Beauty and the beasts

I have a niece who has been in trouble all her life and all her life her parents and friends have made excuses for her, enabled her, and basically taught her over and over again that anything she does is okay, because if people really love you, you are not responsible for yourself. Not even responsible for your own children. You can just do whatever strikes you in the moment and someone will rescue you, or your children so you can move on to whatever strikes you next.

She came out of prison a while ago and gets her ankle monitor off in days.

She looks beautiful for a nearly forty year old woman, but her Facebook and her posts to me indicate she hasn't learned anything. She is merely counting the days until she can go back to what she knows and loves best.

Hoarding clothes and junk, relying on pills to make her happy, needing other people to help her do things most girls of fourteen can do for themselves, being proud of and working at being a scatter brain, looking for love in all the wrong places. These things are all learned and it is going to be very difficult to unlearn them when even her good role models use a legal, more or less acceptable form of the same things.

It makes people feel good about themselves when they pay her rent, bail her out, take her children to her, make her feel like everything is hunky dory whenever she does something harmful to herself or others. She never gets to suffer long enough to find her own way out of trouble. They deny her the right to grow and learn.

This may be her last real chance to have any kind of quality life. It is up to her, but it is going to be twice as hard if well meaning people keep getting in the way.