My sister is insensitive. She’s also an idiot. You know the type of person.. they are unaware of themselves and are unaware that they are unaware.
My cousin is visiting.. He’s here only one weekend (6 days) and she took him on a trip to a sleepy little town that has nothing interesting. She has the whole week off and I only had the weekend off, so I’m annoyed that the two afternoons that I have off are the ones where he’s out of town. Okay. Fine. He said that he wanted to make over here for dinner on Sunday. Sounds great. They were at the ferry terminal at 4pm. 2 hour ferry ride, another hour drive back into town. They can bring dinner. She wants sushi.
For the last 6 years of my life, I’ve been living in the same city as my sister and I have not eaten raw sushi. My children don’t eat raw sushi. My husband doesn’t eat raw sushi. Yet, every month or two, she brings raw sushi over to my house and acts appalled/insulted when I tell her that I don’t eat raw sushi. 6 freaking years of repeating myself.
I didn’t wait for them for dinner because I didn’t want sushi. It’s okay because they didn’t make ferry reservations so they had a 2 sailing wait. So I don’t get to see my cousin today.
My cousin’s trip is what has caused my frustration with her to come to a boiling point. I’m so angry with her… and here’s the rest of why:
She totally undermines my parenting. If I say that I don’t my child to go swimming with her, she disregards my words and goes and asks him. He’s two and a half years old. She does this with all sorts of other things, too.
She forces me to be a bad parent around her. She brings over all sorts of food and forces it on me. She’s constantly trying to give me money. This doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, but her attempts to give me money makes me feel like I’m some sort of charity case… that she’s somehow better than me or at the very least better able to manage her money than me so that’s why I need a handout. The only way to get her to stop is for me to curse at her.. in front of my children and in front of her child. I don’t like to swear in front children, but she does not back down until I swear at her. I’ve tried. It also works if I yell at her. Yelling is another thing I don’t want my children seeing if I can help it.
She’s very negative. Before I figured out my childcare solution, she kept telling me horror stories of baby sitters and daycares. Frankly, she scared me half to death and I was ready to stay home and care for my children on my own. During this time, she kept suggesting that she could drop to parttime hours and care for my children on the weekdays and I could care for her daughter on the weekend. For about half a second this seemed like a good idea. Then I remember who I was talking to. She takes on more than she can handle and then freaks out on people, yelling at people. At one point, I told her to stop calling me at work because her phone calls were disturbing. She works at the hospital so her hours aren’t normal. Something would happen and she would call me at 10 in the morning, at my office and yell at me. It would get me so wound up, I wouldn’t be able to work for a few hours.
The most recent of these calls, she called me irresponsible.. and here’s why. A while ago, my mother had an MRI appointment. These are difficult to get, but because my sister worked at the hospital, she was able to get one for my mother within a month. However, the night before the appointment, my niece gets violently ill. Apparently, her father had gotten violently ill a day before her. It was so bad for him that they put him in the hospital because he was so dehydrated. I’m sitting at my sister’s house, it’s midnight and my niece is crying and vomiting. I’m crying because I feel so bad for my niece and I feel completely helpless. She had told me that she thinks that my niece and her father both have the Norwalk virus. She gets mad at me for crying. I tell her that I can’t take my mother to the hospital because there’s a possibility that my mother has the virus because it’s extremely contagious. There’s no way that I’m going to be responsible for getting anyone’s child or elderly parent ill. I was not going to subject sick people to this virus if I could help it. I called the appointment line and told them that my mother can’t make the appointment because there’s a possiblity that she has Norwalk. I tell them this becuase I don’t want my sister to turn around and take my mother. It would not sit well with my conscious. It was terrible seeing my niece vomiting like that. It was a moment that made me not want to have children… but becuase I did not take my mother to hospital when I said that I would, she calls me irresponsible. Most people would thank me for not spreading an extremely contagious virus, but to my sister, I’m irresponsible.
So she’s my older sister and I was told to listen to her by my parents. It was a habit, I guess. She would tell me all sorts of stuff and I would listen to it. Most recently, she arranged a birthday party for her daughter. I guess it was a fair amount of work because she told me not to give my children birthday parties until they ask for them. My daughter just turned one and my sister told me that I was taking advantage of my child’s age by not buying her a gift for her birthday. I had been planning to have a small family celebration, but of course, with her taking my cousin out of town, this wasn’t possible. So she missed my daughter’s birthday.
And it’s getting late.. and I need to work early. So that will have to be that for now.
