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I am left, as always, aching from the effects of a two am phone call. My younger sister called this morning at 2 am. She tends only to call at 2 am. These calls usually come when she is drinking and can no longer deal with her profound emotional pain. Drinking is how she deals with the difficulties in life. Drinking is also the method which was used to cause the most recent of those difficulties. I reason to myself that I am the one whom she trusts to take the toxins and venom she must expel from her spirit and that she trusts that I will continue to love her unconditionally, even when she then refuses to talk to me for extended periods of time afterwards. Somehow the fact that I know her secrets makes me the enemy in the light of day and sobriety. Somehow she feels I judge her, feels I must judge her. In reality I hardly get to speak, and when I do it is gingerly and well thought out. God knows I have the time to reason as she rambles through the reliving childhood abuses and the desolation of her lonely marriage, both soul ravaging truths in her life, undeniable and impervious even to the drink.

My sister has not called in a while, though the space between communications have been longer in the past. This one, however, was more tense. I knew things were going wrong in her life, but I could do nothing, and she refused to take my calls because I knew. Once again she felt judged and believed I thought myself and my life, or both, better than hers, her words. This is how my immediate family functions. Thinking back I cannot remember when my siblings and I were close, even as children. I was the mother and they were the children. We were the products of divorce. Having been left in the care of a mentally ill mother, the dynamic of the family was severely damaged. Inevitably there was a breakdown, and the parenting role fell to me, tragically I was nowhere near able to assimilate. I was four when my parents parted ways.

A very good friend is teaching me that these things, in my family's lives, are not my things. I guess I grew into this way of being because of the way my family functioned and communicated. The family didn't function and there was broken communication, even when we lived in the same household. The things we kids did to get out of that household and survive at the tender ages of 15, 17 and 18, well they are part of the cause of the 2 am phone calls.

The distance between us now is profound. My mother and sister live 3,000 miles away. This serves us well

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