On Sisters

A couple months ago, my blog email got pitched by my middle sister for her K*ckst*rter project.  So, you know, maybe I shouldn't write things about them that I'm not willing to say in person (likely a good principle in general, no?).

So here are many FEEEEEELINGS, written as if my sisters might actually read this.  If you don't want to read about feelings, here is a bunny.  

To my middle sister,

It's really painful for me to have any kind of conversation with you.  I'm fine talking about gardens or kid swim lessons or whatever, but right now  I'm still having some health problems; chronic severe pain is very tiring and I am really overwhelmed just keeping everyone alive and supplied with clean underwear.   Also, baby.  And that said, if it were really a priority in my life I would  make the time, wouldn't I?

Here's why I don't,* and I quote Captain Awkward:

 "(whatever the hell is going on) prevents them from seeing themselves as the bad guy in any situation and their highly selective memories will remember everything you did wrong with complete clarity while deleting their own bad behavior entirely from the record. You come ready to finally hash out all The Stuff and they act like The Stuff literally never happened and that you are crazy/too sensitive/vindictive/evil/petty/unreliable for thinking that it did.

  I tried to bring up the (eight) Bad First Marriage years- specifically, the deeply offensive weekly screeds about Consumerist America Is So Terrible And You're All Racists, You Don't Get To Criticize Israel's Apartheid Because You Don't Live Here (did this apply in South Africa?) Also Arabs Are Evil, Vote Likkud, vs. your three suitcases of shopping this time (and marching in the Pride parade), and your response was literally 'I like stuff.'

I don't want you to be sorry you lived those years.  I would like you to understand that those years were deeply hurtful, and I didn't much like you then.  I don't want to have an intimate relationship with someone who won't own- or even acknowledge- the pain her choices caused, because I believe it will merely happen again.  I'm sure you were hurt too.  The difference is you were actively being a jackass, and I was not engaging.


To my youngest sister,

Let's recap: you made you own legitimate adult choice to move to another country.  Great!  You're an adult.  You do your thing!

But when you're making a choice, sometimes a consequence is that people are unhappy about it.  I'm not asking you to make choices based on MY feelings.  I'm saying 'I didn't tell you myself  (and had Mom tell you) because I really care about you and didn't want to ruin our relationship' has the opposite effect.  I'm saying that avoiding having any contact with me for nine months says 'I don't trust you to behave like a rational person', 'I am unable to hear your thoughts', and 'I cannot treat you with the respect for YOUR opinions and feelings that I want you to have for MY opinions and feelings.'  I'm telling you that the way you acted, shenanigans with Craziest Unmedicated Cousin** included, is actually a great way to torpedo a relationship.

(I will refrain from commenting on your 'special bond' with Craziest Cousin, or your dramatical llama-ing over how You! Date! Women!  Except when you don't!  [I object to the drama, not to fluid expressions of gender and sexuality.])

Which is all fine. You're an adult!  You do your thing!

But which is also not any kind of relationship. It is you treating me as if I were an irrational, slightly crazy stranger.  Based entirely on how I left you a message 'Could we talk about this some time?'***, let me add, not on me ACTING like a crazy person.

If you want to pretend everything's peachy.... see above.  That is not within my current capacity.  Right now you're not hearing from me because I have nothing nice to say, every mention of you makes me sad and angry, and despite near-overwhelming temptation, I am resisting the urge to have our mother tell you I'm not talking to you.

To both of you,

 For me, the combination of choosing to live so far away, and the way you've both chosen to (not) deal with it, says you don't have a meaningful place in my life. I also want to protect my children from your Israel Is Great propaganda, and I don't trust you to keep it out of your interactions with them.  I don't want to pretend everything's peachy when I'm full of a complex mixture of sadness, anger, and resentment. 

Another fine piece of advice: 

Accept that you won’t really get answers or resolution for the past. You make your own closure. She doesn’t have any to offer. Focus on what you have in common now.

