Then comes moving day. A day designated by my mother-in-law. Not one required for any other reason. I mention this because it just so happened to be on a day that I had 9 hours of school, or in other words I couldn't help in the process and we were moving into a third floor apartment.
Luckily my father-in-law volunteered to help and got his elder son to assist also (I found out later that he paid him for the privilege). I say luckily but I had already tried to get my husband to pay professional movers. We had used them in athens and I figured it would be a better safer way to do things.
Problem number one: you can't keep this couch because its too heavy, why don't you get rid of this. We'll put this up there instead... more negotiations on furniture and we end up with a giant torn-up dirty smelly leather love seat that I thought was ugly and horrific. Other bad furniture followed. Problem number two: We had to get a new dryer because there were no gas hookups at the apartment. Problem number three: they decided to try and move the washer by themselves, Which led to my father in law having to get stitches. Now here comes the nightmare part.
I get home after being in school from 8am-5pm and battling 5 o'clock traffic for another hour. I go up the stairs to my new apartment that I am looking forward to setting up and...
There are no boxes... everything had been "unpacked." By that I mean that with the exception of some of the glassware and dishes which had been unpacked and stacked on the counter, every single box had been opened and dumped upside down, and then the boxes were thrown away. There was a mountain of books in our room dumped on top of each other, and not in any orderly fashion, the books were upside down, pages getting bent, covers partially crushed. I couldn't even get to my bed. Every single room was filled with dumped out papers, dumped out magazines, dumped out dvd's, dumped out books. That wasn't even the worst though for some mysterious reason my husband's parents had decided that he had to take all the old boxes of stuff from when he was a kid with him on this move. So there were piles of old toys, piles of old photos, piles of old trophies. Junk everywhere. On top of that most of the unloaded dishes in the kitchen weren't even ours. They had unloaded the wrong boxes and brought some of his parents dishes over to our house instead. But because they had thrown out the boxes we couldn't even pack them up to send them back to the right place.
This all still gives me chills. It was so horrible and nighmarish. I came home looked at my apartment destroyed, all of mine and my husbands stuff treated like garbage, and realized that the apartment would likely never get to be the nice neat managable space I envisioned. I didn't have the time or energy to put it back together again. I sat down on the floor and just started crying. It was a few hours before I could stop.
We ended up paying a professional organizer to fix two of the rooms, but it took more than a year before I got all the toy dinosaurs and trophies out of the dining room, or that we even had space to eat. In the meantime we were criticized for spending so much money on the organizer and for not paying the brother who made the mess to clean it up if we were willing to pay someone else. Honestly even with my shitty father and grandparents, I don't think I have ever in my life felt like I was being treated like garbage, and for the second time in only about 4 months I deeply and sincerely wished I hadn't moved to Austin.
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