THE GROUP
"My name is Tiffany and I want to join the group because I'm tired of feeling like a complete failure in life. I'm 24 years old, really fat, barely managing to keep going at work and in my relationship with my boyfriend, and my house is always a mess. It seems like I never have time for my friends and family and I haven't gone to church in years. I feel like I never manage to do anything right. There has to be something more to life than this!"
Tiffany clicks the Send button while wiping away tears, hoping that somehow the support of others in the group will help her to find answers to some of the problems that plagued her. She's tried so many things to get herself to be more, better, happier, stronger, prettier...all of the things that society tells her she should be...and nothing has worked. She's running very low on hope. Idly she browses the internet, looking at news sites, checking her email, and searching for the perfect recipe for crème brûlée. Her boyfriend once jokingly told her that he would marry her if she learned how to make creme brulee the way he likes it, but so far her efforts have failed to inspire a proposal.
"Better luck next time," she thinks to herself.
As if her thoughts of him had called him to her, her boyfriend Steve appears in the doorway to the computer room and asks "So, what's for dinner?" Her eyes dart to the clock on the computer and then cloud up as she realizes she has once again wasted all of her free time on nonsense and now has to begin the dreaded evening chores. Cooking, cleaning, feeding the cats, laundry, and keeping her boyfriend happy are chores that she seems to spend her life on and yet she never seems to accomplish much. Although, given the generosity of her waistline, it could be argued that at least the cooking is accomplishing something, though that's certainly not what she's trying to accomplish. She can never get the house clean enough to feel comfortable when guests arrive, and the piles of laundry are so deep that they make one wonder what might be found under them if they were ever to be moved. Jimmy Hoffa? Waldo? Or perhaps Kilroy? As for keeping her boyfriend happy, his mood swings seem to have so little connection to her behavior that she finds it impossible to accurately predict how he will respond to her. On some days he'll be sensitive and charming, attentive, forgiving, and eager to please, and on other days he only seems vaguely aware of her existence, and only then as the transportation system for his favorite piece of her anatomy.
Dodging Steve's hand as he reaches out, yet again, to pinch her butt, Tiffany goes into the kitchen to see what she can scrounge up for dinner. Veggie burgers? A box of noodles with some creamy parmesan cheese sauce with a couple of polish sausages and a bit of broccoli? Or...
"How about some of that fantastic beef stew you make?" Steve says, interrupting her thoughts with a most un-welcome suggestion. Beef stew takes a long time to make, and she'd have to chop so many vegetables! That's definitely not what Tiffany had in mind for tonight.
"I'll make beef stew on Saturday," Tiffany says. "How about beef patties with onions, green beans, and some stuffing mix? Will that do for tonight?"
Not really waiting for Steve's reply, Tiffany begins pulling out the necessary ingredients. Sighing, she realizes that the kitchen is a mess and she'll spend half of her cooking time shuffling dirty dishes from one part of the kitchen to another part just to get them out of her way. The condition of the kitchen is yet another reminder of her incompetence, and she sinks deeper into her depression. Mechanically, she goes about preparing dinner, hoping that Steve won't look at her closely enough to see the expression on her face and ask questions she'd really rather not try to answer. Sometimes it's just so hard to try to explain why she feels terrible, especially when the reason has been the same for so long and he thinks she ought to either get over it or just fix the problem. She wishes she could just fix the problem, but she doesn't know how! She often wonders if she is the problem...
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Several hours later and a few time zones ahead, Susan cuddles up with her laptop to check her email and see what to expect from the weather for the coming weekend. She likes to keep herself busy, so she usually does more than one thing at the same time. At the moment, she's also brushing her dog, a fluffy red pomerainian named Francine, and drinking a cup of hot chocolate while having a casual conversation with her husband and two children who are still finishing their breakfast. Susan doesn't "work," per se, but taking care of the kids and the dog and the house and her husband while acting as owner and moderator of an online chat forum takes pretty much all of her available time and energy. She fits in a daily walk with the dog for exercise and does art projects with the kids for fun, but her true just-for-me activity is her online group. She started the group two years ago after realizing that she needed more adult conversation than she was getting through her other activities. She'd popped into chat rooms now and then and made several good friends, but she was shocked by how many people online were literally begging for help with their problems. She'd majored in psychology before the children were born, and somehow it just made sense to her to start a group online where people could come to share their problems and solutions.
Once she'd made up her mind to do it, she'd jumped into the project wholeheartedly. It was a bit of a struggle, at first, to get enough activity among the members of the group to keep it alive and self-sustaining, but for the past few months she'd seen her online "baby" grow into a thing of beauty. People from all around the world and a variety of backgrounds come to her group to support and be supported. She could do without the "trolls," though. She could never understand why some of the neediest, most troubled people who come to her group are the ones who insist on disrupting it and threatening to destroy it with their deceitful and inflammatory posts. Why, for example, would someone pretend to be a pregnant teenager who was molested and impregnated by her father and then kicked out of her home by her mother when the pregnancy became obvious? And the person who claimed to be a member of the KKK had done immense damage to the group with his hateful messages before he finally moved on to wreak havoc on someone else's group.
