The week is almost over and it feels as though I’ve done nothing but cough and nod off on the couch. Wimbledon is momentarily too painful to discuss following Donna Vekić’s heartbreaking semifinal loss to Jasmine Paolini, and I can’t craft anything suspenseful or amusing from some recent basement mishaps that served as superfluous reminders of why I’ve landed in physical therapy.*
We could instead discuss the latest Eight is Enough episode I watched, featuring special guest star Adrienne Barbeau, but I’d rather wait and see if her character reappears (I’ve deliberately not checked IMDb). That leaves us with — here I’ll rub the bridge of my nose and sigh — Tom, who’s still Tomming all over the place. Since none of you actually know her, and because she’d proudly tell you all of this herself if she did, I’ll get it out of the way now, because it will figure into future posts about my family.
I can’t claim to have been too scandalized by this, since it’s practically a TikTok challenge among certain demographics. But Tom knew it would shock and disgust our parents, and that’s why she chose not to tell them and instead foisted it upon her sisters in separate phone conversations she didn’t think we’d discuss with each other. Though I’d love to dramatize this with hysterical dialogue from Sorry, Wrong Number (the Stanwyck version, natch) or something goofy like that, I only have the brainpower to go with bullet-points:
- Tom was bored in her relationship of 10 years, having lost interest in her partner, ‘Erica’ (formerly T.E.), after Erica gained a significant amount of weight. She then manipulated Erica into giving her a ‘hall pass’ to sleep with an ostensibly heterosexual friend who has shamelessly flirted with Tom for the past decade. This was supposed to be a one-time fling but Tom wanted the relationship to continue and Erica balked, so she dumped her.
- This ‘friend’ (Tom doesn’t yet realize she’s nothing of the sort) has a long history of anorexia and appears to currently be in starvation mode. Rather than admit her obvious physical preferences, which Erica was already painfully aware of anyway, Tom has chosen to deny weight was involved and went so far as to claim that Erica’s poor self-image drove her away.
- The hookup was presented to me as Erica wanting to ‘explore non-monogamy,’ and when I pushed back against some of that right off the bat, Tom was quick to fold — but still withheld the truth. Predictably, the actual story was more like Tom wanted to mess around and expected minimal pushback from her doormat partner.
- After Tom dumped her, Erica went on a dating app for assurance she “wasn’t an ogre,” and flirted with someone who lives almost 2,000 miles away. This incensed the supposedly single and newly non-monogamous Tom, who had meltdowns about it and even tattled to our parents, who were unaware of Tom’s actions and thought Erica would be the first to move on.
- Tom accepted little to no responsibility for her behavior, acknowledging to both of us sisters that she knew Erica didn’t actually want her to do it and was testing her. Yes, she failed the test, but it was Erica’s fault for “planting the seed.”
- Unlike Youngest Sister, I was told that Erica was in the grips of a mental health crisis when Tom strayed: she wasn’t acting like herself, had become self-destructive, etc. As best we can tell, Tom’s having a crisis of her own, but imagine thinking “My longtime partner got weirdly self-loathing and self-destructive, so I slept with someone else” makes you look sympathetic.
- Concerned that Erica could harm her reputation, particularly with our parents, Tom cast her out of their circle of friends and began isolating her from Youngest Sister and our mother, thus robbing her of her strongest emotional support systems. Reeling after Erica told her there’s no chance they’ll reunite — Tom obviously intended to string her along in case something went awry with her ‘friend’ — she was overheard angrily insisting “You’ll come back if I want you to.”
- Tom’s unhappy with me because I’m unwilling to indulge her delusional takes on most of this. But it’s risible to tell your ex “I was turned off by your lack of self-confidence” after completely undermining her self-confidence in such an intimate manner. And it’s insane on every conceivable level to smugly pretend your anorexic side-piece is confident in her appearance, just as it’s imbecilic to whine “I can’t deal with her BPD!” about Erica before running off with someone who not only has BPD herself but is making the most borderline decisions imaginable (like hooking up with Tom to begin with).
- Despite claiming she’s not relationship-hopping, Tom is already codependently enmeshed with her ‘friend,’ who is meddling incessantly in every area of Tom’s life. Bafflingly, they seem to think Youngest Sister and I will keep their secret in perpetuity. They’re already making plans for Thanksgiving.
The story doesn’t end there, but I’m sure you’ll agree that’s more than enough for now. You can probably see how a lot of this fits with some of my previous complaints about Tom’s sense of entitlement, and why some of it bugs me for more personal reasons. But what bothers me more than anything else is how needlessly destructive it is, and how blind Tom is to what a cliche she’s become. She’s in her thirties and much too old for this, just as I’m much too old to pretend there’s anything noble, or novel, about it.
* I stumbled and broke another almost-fall with my hands yesterday, this time leading to a couple of bruised and swollen knuckles. This afternoon, I was rearranging a shelf and picked up a box that was probably 18″ x 24″ and 15 lbs, nothing strenuous. But I had to hold it in my left arm while moving something else with my right hand, and my arm gave out unexpectedly and the box fell. The loss of strength on that side has been one of the more shocking physical indignities of the last few years but only recently has it started to feel dangerously weak, enough that even holding a saucepan containing nothing more than a couple cups of water is a tribulation.