The other day, my brother-in-law reached out to me, stating that “he wanted to visit with me“.
I have yet to return his phone call. And to be honest, I really don’t want to call him back. Part of the reason is that I know why he’s calling, and that’s another story for another day, but the truth of the matter is that I really just do not want to talk to him.
This is a warning to the casual reader of this blog in that the next few passages will be incredibly narcissistic on my part, but I make no apologies for it. The truth of the matter is that I have a lot of pent-up, rage and bitterness, and I haven’t had an adequate way of releasing that rage and bitterness, until I realized that I had an online blog to put it into words.
Aside from my son, I have only one other blood living relative, and that is my sister. By and large, my sister, and I have never had a contentious relationship until our parents died. Sure, we’re siblings, and we did have the occasional fight, but nothing that would drive a hard wedge between us.
That old changed after our mother passed.
I won’t get into the reason that caused this rift between us, but what I will do is describe how I have been basically ignored by her and her family since mom died. Shortly after mother passed, my son became the first of my parents grandchildren to graduate from high school. This is a pretty sizable feat for my son as he is on the autism spectrum, and he really needed to see members of his family support him at this monumental achievement.
I didn’t hear word one from them.
Later, on that year, at Christmas time, I decided to revive tradition that my father had continued on Christmas Day of calling my sister to wish her and her family a happy holiday.
No one picked up the phone.
I was beginning to catch the scent in the wind at this point.
2019 came and went and I decided that the better thing to do would be to step back, focus on what I had to do here in Oklahoma, and not worry so much about what my family was doing in Texas.
This was largely true of 2020 as well
Then, in 2021, I had a heart attack. Not a huge Fred Sanford “I’m coming to see you, Elizabeth!“ Heart attack, but one that was enough to get my attention, and make me realize that I was indeed mortal.
(As if nearly dying from the infection that claimed my foot 12 years earlier didn’t bring me to the same epiphany).
Once I had recovered from the heart attack, I decided to reach out to my sister to tell her what happened. My failure in doing that was that I did not try to protector directly, rather, I choose to email her on the only email address that I know of. Knowing full well that if she saw my name on an email to her that she likely wouldn’t read it I texted her daughter to ask her mother to check that email and that it was important.
That is quite literally all that I had said in that text. I didn’t give a summary or tell my niece what I had said, I just asked her to tell her mother to read her email.
That’s all.
What I received in return, was a very condescending, scolding text from my brother-in-law, telling me not to get my niece involved in “a argument between her mother and her uncle”.
Needless to say, the scent from before was that much stronger in the wind.
Of course, later in 2021 I was back in the hospital suffering from an infection of my toe and all of the nonsense that involved removal of said toe and recovery from set infection. I didn’t bother to tell them anything about that and I instructed my family not to get hold of them.
The long and short of all of this is that I really do not feel that I am obligated to speak to my brother-in-law with any amount of urgency. I don’t necessarily dislike the guy, I just want to understand why, after four long years of being virtually invisible to that family that all of a sudden they want to speak to me.
I’m not expecting a situation where it’s like, “hey Rich, sorry we’ve been such idiots and assholes to you, but how are you doing?“.
Instead, I’m expecting at least 15 minutes to an hour of being chastised, bullied, belittled, and otherwise told how worthless I am. Sad to put things that way but that’s the way it looks and sounds.
Things haven’t exactly been a bed of roses, since my mother passed away four years ago but I’ve managed to keep enough of my head above the waterline to stay alive. I make no excuses for the way my life is turned out and be honest, I’m impressed at the way that I actually made it work WITHOUT any help from my parents. I’m proud of that to be honest.
So needless to say reaching back out to them isn’t high on my list of priorities at this point When it does happen it might get ugly, but if it is to be then so be it.
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