At age one, the sister closest in age to me put me in a dresser drawer and closed the drawer tightly. Until my birth she had been the baby girl and the thought of losing her status as such was unbearable to her and enough to throw her into a murderous 4 year old rage.
Thus was the shape of things to come in terms of my relationships with my family members.
I harbor no bitterness, no ill will. I simply write here to recount the many injustices that were leveled upon me by people whom you'd think would have known better. Case in point..
My oldest sister on my father's side and my middle sister on same side, never told me that our father had died. It has been almost two years. They found him unconscious in his home, a home he told me to never come back to because I "cramped his style." My sisters took Daddy to the hospital, a hospital I had just come out of a year earlier. He never regained consciousness and when the time came to make the decision to take him off the life support unit, that decision was made without my so much as knowing what was going on. To be honest with you, one of my friends called me the day he died and told me the news over the wires of my cellphone. This person had always been, pardon me, a little "loony" so I immediately drove over to her grandmother's home, which was on the street behind my father's home, and asked her uncle just what the dickens was going on anyway. This uncle didn't know too much more than I did, but encouraged me to call the hospitals in the area, which I did. I finally found out from the one hospital Daddy and I shared, that yes indeed he had been brought in, but that any more information would have to be given to me by my sisters due to the nature of patient confidentiality. Let me go back and say that my relationship with my sisters was never close. One of them lived in Windsor or Bloomfield, I'm not sure which city, and she never gave me her address or her phone number. As a matter of fact, in all the years I've known of her, I never really knew her persay, I have never been given nor have I ever known her address or phone numbers. She's aloof like that. Strange. Our oldest sister lives in NYC. When she comes to town it's with a lot of pomp and circumstance, fluff and fanfare: Somehow we're supposed to thank the Almighty that she deigned to come into town! Whoopee!
At present, they have officially disowned me because we've been fighting over our father's rundown house and equally rundown land. Basically, my NYC sister constantly called demanding more and more money, thousands upon tens of thousands of dollars to pay more and more lawyers to do more and more stuff in order to get us closer and closer to selling the land and getting our inheritance shares. Most recently, she demanded, cried, whined and bullied me over the phone to give her $20,000 to pay the taxes on the land. She said if we pay the taxes then hold onto the land for 2 years we'd make out like greedy bandits! I told her that was a nutty scheme and I wanted no part of it. I also told her that she'd better get on some medication and see a counselor because the last time she got a bright idea about spending money on real estate, I had to give her money she never paid back to bail her out of her financial jam and I was not going to do it again, especially not to the tune of $20g's!
She wanted me to refinance my home in order to cash out my equity and get her more money to just throw around like the no substance diva she always has been. But I digress....
My mother's side of the family is no better. The baby suffocating sister is from my mother's side of the family. Six months after she came out of jail for crack cocaine addiction and almost killing her 3rd baby daddy, the authorities gave her my baby girl because I had gotten sick and was unable to care for her. This woman lost her children to the state 7 times due to her addiction. When it came time for me to find someone to adopt my daughter because I couldn't care for her, no one stepped up to the plate. My sister was in jail at the time. I let my daughter be adopted by a family in a nearby suburb, and oh the fur flew! The only person in my mother's family who will talk to me is one of my older brothers. He is dying, but he and I are the only ones of our siblings who stay in constant loving contact! It feels good, but it's also sad because when he dies, I will once again have no one.
Finally, my husband's family thinks we're lunatics! He broke away from the spiritual and religious teachings of his mother, grandmother, aunt and great grandmother, and now his mother thinks I have him living the life of an apostate, someone whose given up and turned their back on God. We are fine! Our lives couldn't be better in all ways imaginable, and we pray for all of our family members who think we've gone off the deep end into idiot town!
Little by little my husband's brother is seeing our way of life as being more beneficial than what he and his wife, alcoholics, are living now. Virtually everyone of our family members has a long road to travel, but prayerfully, God will restore and heal our broken relationships with each other because really, life is just too short to go around being hateful and mad at one another. I let my daughter be adopted and stay with her foster family because I could not provide a loving supportive family for her. Too much phoniness, too much backbiting, too much mental abuse. Hurt people hurt people, it's true. But I've decided to stop the hurting of my siblings and extended family members because eventually we all have to come to the point where we say, truce, it's time to heal. Hopefully, your family will too.