I'm not sure we have much in common now.  I don't know how to rebuild and I don't particularly want to rebuild.  

(Out of scope but also My Feelings: S2's present spouse being a jerk to me and my relatives; the morality of moving to an apartheid state to just... live there; Drama Terrorism Llama I Can't Even; etc.)

Anyone with helpful suggestions is welcome to offer them in comments.  I will delete however I damn well feel like it; reminder that anonymous comments will always be deleted.  Not up for discussion: Israel as a racist occupier, whether moving to Israel is a fantastic choice, or why my cousin is so crazy.  Up for discussion: boundaries, dealing with people in denial/whitewashing/gaslighting the past, how much energy to put into this.  'None' is an okay answer.

*My family members have never been what I would characterize as abusive towards each other, some teenage meanness aside.  Not, like, psychologically damaging meanness.  Just.... teenagers are jerks and we were all once teenagers. "You're fat!" "Yeah?  Well, your violin sounds like a cat being tortured!!"  "Girls!  Cut it out!"
**Who skipped Sister 2's wedding to go on vacation in Canada, giving me some wicked Schadenfreude about how S2, who didn't come to MY wedding, was pissed about Crazy Cousin and CC's intolerable not-fiancée.
*** Yep.  That was the whole message.

Twenty Minute Naptime Blogging: Cognitive Dissonance/ Weddings/ Siblings/ Extensive Complaining

• Sweetpea is napping by herself!  Once a day.  Of course, in trade, she's up every 2.5 hours all night like clockwork. Oh, babies.

• Realization while nursing endlessly (aside from musing on Trapped Feelings): I am dreading Sister 2's (second!) wedding because of some serious cognitive dissonance.  I am putting on a cheerful good-sister face but I am fucking pissed at both my sisters.  

• Sister 2: Still pissed she didn't come to my damn WEDDING.  Yes, I know, it was ten years ago; it's.... a symbol of the last decade, where she dropped out of my life while wallpapering over her abusive spouse and depression; writing lengthy fantastical screeds about Her Amazing Crazy Adventures In The Holy Land (see also: email filter featuring these words); issuing endless condemnations of Americans Are So Materialistic (implication: she is not American at all, our shared past is valueless) while bringing empty suitcases for every visit; voting for the equivalent of Front National every time; and many other choices I found morally reprehensible. Overall, it's the lack of acknowledgment that any of this happened.  Let's just move on to Everything Is Great and ignore the late unpleasantness!  That'll work GREAT. Sister 2 probably also encouraged Sister 3 to move to Israel.  I'm pretty angry about that too.

• Sister 3: Let's recap: got brainwashed by Birthright, took off for Israel five months later, didn't bother to tell me about it in person; finally strong-armed by our mother into coming to visit the day before she left the country; CURRENTLY ON ABOUT HER AMAZING CRAZY ADVENTURES WHY WHY WHY (email filter!); and a bunch of other things that boil down to: dealt with it all in a completely immature fashion, shut me out of her life because she didn't trust me to behave like an adult (based on.... nothing), made choices 'because I have to choose what's best for me' without acknowledging in any way the effect these choices may have on others, and now is amazed that she has bombed the hell out of our relationship.  

• While we're at it!  My mother and her untreated anxiety disorder/ refusal to seek help for anything.  Jesus, Mom, CPS is not coming for my kids, calm the fuck down.  Plus her periodic teary insistence that we should talk to each other (note: my mother has FOUR even-crazier sisters and one of them she didn't talk to for ten years.  Ten.  Years.). Not helpful.  I don't have the time or energy to deal with The Crazy, I don't want to talk to The Crazy, and 'what's best for me' is to not have contact with The Crazy.  

• Naturally, I can't think of a good way to bring any of this up.  It wouldn't help with Sister 3, and I don't really want to start a conversation with Sister 2, "Hey, I'm still fucking furious about all the shit you pulled during your first marriage, and it's really harshing our relationship now, man."  
• Except with my mother.  "You don't talk to YOUR sisters, why should I?" seems perfectly good to me.  

