My father has ruined us financially

Hi Cary,

This is the second time I write to you. I don’t want to take advantage of you, but your advice has given me such a wise and comforting, yet concrete external point of view through which looking at my problem that helped me a lot, and I really look up to your words and brilliant way of looking at things. I wrote to you about my parents who refused to meet my boyfriend. Things haven’t changed about that, but the background is so complicated that I think I have to tell you a bit about my parents, in order to make you understand (man, is my life a mess), because I’m starting to feel a bit discouraged about my future.

As I told you in my previous letter, I am 31 years old and still live with my parents and younger brother (quite common here in Italy for us 30somethings . . . I know I know); we’ve never been rich, but we were quite wealthy, as in my mother could afford to be a stay-at-home-mum, we always owned the houses we lived in, made nice long vacations and travels together as a family, etc. Eight years ago, my father blew away ALL family savings (money that resulted from selling our home and were supposed to be used to buy a new one) for buying a big loft that he wanted to transform into a clothing retail outlet (we were living in a rented house in the meantime), in spite of my mother completely disagreeing and cautioning him against doing so.

Those money were not only my father’s, but also mum’s, because they wed in community of goods [“community property” as we call it in California–CT], and since my mum has not an income she completely relies on my father economically. My father has always been a plumber, and as much as he was good at his old job, he sucked at retail. He spent more than he earned, and completely lost control of this shop, trusting wrong people and losing everything until he had to end the activity. I worked with him at the shop for a while, but had to run away because he was impossible to get along with, always had crazy ideas which he imposed on me (even if he kept saying he opened the shop for me and was mine; but instead it was his toy and the vent for his unrealistic creative ideas).

I found another job as a secretary which I still have. As a result from the closing of the shop, since my father completely quit his former job as a plumber, we didn’t have money, so we stopped paying the rent of the house we lived in and were evicted, and now we live in the former shop, for which we have a 20-years mortgage (signed in 2006). Now my father has occasional jobs in flea markets and helping people move by emptying their houses, moving furniture etc. He is 55 years old, and age is starting to take its toll on his body, and he is constantly in pain (his back, his feet, etc.), and he is full of health problems in general, because he also eats mostly junk food, alternates periods of time as a chain smoker to other times of complete abstinence from cigarettes, and is very overweight. He is very unstable, both mentally and physically. He has always been a whimsical person, but in the latest years this has worsened to the point of being almost demented. He is totally illogical and doesn’t listen to advice, doesn’t listen to our worries for the future, seems to ignore that society has rules to live by, mostly that you have to pay for everything, and ignores that there are bills to pay. It’s me always having to remind him that the electric bill needs to be paid etc., and every time he complains that we only ask for money. Like I use that money to go to Vegas! He completely lost the sense of reality and keeps saying that at this point he is fed up of everything and only cares for his dog, which is untrue, given that he never even takes her for walks and I always have to take care of her. We really can’t figure put what is going on with him and why he seems to be gone nuts in these years; I suspect that he had to grow up too soon (he is from a very poor rural area of southern Italy and was detached from his family as an infant and sent to a boarding school where nuns used to beat children, then at 6 years old started working picking tomatoes from fields, at 13 he migrated to Milan to work and by the time he was 18 was already engaged to my mother and at 24 he became a father, has worked his ass off for an entire life and somehow I think now his brain is living the carefree stage of life that normally belongs to children.

My mom would like to start a job but here in Italy young people are not able to find a job, let alone a woman in her fifties who has always been a stay-at-home-mum. When my father signed the mortgage, as he was self-employed, the bank needed a guarantee, and so dad convinced me to co-sign the mortgage (since I have a salary). I was only 20 years old and completely naive, so I accepted. Because of this, now I won’t be eligible for a mortgage of my own, and so I won’t be able to afford a house of mine until 2027! But I will be 43 by then, and I really want to start a family with my boyfriend of two years (that’s the boyfriend my parents don’t want to be involved with, yes). Now my father has even stopped to pay the mortgage, so now I am afraid the bank will claim my salary (which is the only thing I’ve got), and that we will be evicted also from this loft, and then we will have nowhere to go.

Our former landlord is still claiming the rent we haven’t paid, so now we have to face him and the bank. My mother is completely devastated over this and stopped even acknowledging the existence of my father out of rage for having done this to our family. She is worried about where she will spend her old age, and I cannot blame her. Every month I give my mother a quarter of my salary to pay for groceries, but I wonder if I will have to take her with me the day I’ll go live by myself? But how can a couple begin married life with a live-in mother in law? I haven’t yet talked about this with my boyfriend; I do not even have the courage of breaking the topic. I don’t even have the courage of thinking of my near future,

Cary, because the mere thought of where will we be in just five years paralyzes me in terror. I won’t be able to make my own family, and I will be forced to take care of my parents as long as they live, because my father seems to completely have stopped caring about anything and doesn’t even provide for food. What will happen? Will I have to be a mother for my own parents?

I’m afraid my boyfriend will get tired of this (and he would have every right), even if he is extremely supportive and says true love means sticking together through thick and thin (he is such a star that sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve him at all).

