“Weddings and funerals.” Those are the two important events in life, according to both my mother and my sister.
My sister referred to them when she replied with a histrionic email to the prospect that my husband and I were not coming to the sibling reunion one year. She took it as a permanent abdication, which it wasn’t at that point, but that was probably wishful thinking on her part. And she wrote, “What are we supposed to do about weddings? And funerals?”
My mother referred to them when she was staying with me in Texas, when Joe & Susan were getting married. My then-boyfriend, now-husband of 27+ years had to ask me why, whenever I went somewhere with my mother, I came back crying.
It was because of the awful, hurtful things she kept saying to me. One was, “I like Susan better than you, because she’s nicer to me.”
Naturally this has been excused by my siblings — as “that’s probably when she was starting to get sick.” No, she was already sick for a long time before that. What kind of a mother says that to her actual daughter, about a woman who was practically a stranger?
But two other things she said during that visit were so revealing.
One was when he picked her up from church, and then had a talk with her about her horrible, destructive behavior towards me. She offered a few excuses, one of which was something like, “Well it’s only [when we’re all together] at things like weddings and funerals.”
Clearly, these were the important events.
At another point she grumbled to me that “if she never set foot in Texas again, it would be too soon.” I said, “What about if [BF] and I get married?”
She replied that she wouldn’t come to my wedding.
And that right there is how I know I was never “in the club”, and where that idea came from.
Weddings and funerals are IMPORTANT — yet here she was saying that she would not come to mine.
It’s shorthand for saying, “YOU DON’T COUNT.”
Her attitude towards me — and statements like this one giving it away — gave my siblings Mom’s permission, maybe even Mom’s encouragement to treat me poorly.
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Well, I have been told by my oncologist that — while no one knows for sure, of course — her best guess is that I now have one “good” year left, before I get really sick and die.
One funeral, coming up fast. Way too fast.
And will any of my siblings do anything about that? I mean, it should be IMPORTANT, right?
hahahahahahahahahahahaha
Of course not. It’s ME, so it’s totally NOT important. In fact I am pretty certain it will be a relief to at least half of them.
They will say that I rejected them, of course. Which is not true: I rejected their TREATMENT OF ME. I have always said that I would be happy to have a respectful, two-way relationship with any of them.
“Set the boundaries… and leave it to the toxic person to decide which side of that boundary they want to stand on… If the relationship ends, it’s not because of your lack of love or loyalty, but because the toxic person chose not to treat you in the way you deserve. Their choice.
“…The choice to trample over what you need means they are choosing not to be with you. It doesn’t mean you are excluding them from your life.”
That’s exactly what I did, clearly stated even in the very first thing I ever wrote to them about this whole fucked-up mess.
And they made their choice: not to treat me in the way I deserve, as an actual member of the family, on an equal footing with any of them.
I asked my husband what he thought would happen now if I had not broken up with my siblings. He imagined that my BIL would probably cajole my sister into visiting me ONCE, in order to forestall any guilt on her part. She would drag the two brothers of The Triumvirate with her, for backup. The three of them would do their familial duty as perfunctorily as possible, probably for a weekend. And that would be that.
I think he’s pretty spot on. And if he is, clearly I’m not missing much in actuality.
But oh, how my heart aches for the reality of a healthy, unbroken, loving family that could, that should have been.