11/2007

The same old thing

My sister and I are estranged, again. It always happens the same way. We make tentative contact and awkwardly try to be polite. Then she asks me to get in contact with the rest of the family, who I consider abusive and do not want in my life. I tell her no, she asks again. I tell her no, she asks again. I tell her no, she starts telling me what various states of terrible health they’re all in, how they miss me, how I must be lonely without family, how I don’t really know what family means. She tells me how hard it is on her having to be the messenger, and that all she wants is to see our family whole again (I am not convinced they ever were). She argues that it’s not like I’m not a fucked-up person, and it’s not like I wasn’t married to a fucked-up person, so why do I get to be snooty and decide not to hang out with other fucked-up people? I tell her no, and I’m not going to talk about it again. I tell her, she gets to make her decisions about her life, I get to make mine, and I respect hers even though I don’t understand or agree with them and wish she’d respect mine. She blows up and insults me, tells me how crazy and fucked-up I am, that I’ll never be happy, that I’m cruel and selfish and do nothing but use people. She can’t respect my decisions about how to live my life because I’m too fucked-up to make the right decisions. She tells me obviously that I think I’m worthless. I have to go with my gut here and understand that what she’s really saying is she thinks I’m worthless, and that she hopes that hurts me enough that I can’t stand. I can’t say I know anything for sure, because I do not consider myself Miss On Top Of Insight Mountain, but I also think she’s projecting how she feels on somebody who’s gotten to drop the baggage she so dutifully carries. I think this because always when she blows, she launches a diatribe about everything that’s wrong with me, and then says she knows all this because we’re so alike, even if I won’t admit it, and that’s why I need to be with the family the way she is. Every time she says we’re alike, I feel like she’s using it as a weapon, a condemnation. But, then, that’s the way my family is — certainly love hasn’t kept us together, so something else has to, something like a noose.

This has happened three or four times. Me and my sister have never really gotten along, not even when we were kids. She was pretty shitty to me growing up, sometimes in a regular sibling way and sometimes not. I still get angry when I think about that, but I have tried not to take it personally, or dwell on it. She was in the same bad place I was, with the same abusive father, the same dilapidated house, the same dysfunctional family, and while I acted out on myself she acted out on herself and on me, with neither of us really understanding what we were doing or why. Once we had both left home, our lives went in pretty different directions, but we tried now and again to be good to each other. Often I felt like we were monkeys who were given an electric keyboard and a rock, and told to make a symphony. Neither of us had any idea how to make a functional familial relationship with each other, so we just banged the keyboard till it broke, then blamed each other instead of the hand that had given us such absurd tools.

I’ve tried not to take the past few times this same old thing has happened personally, either. Sis had to go back and make nice with Dad after she ran away. She didn’t have the help that I did, from my school, from other adults, and she must have thought it was true when he told her that she’d never be happy, never survive, never be a normal person without his help. I empathize with the loneliness that made reconnecting with a hurtful family seem like a good idea, like the only idea. And I know what it’s like to be under Dad’s influence; it’s always been his way or the highway, follow his rules exactly, even when they make no sense, even when they’re degrading or contradictory, or he’ll cut you off and make active attempts to sabotage your life, destroy your support until you have to go back to him on your hands and knees. I have sympathy for that, and I tried not to take it personally that she was in a bad situation, trying to have a relationship with a sister she didn’t know, all the while knowing if Dad caught wind of it she’d be cut off, and knowing the family back home would never cease guilting her into bringing me back into the fold. I don’t think Dad would cut her off anymore for just talking to me, but for having a healthy happy relationship with me, where she can respect the decisions I’ve made to distance myself from the people who hurt me, I think he wouldn’t be able to take that. For her to treat me like an adult would be too much of an insinuation for Dad that there’s a valid reason his daughter never wants to see him again, that it’s not because she’s obviously insane or a lesbian or mentally unfit or whatever reason they’re using to explain me away these days.