I worry that I’ll never be able to go my way in life and that I’ll end up paying for my father’s mistakes. I resent him so much for all this, and still my heart breaks in two when I see him struggling every day, and also when I see my mother crying because she is afraid of not having a roof on her head. I have obviously excluded having children, given that, apparently, I already have two. I know that there are people who can’t even eat regular meals and I shouldn’t complain, but in this case what frustrates me is that we were having a normal life until my father decided to risk everything. This is not a case of random life misfortunes, this is a deliberately sought-after demise. It’s just not right that my father jeopardized entirely my future and my mother’s. Everything I see down the road is a black hole. Any thought you could offer me will be much appreciated. I thank you from the bottom of my heart and apologize for the obnoxiously long letter.

Futureless

Dear Futureless,

I feel for you and your family. To see your father go downhill like this has got to be not only scary but painful. I understand the anger you feel toward him for wrecking the life you had.

It is possible for you to plan for a future, however, and you can have children if you want them.

but you will first have to go through a period of some months or perhaps longer in which you soberly accept your situation and reflect realistically on your options.

To face the situation as it is now, you must recognize that good things also happen unexpectedly. After a series of setbacks it can seem as though the future is filled with nothing but further setbacks. But life isn’t like that. As many good things happen unexpectedly as do bad things. You are due for some good fortune.

Your boyfriend says true love means sticking together through thick and thin. Do you believe him? Do you trust him? If you do, you must lean on him now. You must call on his help.

If you don’t believe him, then you really need to get out of the relationship. You are going to need to depend on him. This is a crucial moment. It is a crucial moment because I suggest you and he marry and announce that you are planning to have children.

For the household you had has fallen apart because of your father. It is now your job to rebuild a household.

You and your boyfriend now must fill the vacuum left by your father. You must become the heads of a household and take responsibility for the practical affairs of your family.

This is a big deal but it is what life is asking of you. It is, in a sense, the natural order of things. As parents weaken, their children step in and displace them and their authority. Your boyfriend must, in effect, step into a role that has been vacated by your father. And you must step into the role your mother has occupied. She in turn, when you have children, may step into the role of grandparent.

Your father will resist. It will be ugly. For that reason, I suggest that you strengthen your ties with the people in your larger community who are your father’s age and whom you and he both respect. They may be family members or friends. Which ones do you instinctively think of turning to? Go to them. Tell them that you are planning to marry and have children and ask for their support and understanding. This will build opinion in your favor.

You have all the world’s natural sympathies on your side. Your father has fallen from grace and must be filled with shame and anger. But you have to go forward with your life. It’s best this way.

It may seem to you that conditions will not allow you to do this, but the opposite is true. You are in a position to change conditions just by making a decision. Deciding to marry and have children changes everything.

It strengthens your role and your boyfriend’s role. It strengthens the family as a functioning unit. It changes priorities. It confers upon you the family power, prestige, and moral authority needed to displace your father.

It changes the power dynamics. It shifts the family’s focus to the children who are coming, and the necessity for their care, to new life and its promise, to renewal. It galvanizes your community, your extended family and friends, and even the state, which has an interest in the care of children and the durability of families. And it changes your mother’s role to that of grandmother.

To take this action requires faith and courage. But if you do not do this you remain paralyzed.

The beauty of it is that it is also strategic. It places appropriate pressure on those around you in a way that they can neither deny nor denounce.

If you and your boyfriend marry and plan to have children there is no force on earth that can deny the rightness of your claims.

In short, I am saying rather than delay and let conditions dictate to you, make a bold move and change conditions. Sympathy will shift toward you and your growing family. Your mother will become an asset rather than a burden. It will awaken her sense of purpose and give her new power in the family.

It will tend to displace your father. That is the intent. He will probably fight it. He may take destructive actions. His condition may worsen. But you must not give in to him.

It may sound cold but it is actually just life-affirming. Go forward with your plans. Let love and desire guide you. It is how life renews itself.

In fact, while your father will probably fight these changes, this transformation could be healing; having lost his ability to care for and lead his family, your father must be mired in shame, guilt and anger; while he will outwardly resist, he may find that inwardly this is all a relief, the kind of solution he has secretly longed for, a way of escaping from the duties he can no longer perform. He may rage to save face but accept in his heart the rightness of the situation, as he must know that he has brought shame upon himself.

So that’s my simple, bold, timeless suggestion: Marry. Get pregnant. Force the issue.

Of course, I can already hear the objections from my good friends who, like me, are citizens in good standing of an affluent, mobile, atomized society whose religion is individualism and independence. To them the solution I am proposing may seem foolhardy or somehow politically suspect. To even acknowledge the power and grace of a traditional family structure may stink of something retrograde, repressive, patriarchal. What I am doing, however, is acknowledging these forces. Traditional Italian families are patriarchal. Women do gain status and power by having children. Young husbands do displace the fathers of their brides. To at one and the same time valorize the social progress of women by denying the very conditions that made that progress necessary is a contradiction. Traditional society is powerful. I am saying: Use the power of tradition to your advantage.

In modern America, sensible young people, especially women who wish to become mothers, take a practical approach: First establish economic stability and only then embark on the adventure of parenting. What I propose is more radical and requires a leap of faith that is obvious if we will only admit it. You live in a traditional Italian family. In a traditional Italian, power flows toward the mother and her children. It is a patriarchal society and one might complain that it is unjust that this would be the only way for a woman to acquire that power, but the fact remains: power flows toward wives and mothers. Abuse, too. That is the dark side. I’m not saying it’s pretty or perfect.

I am saying use the latent power that you have as a woman who can marry and have children.

Marry. Get pregnant. Force the issue.