4. The Unhealthy Safety in A TIRED MARRIED MAN

I feel trapped between two realities.. I have lived over seas and have traveled to over 30 countries, I have seen so many cultures and lifestyles and living situations that I tend to wonder, why in the world am I back in my home town? I moved back here to give my 5yr old boy a huge family of cousins and aunts and uncles and a school that I grew up in that is crazy safe. My home town has almost zero crime, and I mean it, even a car that was left unlocked all night never gets broken into, heck I leave my keys in my car almost every night and my doors unlocked on my house, because well crime just doesn’t happen. We don’t even have homeless people in our town or in our nearby towns, our houses are huge (but old) and between 50k-115k. So I know what we have is rare, after living in huge cities and all over this world, i know that my kids are super safe living here, but…
The bigotry, racism, intolerance for difference is almost unbearable, and they don’t even know they do it. My family was super happy to see me come home with my kids after being gone for 12 years, but when we got here, I realized that the unhealthiness of some of my family is unreal, within my first year of being home, we called CPS on my Aunt and even my dad called me a snitch for doing this, when my wife and I were told by my aunt’s sister that she was back into drugs again and almost never sober.. well i’m sorry, she has an 8yr old girl there, and two older kids that lock themselves in their rooms all day. I just don’t understand how anybody can just talk about this, not do anything about it, and then say “don’t be a snitch” to us that did something… are we really living in the 1950’s mobster time frame in some city sub? straight up dumb.
My dad will almost daily emotionally abuse my mom, telling her literally “you’re fat”, “you don’t make enough money to live without me”, “what do you even do all day?” (when the house is the cleanest home I’ve ever seen, to the point that makes me wonder what my wife does all day, lol) “Get out of my house!” , calls her names like “Ghetto” for her “Ghetto butt”, calls her “Hogger” like a pig name. but he is always yelling, day in and day out, has been for years. I have told her to leave him sense i was a teen, and she doesn’t, they don’t even sleep in the same bed, my dad has his own room downstairs, partly due to the fact that he snores so loud and partly because he doesn’t want to sleep next to her.
I say all this to say, that part of me is torn because I have a great government job, and over all a pretty safe and good neighborhood for raising my kids, but my kids biggest family influence besides me and mom is their aunts, uncles, grandparents, and 85% of them are horrible examples of everything from physical health, mental health, to relational health. Most of them are just horrible examples of what a family should be. The one thing they are really good about is having get together on weekends and doing things like movie nights and game nights and just big activities, they truly are amazing at such things. but their day to day example of a healthy family and what i want my kids to see as “normal” is.. well.. horrible.

I guess i have two options:

1. Move to somewhere that just has way better values, but this would be my 8,9,10th move or so in like 8 years.. and i’m so tired of it. we would need to find a new church, new people, new routines, new everything…and so much of me doesn’t want new anything. I’m pretty sure this would ruin my family relationship as well, and this would be my “goodbye, we’re just not fitting in to this life, like you guys do” move. I’m 33, not 18, I have a family to raise right, and i need them to have good examples around them in life, and this just isn’t it. I was wrong to come home, but now i know and can be confident in my choice to stay away and just visit from time to time.

2. Stick it out and just raise my kids with much better values in my own home, get them to travel and see how other people act, and just teach them better morals then what is in our family. Only really hang out with the 15% of family that do show good relationship values and respect each other and friends that do the same. Show them what is good and bad, as it happens like “did you see how Uncle bob called Aunt Lanna Fat and stupid.. that is a really horrible thing to say to somebody you love, and that is something Uncle Bob should talk to Lanna in private about. You shouldn’t ever say things like that to somebody you love, especially in front of other people just for attention.” and lets be honest, I would then have to talk to “uncle Bob” about how him saying that is something I don’t want in my kids lives as an example of what an husband and wife say to each other, I teach my kids respect, and i expect the same out of other adults with their significant others, especially in public and around kids who learn from our behaviors.

Last updated May 10, 2019