All of that and she might not get fired? That's... wow. As someone who has been fired twice in his career (for misconduct - aka saying something mean) there sure is a wide breadth of job security between industries. Not that I'm some innocent lamb in the woods, but sheesh.
We had a living room like that. All the fancy furniture and vases and stuff were in there. Unauthorized play time in there was certain to draw ire from my mother. There was a light yellow carpet in there, and I think I walked in there with my baseball cleats on one time. I can't remember exactly, because I got yelled at so much, I've suppressed those memories as a coping mechanism. My mom would also clean the bathroom closest to the den before company came, and then put tape and a "no entry" sign on the door.
Our house setup was a bit strange. We had a family room (main TV room), a living room (reserved for company), and a finished basement. The siblings and I spent time in the basement, my mom and dad in the family room, and the cat in the living room. He later got eaten by coyotes, which are infinitely cooler than dire wolves.
1 of 2 things are in play here. Either she is really good at her job and hard to replace, or this is a union thing. Or maybe a combo of the two. If you don't have one of those two protections most companies won't keep people around that mess up.
Focus: My dad. Born with cross eyed to my grandmother (who should be canonized) and an alcoholic woman beater, he developed polio and went through life with no calf muscle on one leg and half of one on the other. This didn't stop him from doing multiple tours of Vietnam, getting in bar fights, and being a functional alcoholic in general until he got busted for a DUI right around the time they started throwing the book at DUI offenders. He was married 8 times to 7 different women. The last 5 of those women were of Asian descent, so I guess he had a type. During those rare moments he was single, he whored around with bored housewives, though he claimed that he never initiated anything. He died in the Philippine Islands with a wife that waited all of two months before getting engaged to another old white guy. My mom, after having been essentially abandoned by my dad in a country where she couldn't speak the language with two young boys, became embittered and money hungry. She believes that everybody is out to screw her over financially, so she's constantly telling me about her latest real estate plans. She and husband number 3 live in Hawaii, which has one of the highest costs of living in the country. Working multiple jobs to make sure my brother and I were fed, clothed and housed meant that she wasn't around much, but she's tried to make up for it by sticking her nose into my brother and I's business constantly. With a combination of guilt and Korean familial values (which are a fucking nightmare sometimes), I am frequently forced to choose between my wife's desire for my mom to just be a grandma and my mom's insistence that that sort of desire is disrespectful and how I need to keep my wife in line.
Shit, I forgot about my dad, bu You'd be surprised how common this is in the medical professional industry; estimates are 1:10 nurses have a legitimate abuse issue. It's in everyone's best interests to have her seek help and try to salvage what's left before retirement, although that will obviously involve a serious change in her nursing path. Keep in mind, it's not completely altruistic; should she "fail" diversion, they're required to report to the DEA, subject to fuckloads of fines, repayment of any meds logged on insurance claims, and her hospital would rather attempt this than lose their magnet status....
My grandmother on my mom side is the most fucked up of my family. Very physically abusive and manipulative in the Livea Soprano way. She used to beat my mother and take her to the local hang out to show her friends the bruises she inflicted. I recently learned she gave up caring for my Aunt at a few years old and just gave her to a relative to raise for a few years. When my grandfather decided to bring her back a few years later, after they had another child my grandmother liked, she would torement my aunt by telling her she'd really just wanted an abortion. My grandfather, by all accounts a very decent loving man, threatened to leave her and take the kids. She snuck up behind him while he was in the shower that night and pushed him over throwing his back out and laying him up in bed for a few weeks. Ive never got the full story of my mom's upbringing really, Im not sure why my grandfather stood for such abuse. She refused to allow my grandmother to see us so I never actually got to meet her before she died a few years ago. I also have an uncle on my mom's side Ive never met because he was close to his mother and my mom didn't want to have anything to do with anybody that liked her.
For some more light-hearted parental stories... My dad grew up in a Saskatchewan town so small most Saskies haven’t even heard of it. The pranks they played on each other would get them sent to jail today. Halloween meant pushing someone’s outhouse back so if they didn’t bring a lantern at night they’d fall in. Funniest one to me was when his older cousin filled a pig intestine with blood and taped it to his ass. This was back when the nuns whipped kids on the ass, as opposed to the hands, for misbehaving. He purposely got in trouble and the nun freaked out when she thought she seriously wounded him after the intestine popped. One I wouldn’t believe, if I didn’t meet the victim years later when he was still friends with my dad, for some fucking reason. They were all buds, and decided to tie their one friend’s hands behind his back, put him on a horse, tie a rope around his neck and up to the beam in the school barn, during school hours, and threatened to slap the horse’s ass while the kid – again, a friend – wailed. “Looking back, it was pretty dangerous – a snake or mouse could’ve spooked the horse.” YOU FUCKING THINK?! They got suspended for like three days.
So my father was a functioning alcoholic for much of his life but has settled down somewhat as age has caught up, the love for drink has been passed on to most of his kids. He was at various times an abusive parents and I being the oldest copped the majority of the hidings if I was at fault or not. When he and my mother divorced things got real messy though, I'd already left home but some of the stories I heard involved him taunting her boyfriend who used to be one of his friends until he got his teeth kicked out. Stealing her ladder and shitting in one of her gardening gloves. He crashed a couple of cars while drunk back in the day and there are plenty of other little things that made him a bit of a shit dad for a long time until he sorted himself out.