I’m posting this prior to editing it, just to get it out of my hair without having to write a McCheese tonight. It won’t be cleaned up until Tuesday, so read at your own peril.
When do you cut your losses and write someone off completely? I’ve grappled with this lately when it comes to my wayward sister. Despite my curmudgeonly reputation, I don’t have a particularly punitive nature; once you’ve earned my loyalty, it’s perversely difficult to lose it.* Sure, my trust is occasionally misguided, misused, or misplaced — that’s how I made it through five or six seasons of Billions — and when that happens I weigh the severity of the transgression against whatever else might be sacrificed if I throw the baby out with the bathwater.
My conclusion is usually “Nah, it isn’t worth it.” But there’s something about the Tom situation, which gets dumber by the week, that makes me feel differently. Unless it’s eventually revealed that a coconut fell on her head a few months ago, leaving her concussed, or that the past year of her life was a Pam Ewing dream, I’ve done the math again and again and am willing to absorb the loss. She’s too old to act so childish and I’m too old to pretend it’s OK.
This isn’t something I expected to feel about her, much less semi-publicly express. Like many eldest children from large families, I have a high tolerance (and even a certain fondness) for my siblings’ most outré antics — and they’ve done some pretty strange stuff over the years.** But Tom’s lengthy history of being a selfish little shit — and her newer history of being manipulative as well — has pushed me past the limit. Normalizing her behavior is the same as enabling it and I don’t want to do that; our parents and her ex already tried that and their indulgence only made things worse.
We celebrated Muriel’s seventh birthday today and the closer she gets to double digits, the more I want to cry, I wrote a couple nights ago. Do you know how exasperated Crankenstein would be if what got me into therapy wasn’t the ongoing struggle to find the will to endure following the loss of my best friend, and wasn’t YOPD, but was instead neuroses about Muriel’s mortality? I thought then of everything else that would come up in therapy: how many challenges I’ve faced in recent years, and how much monumental stupidity and needless aggravation there’s been to contend with because of Tom.
This has been the worst year of my life so far, an assessment that should surprise no one. It was worse than a year of intestinal surgeries, hospital-acquired infections, and learning to live first with the indignities of a temporary ileostomy (which I absolutely detested) and then a j-pouch. It was worse than Ex’s departure. Slowly coming to terms with the cold realities of my present and future health, not to mention my marriage, has hardly been a walk in the park, but it’s all small potatoes compared to other, more recent events. Losing my own life or all of my limbs would’ve been easier than losing Joe.^
Tom, who outspokenly considers herself the most self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and morally superior member of our family, knows that better than anyone, which is what makes her continued silence so loathsome. She remains indignant that she couldn’t manipulate her sisters into supporting her mistreatment of her ex, and further embarrassed herself when she tried to drag Crankenstein into it, unaware that her feelings were no different than ours. That’s part of what her silent treatment is actually about — she couldn’t handle the blow to her ego, panicked, and defiantly dug a deeper hole. Now it’s easier to live there than climb out.
It’s not as if Tom saying “I’m sorry about your friend” would’ve repaired our relationship or made me feel any better. But it would’ve been important to her personal growth and maturity. To be incapable of such a simple gesture in one’s thirties is as worrisome as the rest of her self-serving actions this year. The craziest thing about it, though, is that something similar happened before. Five years ago, when her ego was bruised about a disagreement, she unsuccessfully tried to alienate me from the rest of our family.
During the short amount of time that campaign lasted, Youngest Sister suffered a miscarriage, one of our cats died, and Crankenstein’s father barely survived a widow-maker heart attack. Tom tried to keep me in the dark about the miscarriage and made no attempt to contact Crankenstein about her cat or father. She only dropped her vendetta when she thought our dad might’ve had a heart attack himself (he hadn’t) and was afraid to be alone while our mom took him to the hospital. If that taught her nothing about the importance of family or how quickly our lives can change, this latest go-round won’t, either.
Months or years from now, when she’s done licking her wounds, I expect she’ll feed a line of self-serving BS to our mother, who will eagerly and earnestly parrot it to me: “Tom was so worried because you were falling and choking and she couldn’t handle the thought of watching you decline, so she pushed you away.” But that’s not what happened. Tom’s a control freak who spiraled first when she lost control of her ex and again when she couldn’t control other people’s reactions to her antics. She’s angrier at me than she is at Youngest Sister because she viewed me as a surrogate parent and is upset she lost my respect.
When Tom was younger, I used to amuse her by reciting some of George W. Bush’s greatest hits, like when he referred to Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (a family friend was married to a member) as Nitty Gritty Great Bird.^^ She found his mangling of “Fool me once…” so hilarious that it almost made her cry. It’s a quote that now reminds me of her, for a very different reason — it captures how I feel about being subjected to another of her preschool meltdowns:
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says ‘Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.’ We’ve got to understand the nature of the regime we’re dealing with.”
She’s fooled me twice now. The first time was on her and the second’s on me. I understand the nature of Tom’s regime quite well. One day maybe she will, too.
* “Tell us about it,” some of you will sigh. “Tell us again that you’ll always love your awful ex.” But I’m strangely devoted to all kinds of things, even office supplies: I still use the Garfield ruler I’ve had since kindergarten and the same mechanical pencils I’ve had since middle school. (The ruler is 35 years old and in wonderful condition. I still have its matching pencil sharpener, which sustained considerably more wear.)
The pencils are in a pen cup on my desk, along with my purple Dr. Grip gel pen from middle school — that was a great splurge and was subsequently guarded with my life. I last purchased new ink for it a couple years ago, though my preferred pen is the Uni-Ball Vision Roller, which I started using in middle or high school. They’re disposable and I buy them in bulk but don’t go through them too quickly anymore; it’s harder to write in longhand now that my hands cramp. That’s something PD has taken that I’m resentful about, though I’m grateful my writing’s still legible.
** There was the time I had to intervene in my late teens or early twenties to get Felix banned from a NAMI forum because, newly diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, he was claiming to be the reincarnation of Richard Trenton Chase, a depraved serial killer, and made threats against me and other relatives. (You don’t want to know anything more about Chase than that.) On another occasion, he harassed an incarcerated European serial killer via email.
In my opinion, he was trolling (I’ve never felt unsafe around Felix, even when he was unmedicated), but his psychiatrist had instructed our parents to restrict his internet usage — particularly access to mental health and pharmacological websites — because it was hampering his treatment. For whatever they reason, they didn’t take it seriously, so I did what they wouldn’t since we shared a family computer. It helped to an extent but there were still many other problems to address.
^ If that sounds hyperbolic, it isn’t. He’s gone but his pain endures and is felt by those who loved him.
** While looking for a link to video of this on Tuesday morning, I came up empty. That didn’t make any sense since clips of W.’s gaffes should be readily available, so I tried again with “George H.W. Bush” instead. Still no luck with video, but there was an old Entertainment Weekly list confirming it was H.W. who said it, and it was even funnier than I thought: Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird.