This morning, keepers wrote and put up a blog entitled DEPENDABILITY which expressed our frustrations over some things happening here at KEEPERSKORNER.  As soon as we hit the PUBLISH key, we began walking around waiting for the emails and phone calls where others are saying to us “How dare you feel frustrated with this or with that!!!” In truth, we were thankful that keepers had a meeting this afternoon and would not be in our studio.  We had taken our shower and put on makeup and fixed our hair so that we would be ready to walk out the door when our John Michael showed up on his lunch hour to take us to said meeting.  However, less than two minutes before he got home–a phone call came telling me that the meeting had been canceled and would be rescheduled later in the week.  So John and keepers had a quick lunch.  Then, he headed back to work and keepers took off our dress and slipped into shorts so that we would be cooler this afternoon.  It was nobody’s fault that this meeting was put off but added to everything else keepers are dealing with, the cancellation of today raised our frustration levels even higher.

After John left for work again, I was sitting here thinking about no one would understand why keepers are feeling so frustrated right now.  After all, the things we talk about in our DEPENDABILITY blog are just common courtesies that keepers would appreciate but seldom receive.  Much of our frustration is coming from difficulties that keepers have already learned to live with so I began looking inside and questioning why these things are upsetting keepers so much right now.

Whether it is with ourselves or with others, keepers always find that it is very important to look beyond the facts that are presented and see what the real truth is that has been hidden deep away.  So, after letting go of our meeting for today, we began looking really hard for the facts that are not on the surface in our lives right now.

1.)  The niece who contacted keepers a couple of weeks ago–just before she was going into treatment for her own addiction–never made it to the appointed drug rehab program.  In fact, she seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth.  Her own father has no idea where she is at this point.  A truth that keepers know is breaking our brother’s heart.  In many ways, it is breaking keepers hearts as well.  We do not know this young woman well.  She lives on the other side of the country from keepers and getting together has been a seldom thing with us. We have only met her once in our lives but she is our niece and we have followed her life story as she has grown up.  We can empathize with what she is going through simply because we know how difficult it is to be a young girl or a young woman in this family.  Our niece reached out to us and was very kind in the words she wrote to keepers.  We could sense her fear and her feelings of aloneness and, yes, even her feelings of vulnerability.  On top of that, we know the good heart of this one brother who is her father.  He has fought his own addictive demons and struggles every day to stay sober.  I know that only because of the family we come from and the intense addictive behaviors we all have.  He has grown very weary from worrying about his daughter and from raising her young son at a time when our brother is no longer young or an endless font of energy.

At this point, keepers are very worried about this brother because he is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.  We are very worried about our niece because she really is such a sweet young woman who holds so much promise but can not break an addiction that began for her when she was all of 16.  We feel so frustrated because we care so much and can do so little.  That sense of being helpless always drives keepers crazy because we know that every problem has a solution but we have no wisdom to come up with the answer for these two people who mean so much to keepers.  For us, this is making life feel very ironic.  We receive emails and comments often about how keepers have helped this abuse survivor or another multiple.  Yet, keepers are constantly faced with the truth that we have no power to help those in our own family.

Second, things are very bad with our brother who now has such a serious alcohol problem.  (Not the same brother as the one above).  He is our younger brother, as well, though and keepers love him very much.  It has been two years since we brought him into our home and tried to help only to face the truth that our efforts (both financially and emotionally) were completely wasted.  I am told that this brother’s health is extremely bad in today which makes sense because he drinks to the point of being comatose with great frequency.  He has lost his law license.  He has had his home foreclosed on.  He has attempted su*cide on the side of the road.  He has been in psychiatric hospitals.  He has spent much time in ICU with physical life and death issues.  He has truly depleted his support system by continually making no effort to begin his own healing.

As recently as two weeks ago, this brother was living in an Oxford House for recovering alcoholics.  He had a job but keepers have no idea what he was doing.  Then, one evening our sister called to find out if we knew where our brother was.  He had walked out on the home he was living in and abandoned his job leaving behind bonus checks and his pay check.

It seems that this brother got a cabin on one of the rivers in our state and has spent the last two weeks in a totally drunken state.  I am told that he has even sold his car for cash so that he would have more money for booze.  We know that he must be severely malnourished because he never eats anything while he is drinking.  Needless to say, things are getting worse each and every day in this situation.  Things are so bad that our other brother (the father of our niece) is convinced that this brother is acting out a su*cide plan that will come to an end soon.

The truth about our alcoholic brother is that this is the worst addictive situation keepers have ever seen. ( We have been involved in many of these situations so our words are saying a lot. )  Our brother has no desire at all to stop drinking or to be in real recovery.  For some reason, this is the path our brother wants to be on and any attempts to help or even show caring are futile at best.  So, keepers have begun waiting for that fateful phone call that will tell us our brother is gone from this earth.

Keepers are living with underlying frustration running constantly.  The police have told us that the person writing the Munchkin comments is a severely disturbed human being.  So much so that we have been instructed to send those comments to spam in order to prevent putting John and keepers through any more. Everyone tells us that the person writing those is not our daughter which keepers believe for the most part.  But, we know too that there is a one in a million chance that it is our daughter who is so severely disturbed.  We feel frustrated because this person will not call us or even email us in a way that we  can respond so we are completely helpless to ease the suffering of whoever is writing.

Keepers are frustrated because we love our niece yet can do nothing at all but pray for her.  Keepers are frustrated because we feel desperate to help our alcoholic brother yet are powerless to do anything positive or constructive in his situation.

So, it was probably much easier for keepers to begin today feeling frustrated over the things going wrong with KEEPERSKORNER than to sit back and look at the reality of our frustration.  Munchkin and our niece and our brother are all people who are deeply entrenched in keepers hearts and feeling powerless is so frustrating for our system.

So that is keepers situation.  We l0ve each of these people deeply yet can do nothing to help. To us, it only makes sense to focus on the little frustrations because our big deep down frustrations feel way too overwhelming to even think about.

peace and blessings,

keepers