So... I don't want to go to the wedding because not only am I really angry, and Sister 3 will be there and I don't want to talk to her until she advances past Emotional Age: 15, BUT ALSO this is the second tense horrible wedding of Sister 2 that I've been to and she has been to ZERO of my wedding(s) (my wedding was not tense, it was actually quite lovely).  

However, I was raised by some good Midwestern Protestants (my mother is Jewish but at heart she Does What Must Be Done) and so I will put on my nice dress and my smile and bring the pies and punch and hat that I made for My Sister's Second Damn Wedding and I will do the right thing.

And then I will light out of town like my tail feathers are on fire, stopping only to buy $300 of wine at Trader Joe's.  

(Wedding in 2 weeks.)

Daily Write It Out: Gardening as Therapy

With regard to my feelings of trapped misery, I have to say that gardening helps.  On good days, when Bug isn't home and Sweetpea consents to sleep Not On Boob, I ignore the mountain of cooking, housework, and other boring adult chores, and go outside with a trowel.  Friday I planted two lilacs, a rhubarb, and three thornless blackberries; put down mulch; pickaxed a few stumps out; and sprayed the poison ivy* for the Nth time.  Earlier in the week I put in three currant bushes, 100 okra seeds, and some hyacinth beans.**  For some reason, this largely irresponsible digging-in-the-dirt makes me feel a great deal better about life.  (Probably some combination of sunlight, fresh air, things-that-aren't-children to do, and exercise.)

My theory is, therapy would cost me $25 a week (copay + babysitting) whereas $25 a week can buy a LOT of plants.  And most of my plants are free!  So clearly this is a perfectly reasonable outlet.

(Also we have 0.9 acres, and when we moved in there were three scrubby barberries planted in full shade and two scrubby rhododendrons planted in full sun.  CLEARLY it needs a lot of gardening.)

* The only thing on which I use nasty herbicides.  Dr. S requires steroids when exposed to poison ivy, so... sorry, environment.  Everything else gets pickaxed out.

** In addition to our Major Budget Item Landscaping, I've been scrounging plants from everywhere.  Friends, neighbors, things growing by the side of the road, brush piles, stuff set out for trash day, things that rooted themselves.  Also my dad brings me plants periodically, including two rhubarb crowns and several dozen hot peppers and a bunch of tomatoes.  The lilacs were runner-ing into my yard and the blackberries were from the garden I work in with my friend C- they'd escaped into the veggie beds.  Bought and rooted the currant cuttings; okra seeds from Experimental Farm Network; hyacinth beans collected last year from the library's garden beds.  Dr. S insists that I have a plant problem.  I don't see why it's a problem.

Daily Write It Out: In which my MIL gets on my very last nerve

So I've never really gotten along with my egocentric, toddler tantruming, whiny, entitled in-laws.  Neither does my dear spouse.  And they've always played favorites because Dr. S doesn't play along with their inconsiderate and coercive games. They disrespect every boundary we have.   They have spent the last ten years being rude and disrespectful, and throwing a tantrum every time Dr. S and I establish reasonable adult boundaries (no, a one year old cannot go to dinner at 7 pm; no, the tantruming child does not get ice cream; no, we cannot drive ten hours with a nursing baby but you're welcome to come here, retired people). They have a chronic inability to get that dairy could actually send me to the hospital and are always insisting in going out for a cheeseburger (while I either stay home or starve- in my cosmos, not feeding people is a cardinal sin). They drove down to Alabama for BIL's pilot graduation, but here is 'too far'. The only good thing is that it is Dr. S's job to enforce boundaries and he does with extreme prejudice.  They visit once every year or two; I go along with it because I don't want to cut my boys off from them- for the children's sake.  I mean, one day they'll be gone and I don't want to have to explain why I never let them see grandma and grandpa.

