The Lazy, Belligerent Gamer and His Enabling Father

A Story about My Insane In-Laws and the Impossible Situation We Faced Deciding to Move in With Them After Leaving Chicago

Introduction and Background

First off, this is a story of an outsider’s perspective of what I experienced with my long-time boyfriend and his crazy family. This is just one side of a two-pronged dysfunction from both of his parents. Michael didn’t even want to move to Erie. This was all my idea. We were both perfectly intent on living in Chicago and there was so much more opportunity there for both of us to succeed. I had Verizon there and he had more opportunities for his freelance engineering pursuits. I just thought in our current situation at the time, we couldn’t afford to live in that city anymore. I didn’t want to turn around and admit defeat and go back to my family in Sacramento. That was much further than Erie where his dad and brothers lived. I proposed that we try living with them for a while until we could just go out and be on our own. I transferred my job to Erie. The stage was set for a new chapter.

East Side Slum House

We moved in with Michael’s dad, Adam, in July 2018. He lived in a run-down house that was in major disrepair on the poor East side of Erie, Pennsylvania. They had moved in there 10 years before after living in Sacramento previously to that. He agreed to let us stay in the extra room where Adam’s daughter and Mike’s sister had previously stayed when she attended high school in Erie when she had to move away from her mom and stepdad. The moment I walked in, I wondered if this was such a great idea. First off, the bed we both had to sleep in at night was in a room with no heat or air conditioning and was only a twin bed for two larger men. I’m sure I may have nearly knocked Michael off the bed a couple of times every night. To ingratiate me to the family and this being the first time I met his dad and his brother’s, I tried to be friendly with his dad and always came out to talk to him and watch TV with him, which he always did, while I was out in the living room for most days when I didn’t work. This became more common once I was unable to work anymore and was trying to apply for Social Security after that. More on that later.

Adam, the Hypocrite

Adam was a hard guy to figure out and was very difficult to get along with. I always felt like I had to tread lightly with him. He was quick to anger and many of his beliefs and opinions were rooted in ignorance and television news bits. He was a moderate liberal, but he had many views as a conservative and was super hard to figure out at times. He had loosely held beliefs that seemed to shift with the day. He would also tell all kinds of stories to me to make himself seem important that I later found out from my boyfriend weren’t even close to true at all. He was the type of guy who tried to impress everyone he met but at the same time was not trying to impress anyone at all. He also had one weird house rule for me that I never really fully understood. He said that I could stay as long as I was following his rules and didn’t receive mail at his house. That rule at the time seemed weird. Later, I found out it was because he was super paranoid of the government and thought that my presence there would affect all of the other benefits they were receiving in the house once I was unable to work. I really needed to get my application started for Social Security. At this point, I was stuck and couldn’t figure out how to get around his rule, the one rule he claimed was of the utmost importance.

Thomas, His Belligerent Son

Thomas, or Tom, as everyone called him, was a man who at the time was 27 years old when we moved in. He was in the room next to us. He would sleep in and would be at his computer all day long with a headset on. He would say the most outrageously offensive things I’ve ever heard come out of a person’s mouth. Sometimes at night when I was uncomfortable in bed trying to sleep, I’d hear him say the N-word at least a dozen times a night. He also cursed people out, called people all types of slurs, and was constantly loud, and never seemed to step away from his computer other than to go to the bathroom or eat food. The last thing he did a lot of. He ate so much that I ended up spending most of my monthly paycheck on food just to feed him, it seemed. I recall one time when I went to Wal-Mart to go shopping when we were low on food for the household. I went to buy a 2-pound turkey breast for sandwiches for everyone. I put this in the fridge overnight and the next day with him being the only one up to eat, it was gone. No one else had eaten any of the turkey breasts and I was flabbergasted that someone could be so inconsiderate and so gluttonous that they could eat an entire large packet of food so quickly.

Thomas’ Relationship to Dad and How That Negatively Affected Everyone

Tom had a very chummy relationship with Adam. Despite the fact that Tom never worked, Adam allowed this to continue. In retrospect, I feel like Adam felt like if he pressured Tom, he would lose him. On the track that Tom is going now, I feel like Adam is enabling him and isn’t encouraging him to enrich his life. This will only end badly for Tom and Adam. I asked him curiously one night why Tom wasn’t working and he gave me some weird response out of left field about how parents making children work was some sort of Communist Russia scheme and that he was able to continue living with him this way as long as he wanted to as if this was a normal arrangement for a father and his grown son. He was enabling a man child with a stunted development and lack of any true social skills. I hardly ever interacted with Tom. Only a few times did I attempt to talk to him and most of the time, it was just to ask him what he wanted to eat. Michael and Thomas didn’t get along well.

How All of This Ultimately Ended Michael’s Relationship With Them

Michael is the polar opposite of his brother. A hardworking, intelligent, highly capable individual who has had plenty of work and success in his life. He can do plenty for himself and he tried to help both his brother and his dad while we were staying there. He even helped fix the heater so that they would actually stay warm in the frigid winters in Erie. Ultimately, even with all of Michael’s help for his family over the years, it seemed his dad always held him to a different standard than his other kids. He basically let Tom do what he wanted. With Michael, he criticized every move and questioned Michael’s intelligence and intention at every turn. Adam ultimately turned on me as well because even though I had helped financially a great deal by providing food for the house whenever I could and offering my company to him, I broke his one rule. I only did it because Michael called ahead of time and the office said that me receiving mail there wouldn’t actually affect anything with them. Plus it was only an inquiry and a start to my social security application, not applying for it fully at his house. I just needed somewhere to receive my paperwork. I found out he returned it to sender and said I wasn’t going to be staying after we had already lived there 10 months. He essentially kicked us both out and basically in effect severed ties with his son. Even though he told his son he could stay and thought Michael would just leave me in a strange city alone and stay with his dad. He decided against it. He decided that his family’s constant toxic behavior and my commitment to him were the ultimate motivation to never look back. We always did wrong while we lived there but in his father’s eyes, even though Thomas was so much more harmful and worse to the household overall, he could never do wrong. He was infallible because he was the son who would always stay and never leave the house.