But she’s an adult now, and so am I, and it’s not a question of what Dad can take or the family wants, but how she and I are going to act with each other. I have tried not to take anything she has said to me in the past personally, tried to always be sympathetic. But I think in the past I wasn’t able to admit to or understand how much it was hurting me to do that. I’m in a different place now, where I’m able to say more clearly what I want and what I need out of a relationship with another person. I try very hard to make everything I say or ask for as nakedly honest as possible, as genuine and as vulnerable as I can, because there’s no other way, in my mind, to build a real relationship based on trust and respect. I can’t say I’m surprised that it happened the same old way this time — it always does — and yet I’m so hurt and disappointed, there must have been some part of me that thought it would be different, somehow. Some part of me vulnerable to that hope, and that hurt. In the past I tried not to take that hurt personally, but I think that was only half my sympathy for my sister, and half my own belief in how disposable my need for happiness and respect was. I value my own happiness a lot more than I ever have, and while I’m still sympathetic to the things my sister has been through, because I know them better than most, I don’t have to sympathize with being called crazy or fucked-up or cruel or evil. Those are things my dad used to call me when I was too young to understand what abuse was, and I’ve had a lot of practice at trying to understand people who hurt me, rather than finding people who don’t.

This really hurts me. When I ran away from home, when I decided to cut off my family, those things hurt me, too, but I wasn’t ready, willing, or able to feel it. And the most central person in my life, my main support, would only say things like, “Aren’t you over this family shit yet?” or “Nobody else could put up with this,” when I cried. And I sympathized with him, having to put up with a girl with so much baggage, rather than finding somebody who could love and support me in a way that brought me real comfort, and didn’t treat my emotions like a liability instead of a valuable part of me. I would say one of the reasons I chose to be with somebody who was hurtful rather than supportive was partly because I wouldn’t be encouraged to dig too deeply, to feel that wound that felt like my body more than my flesh did. I didn’t have to feel that hurt, I didn’t have to admit things hurt at all. When I read the latest nasty email from my sister, I immediately dove into my work, started making plans for the ways I could busy myself today, at every moment. And I finally had to realize, I’m upset, I’m really really hurting and angry and unhappy. That’s one of those things normal people have, the ability to recognize those things without such a struggle, and without astonishment. But I did realize it finally, and that’s why I’m writing about it. Because I need to admit that I’m really really fucking hurt, and I need to say it right now, before I try to make it something else, something safer, something banal.

And with that, I need to admit that I don’t think I can deal with my sister anymore. Every time she has made her rock on keyboard overtures to me, I have tentatively banged my rock right back. But she’s never approached me in a way that hasn’t been condescending, aggressive, and guilting. And while I sympathize with that, too, because I have been condescending and aggressive and manipulative to the people I have loved and needed the most in my life because I was unable to respect love or need, I also feel deeply ashamed of my behavior, and regret it terribly. I feel that way because I know what I said and did was wrong, and would like to make amends, and never do it again. I don’t get that from my sister. I think if, in a few years, she starts banging her rock again, I can expect a replay of the last symphony. If she feels any regret over the things she’s said to me, I don’t expect an apology, or an apology that isn’t tinged with, “If you weren’t so fucked up I wouldn’t have to call you fucked up.” And I feel so hurt and so angry, I can’t say I’m willing to put myself through that again.

When I’ve cut off the other members of my family, I never had any regret or remorse. My grandfather beat me, my father told me I was a worthless monster, my step-uncle made sexual overtures to me and beat the living fuck out of his family while the rest of the clan pretended nothing was happening. It was easy to drop them out of my life, as easy as it is to turn down men who hoot at women and try to get them in their cars — you know you’re not missing anything by calling them cunts and walking away. Sis and I never had a relationship, not really, but I had always hoped we could. She’s my only sister, she’s the only other person in the world who knows exactly what it was like where I grew up, the only person I can say “Remember when” to without getting a look of pity, horror, or shock. It’s not easy for me to cut her off, it hurts a lot, but it hurts me more to be called fucked-up and crazy by somebody I want to love. I’ve had enough of that hurt in my life, god knows, and there’s no longer a place for it.

I don’t have any point in writing this. I just needed to share, and I needed to do it right now.