My parents are wonderful, helpful, and reasonable, and only drive us nuts about once a year.  They also understand that dinner is 5:30


So my SIL, who is delightful, is pregnant.  Just a little pregnant.  After many years of infertility, and I'm genuinely delighted.  I very much hope they'll be holding a screaming baby in January.

My MIL has not bothered to come see Sweetpea, her only granddaughter and the third of her three grandchildren (the astute reader will note that I have three kids). But she is already planning to FLY TO KOREA in January.

No, dear, I DON'T think you should take the kids to see them in August after all.

Daily Write It Out: Running on Empty

One of my huge sources of frustration with.... everything... is the current complete lack of time/opportunity to do all the things that make me feel like a functional human.  I need to get exercise.  I need an hour at the end of the day, with no children in it.  I need to get outside and garden. I need time and energy to clean up the house sometimes because my spouse is afflicted with can't-put-it-away-itis.  I need to have time and energy to give to my older children, who otherwise are super extra horrible.  I need to spend less time  nursing the baby.

With all this and the lack of sleep, I feel like the tank has run dry.  Dr. S does what he can, but he can't feed the baby (yet, though she  will drink a little from a bottle now) and the to-do list is endless.

Of course Dr. S might also benefit from doing something that's not dishes, mowing, or child-wrangling.  I'm thinking we need a weekly family outing to the local brewery or something (they don't have a restaurant license so we bring cheese sandwiches and pickles for the boys, and once, a gloriously delicious kosher  sausage with homemade sauerkraut).  And I need to work out some kind of summer schedule for the boys.  Mondays at Local Gardens!  Tuesdays at the park!  Rainy days at the... hmm, don't know. And I need to find some kind of kid swap, though this is pretty hard with three and one a baby.  And I need to go to the gym.  And before any of this Sweetpea needs to drink more than two ounces of bottle at a time....

Daily Write It Out: Nursing

It's surprisingly hard to produce readable English on a tablet.  But, you know, I need to write to retain my sanity.  So forgive us our linguistic trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I feel most amazingly trapped.  In large part by breastfeeding, which prevents me from, say, gardening, or going to the gym, or knitting, or going to knitting, or... you get the idea.  I know that this too shall pass, but if people would stop telling me I'll miss it, I'd be grateful.

In related news, Sweetpea has consented to take a bottle three! whole! times!  In retrospect, however, right after she rolled over the first time (and was consequently in a righteous fury) was not the best time for today's bottle.  So far, so goaty. (Not a typo; this.  Due to my cow dairy allergy and her eczema I was hesitant to give her cow or soy yet.)

Because I'm a terrible mother, I also gave her a little banana today at 4.5 months.  She loved it, and I was getting tired of the piteous crying every time she smelled food.

This may be a product of my trapped depressed feeling like nobody listens to me and my mommying work has no value to me.... but I kind of want to become a lactation consultant.  It would take me at least eight years, I estimate, since this would be a seriously part time endeavor.  It's somewhat problematic that the main route now is as a LLL leader, since I'm cruelly weaning my baby (slowly) with a complete disregard for how I should be a miserable milk machine for her sake until next December.  How dare I prioritize my own needs?  Nonetheless.  This is born in part from the feeling that there should be more LCs in the world who say 'It's okay to wean your baby.  It's okay to hate nursing or even just dislike it. It's okay to NOT nurse your toddler on demand if you don't want.  Nursing does not have to be a magical bonding experience. All that HAS to happen is your baby HAS to be fed something.  Breastmilk probably has minimal real benefits.  If you want to breastfeed I will do my best to help, support, and educate you, but if you choose not to, or to add in formula, I will also help, support, and educate you.  And I will try to help you feel good and not guilty about your choices because breast is not always best.' And it is also born of the feeling that I have never met a LC - except my doctor in Cold State- who actually said those words to me.  (In fact she said something like, a chronic infection with severe pain is a medically indicated and completely reasonable reason to wean your child, and I will help you as best I can until you are ready to wean him.  So good for her.)