Well this weekend offered me absolutely no privacy to update, so here comes a big bomb of an entry, I guess.

Traffic getting down to Cincinnati wasn't too bad Wednesday night as soon as I got out of the city. I got to my grandparents' house around midnight, walked in to find my grandmother asleep (my grandpa is at the nursing home full-time now) and my family in the downstairs level. My sisters were all sitting around watching TV with my dad and I came down the stairs excited to see them. They all kind of gave me a tepid hello so I asked why everyone was so happy. No one said anything, so I asked where my mom was. My dad said she was in the bedroom where she and my dad stay when they visit my grandparents.

I knocked on the bedroom door and went in to find her crying, with a mountain of tissues beside her. I asked if she was ok, she said she wasn�t, I asked why, and she said it was because of my sister (meaning Adrienne) and my sisters (meaning the two younger ones, Jillian and Amanda) and that she's sick of being the bad guy. I didn�t really know what to say and seeing her upset really upset me, so I told her it was good to see her and hugged her. She squeezed me tightly and said, "I love you." It was like she was desperately looking for someone to be on her side for once. It made me feel really strange, like I was the adult and she was the child. I also had to try to hold back my own tears�seeing my mother sitting in a bed sobbing was an incredibly depressing thing to see first thing when I expected all happiness and welcome.

My mother and Adrienne have always had a rocky relationship because they are both two very prideful and stubborn individuals and they tend to clash often. Adrienne in general is unreasonable and hot-tempered. She will let things escalate to a level where the next natural level would be physical violence. And once in the past, she did hit my mother. But my mother isn't totally innocent in these situations. She can often be really immature and spiteful and can result to things like petty name-calling, assumedly when panic sets in and she feels she can't get anywhere with Adrienne. So whenever the clashes occur, they are messy and often childish.

What is further stressing the interactions between my mother and anyone else right now is that her father is dying, and could die any day. Ever since my grandpa was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's I've noticed a change in my mom. She seems at once defeated and short-tempered. And instead of seeking out some sort of therapy or outlet for these emotions, she takes them out in the form of anger towards my sisters and my dad. If I lived at home, I'm sure I'd be hit in the crossfire as well. The result of this behavior is that my mom receives a lot of anger towards her in return. Only instead of seeing the situation as A + B = C, my mom sees it as pure scorn and dislike for her very existence.

After breaking down in tears in front of my dad the night I arrived and explaining that seeing my mom cry was what was bothering me, he told me why she ended up that way. She'd come home from visiting my grandfather with my grandmother, received no inquiries from my sisters as to my grandfather's health, silently took offense to that, and essentially started off on a diatribe. Adrienne retaliated with her usual quick anger and shouting, and my mom shouted a few things back and left the room. So that was Wednesday night.

Thursday I woke up and hung around with my younger sisters until my youngest uncle and aunt came over with their two little daughters, who are possibly the cutest little girls I know. They've both got nice red hair and are very tiny little girls. One is 7 and is shy but sweet, and the other is 5 and is a complete spazmo darling. The five year old has a taste for the potty humor, as five year olds do, and, for example, was singing "Old MacDonald" thusly: Old MacDonald had a farm, E I E I O. And on this farm he had a bottom, E I E I O. With a poop-poop here and a poop-poop there... I found this to be a stroke of genius on the part of that little girl.

A few hours later the rest of my mom's family started trickling in. Over the past few years I�ve come to realize my mom's family represents a cornucopia of what contemporary society has come to term "issues." Going from the oldest to the youngest child of my grandparents, here's a precis of each child's family:

The eldest is a high school teacher who lets his racism show every once in a while and who has taught his offspring to treat his wife like an uneducated slave.

The next eldest forced his daughter to hide her teenage pregnancy and was going to force her to give the child up for adoption until he changed his mind and the forced his daughter to tell each of her aunts and uncles in a letter what was really going on.

My mom.

The fourth child, who developed kleptomania after a bout with meningitis, is married to an alcoholic ex-frat boy who can't hold down a job for more than a year.

The fifth child married her high school sweetheart, who because abusive after their child was born. After divorcing her husband, she remarried and now appears to have developed a drinking problem.

