by Luningning Sugbu

Created on: April 06, 2010

       I’ve had enough of my aunt’s rudeness and I am beyond sick of her irritatingly nasty ways. I decided to never talk to her anymore and teach her a lesson that relationships are nurtured with affection and respect which are earned and not demanded just because she’s my mother’s sister. From now on, I’ll never treat her and her other three equally obnoxious sisters with the same deference I accorded to them when I was younger. 

     She’s the third to the youngest, a nurse who has never married, rightly because she is abhorrent to anything that entails responsibility, even responsibility for herself. She filed for bankruptcy at one point simply because she chose the hedonistic way of life and ended up living at many of her friend’s apartments.  She used to have a property in Pennsylvania but was taken by the state because of unpaid taxes. I never really judged her and accepted her for what she is, but she seemed to have accumulated a lot of insecurities through the years and the once active and humorous aunt we once dotted on evolved into one big bully who takes joy in spiting her nieces.

   I came to New York in the early 90’s while she was already an established New Yorker who arrived here way back in the early 70’s. I used to see her as my second parent till tragedy struck my career and the only close relative I was counting on turned out to be my greatest detractor who mocked and laughed at me in front of her friends. I was newly married then and was desperate for help after my working papers got totally mishandled by the lawyer I hired.

   Suddenly, the bully hidden underneath reared its despicable head and several times over the course of three years, she left messages on my answering system sounding like the commanding general of the US Army. At first, she reduced me to tears with her unreasonable demands where I got terribly hurt and close to desperation. What doesn’t kill you can make you strong. At my lowest point, I summoned the last vestiges of my self esteem and decided not to allow some jerk of an aunt to treat me worse than an abused child. I’m already an adult in my early thirties and soon realized I don’t have to talk to anybody if I don’t want to.  Thus, I excommunicated her for three whole years and ignored her phone calls which annoyed her greatly.

   I was totally

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