The Story

So here's the deal with graduation for those of you who don't know the specifics...

My major requires two semesters of internships with two classes that coincide with those internships.

(Meaning: you register for the curriculum class, but then you also register for a separate 'lab' portion that is fulfilled by completing your internship hours. The class is 2 graded units and the lab is 1 pass/fail unit depending upon whether or not you complete your internship hours.)

This is the annoying technicality that kept me off the Dean's List last semester because even though I had above a 3.0 and took 12 units I only had 11 graded units and this one, STUPID pass/fail unit. No 12 graded units = no Dean's List.

But anyway...

This semester I've been taking the second internship course. This is also the course with the professor that has royally pissed me off a few times, including the first week when she openly criticized me for 'not taking the time' to find a more beneficial internship. I've grown to appreciate some of her antics, but, well...

...we definitely have a love/hate relationship.

So, going back to Monday and my march on the department office...

I met with my advisor (by this point in tears, of course) and she realized that even though I have been going to this class all semester, completed all of the course work, turned in all of my paperwork from my internship, and completed my interning hours...

I WAS NEVER ENROLLED IN THE COURSE.

Really? 

Really.

She then informed me that I would need to go apply for a late add.

So I did.

Oh, wait, 3 weeks to finals? Sorry, no late adds accepted!

So now, I get to wait until the semester is over and pay $20 and apply for a retroactive add that takes 4-6 weeks to process and IF it clears I get to pay another $20.

Maybe I screwed up somewhere, but you would think the professor in charge of your internship would catch something like that? Nope.

I informed her yesterday of the issue and wanted to verify that I in fact had everything turned in (heaven forbid another over sight occur and admissions not grant my retroactive add due to one missing piece of paperwork) and she says to me, "Do you think they would be willing to admit any fault on their end?"

Oh yes. She did.

And now you know why I never even bothered considering asking her if she had a printout of the class list.

Hopefully everything processes and I get my diploma.

But let's say they don't accept my request. This is not just a class I get to take over again, with a possibility of taking it online. 

Nope.

This is my ENTIRE internship OVER AGAIN.

With 2 kids this time.

Not living close to campus.

And no access to childcare.

Because of a 1 unit technical over sight in registration.

$%#@!

This has been stressful. So much so that it has combined with some other things (namely moving back into the same house as my grandmother, and she is not a mentally healthy or stable person in the slightest) which is actually causing me some mania. I noticed today my intense desire to start cleaning and packing. Luckily, I didn't act on it and was able to fall asleep.

But now, after my 2:30 AM nightly trip to the bathroom, my mind is racing with the anxiety of having to deal on a daily basis with an overbearing, depressed, highly controlling, compulsive eating 87 year old again and I can't seem to psycho-analyze myself enough to calm my nerves to fall asleep. 

Within only a few minutes visiting my parents she is so immediately controlling of Baby Spin's activities and behaviors and overly involved my business (Why are you here? What are you doing? What's going on?), and it's not even her house or her things.

Or her kid, for that matter. 

I believe in innocent until proven guilty. I don't jump to conclusions with my kid and there is no reprimanding/reminding unless an offense has occurred in the present.

Not with her. Not even with a toddler.

It's not innocent until proven guilty.

It's guilty...and always will be.

PISS.

ME.

OFF. 

The biggest issue is that she was highly abusive to my mom when she was a kid, and so now as a way to 'fix' that she jumps in on ANYTHING that deals with my mom, coming to her 'aid' as she sees it. This makes having a relationship with my mom very difficult.

When Baby Spin and I are there and my mom is sleeping, grandma's always on his case about being quiet, even if he isn't being loud.

Now that he's quieter than her with language, she's on his case about making noises too loudly. WHEN HE'S NOT EVEN DOING ANYTHING.

I heard a great quote from a professor (actually, it's coincidently from the professor in question from above):

'Defensiveness is actually a distortion of reality in attempt to repair past trauma.'

Boy, is she defensive when it comes to my mom.

And boy has she caused trauma. Not just for others, but for me as well. She had a very large hand in raising me because my mom had a career.

It was rough. 

Looking back, I realize a lot of the time she was controlling just to be controlling. No constant empathy when it was one on one, no real admittance to being wrong or recognition, and not a lot of room for error. 

She would say things to me like, "Don't ask to jump on the trampoline at your piano teacher's house. You don't want to be a nuisance." 

EVERY student spent time on the trampoline. 

I had done it once.

She took me to a dentist appointment one time and we got there early. So she went to McDonald's and got a full meal for herself. She sat in the car and ate it all with me right next to her. In the end, her only remark was, and I quote, "You've already had your breakfast."

I was a child and to be controlled and treated as such. You know, the old school way of looking at children, concept of, "Because I'm bigger than you." But yet, ironically, I was still expected to do things like my own laundry, later sew my own pointe shoes, and handle all my other grown up chores. 

It's true, she had it hard growing up. 

But at some point a person needs to take responsibility for who they choose to be today. 

'Yesterday' can't be blamed forever.

Even now she soils my relationship with my mom. I was able to talk with my mom about it recently. Which was a huge relief. Our relationship has really been strengthened over the past few years, and I want to keep building on that. I want to spend time with her. Just her. During this talk she realized the truth in what I was saying about grandma's interference and it causing damage. It probably helped that just the day before my grandmother had gone into my mom's room after hearing my mom was going to watch Baby Spin for a few hours the following day and she wanted to 'discuss the matter' (an arrangement, by the way, I had made 3 weeks prior). My mom had been studying for a test for recertification at work and she was really stressed about it. She was spending hours studying, actually. And here, my grandmother walked in and said to her, "You just need to sit your daughter down and have a discussion with her and inform her of the times when you can and can't watch her son."

That hurt. A lot. But like I said- guilty and always will be. 

(Thankfully, my mom cut her off at the pass with a 'what makes you think you can tell me what to do' remark. Way to go, mom. :)

 She had assumed I hadn't pre-arranged for baby-sitting. Obviously, she didn't know the details but why should she? It didn't concern her and therefore wasn't her business. Even still, she just assumed I was being inconsiderate (which if you've ever watched my kid you know that's not how I roll). 

Even when we sat down with my parents and discussed moving back in with them she came into the room and butted in on the conversation and said, "Well no one checked with me." Clearly, this was her way of still trying to put in her two cense after she realized she hadn't been involved in something...that wasn't her business to begin with.

She feeds off portraying anyone else in a negative light to my mom which is me most of the time. Sometimes Mr. Spin, too. And especially my poor dad. (Oh yes, you don't even want to imagine.) In fact, it used to always be my dad, but now I've become the whipping boy, probably because I'm not there enough to know what's going on behind my back and defend myself...

And there is no sitting down and talking with her. I have enough education and enough understanding of her history and current state of being to recognize that what I will say to her she will not be able to hear. She can't handle it. She won't be able to cope with the reality. 

And so it goes, out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Man...how am I going to survive this.