The sixth child is married to a woman who refuses to move more than ten miles away from her parents ever since her sister died unexpectedly, which has resulted in difficulties finding employment. His wife also has her youngest son all but chained to her hip. He's three or four years old and I laid hands on him for the first time last week.

And then there's my youngest uncle, who lives the most normal life despite being the openly "different" child while growing up: drugs, smoking, leather biker jackets, goth tendencies et al.

My youngest uncle went with one of his brothers and my grandmother to pick up my grandpa so he could have dinner with us all. After they came back I walked upstairs to see how my grandpa looked. He actually didn't look too bad, but if he wasn't being spoken to or actively doing anything, he would just lay or sit motionless with his eyes closed. Right before dinner I went up to him, hugged him and told him it was good to see him. He gave me a kiss on my cheek, although I'm sure he had no idea who I was. Then I asked him how he was doing and he barely sputtered out some garbled words. Whenever anyone else would say anything to him, he'd just look at them and smile, or he�d shake his head and look down.

It was decided that my mother and all her siblings would be the only ones sitting at the large dinner table with my grandparents. So spouses and children were left to find their own seating arrangements. I sat at one of the wet bars in my grandparents' house, along with my dad, my sisters, my cousin Erin, my cousin Leeann, and Leeann�s husband Paul. A big punch bowl filled with a frozen bourbon mixture Leeann had made sat in front of us. One of my aunts (the fifth-born) came in to get some punch and was asking Leeann about it. The aunt asked if she could take one of the maraschino cherries Leeann had put in the punch, and before Leeann could say "yes," my aunt blurted out, "OH WAIT! I thought Paul took your cherry!" There was a half-second of dead silence until I turned my back to my aunt, looked over at my dad in disbelief and horror, and started laughing and crying at the same time. It wasn't necessarily the What, it was more the Who that disturbed me most. Anyway, that became the running topic of conversation for the rest of the night.

Apart from a short episode between my mother and Adrienne, and my realizing Adrienne and Erin supplying Amanda with alcohol, the rest of the night went rather smoothly. Before my uncles had to take my grandpa back to the nursing home they got a photograph of my grandfather sitting amongst all his kids, and then another photo of him sitting with all the grandchildren. The poor man just sat, looking straight ahead in confusion while the camera flashes went off around him. Every once in a while he'd say something nonsensical and people would roar with laughter, incredibly. I just don't understand why that was the response. Anyway, that was the meat of Thanksgiving night.

Friday Adrienne left around 5 to fly back to her home. She barely said goodbye to my mom, and my mom elected to stay at my grandparents' home while the rest of us dropped off Adrienne at the airport. Earlier in the day Adrienne spit out some nasty statements about not coming home for Christmas and not being able to wait until she was home so she could be away from everyone, so I guess that was my mom's way of responding to those statements.

Friday night I went with my two younger sisters to see a hockey game with my youngest uncle and aunt and the little daughters. It was pretty fun and it took my mind off the mom-Adrienne business for a while.

The rest of the weekend I didn�t really do much, drove around with my younger sisters on Saturday afternoon and bought a few CDs, hung out with my family Saturday night, and then left early yesterday morning. I'll be seeing my family again in 2 � weeks so it wasn't too bad leaving them yesterday, but I know I won't see my grandma again for a while, so that was a little difficult for me. It's just tough to make time to visit when I live kind of far away. She understands that, and hopefully I can try harder to visit her at least once again before next Thanksgiving.

I was exhausted after I got home yesterday, and pretty much just laid around watching TV with April and her mom until about 9pm. Then, because my mind was preoccupied with the subject, I wrote an email to Adrienne telling her how upset I was over her and my mom's relationship. I also mentioned a few other things and asked her to please consider making an effort to improve things. I knew if I called her with the same subject in mind she'd just hang up on me, much like she's done in the past when I've tried to communicate information she doesn't want to hear. So email was the best option in my head. She wrote me back with one sentence indicating she'd read the whole thing, but so far that's it.

I think that's enough for now. For the next 2 � weeks I need to buy presents for people and go to various holiday parties. It's really snowing hard outside�we're supposed to get between 3 and 12 inches before tomorrow morning. It would be really great if work was cancelled tomorrow. I'm going to wish for that for the rest of the day. And feed myself sushi tonight.

If anyone has read this whole entry, I am impressed.