That was part of the tension, I'm sure. To be totally honest, I'm not sure exactly what it was all about. It's never totally made sense. That stuff was part of it, but it was a lot more complicated. She's always had emotional problems going back to when she was a teenager. It compounded with my brother and my dad. When she got married, it got even worse because there was some tension between her and my mom over that. I stayed out of all of that and just told her I supported her in anything she did. I've never criticized one thing she did and tried to be very supportive. Here's what happened the last time we saw my sister (about 2009).
She came back from a year teaching overseas in UAE and stayed with my mom to visit which was typical. The visit kept dragging on and on to a couple months. My mom couldn't get an answer for why she was staying so long and thought she might be establishing residency to get a divorce based on questions my sister had for my mom's boss (a lawyer).
Things started getting tense because my sister was basically just laying around the house with no apparent plans to leave. She's kind of a slob. Whenever my mom would ask when she was leaving or why she kept staying, she'd get mad and lock herself in a bedroom. At the very end, my wife took my sister shopping mostly to get her out of the house. They hung out all day and had a good time. When they got back to my mom's house, she got into it with my step-father about something.
I got a call from my mom. She said,"Please come get your sister. She's in the yard screaming at Butch and she won't stop! I'm going to have to call the police!!"
When I got there, my sister was collapsed...sobbing in the driveway. My wife ran over and told me to hurry up and get her out of there because her and Butch kept yelling at each other. She was scared it was going to get violent or something. My sister was leaving and wanted to go see my brother's car and her cat's grave. Butch told her she just needed to leave now because she was upsetting her mother. It freaked her out that he was telling her to leave the property our dad bought. That made it even worse because then she was screaming back at him that he didn't even belong there. They were both kind of crazy.
We drove over to my house where my sister collapsed in the driveway and kept sobbing. I held her while she told me about previous suicide attempts and showed me cut marks on her wrists. She'd been hospitalized for breakdowns. She had overwhelming survivor's guilt. She told me,"It's a shame. She just lost another kid."
I drove her around nearly all night that night to find a place to stay. She still didn't want to leave Missouri. We found a motel with cheap weekly rates. I took her stuff to her and got her checked in. She doesn't drive. I went by every night after work to check on her and see if she needed anything. I never did get an explanation for why she wouldn't leave. When she was ready to go, I took her to the bus stop and waited until her bus got there. We hugged. She had me send her suitcase from our house a few months later.
Since then, communication has gotten less and less often. And more and more cold. She used to call once in a while and send cards for Christmas and birthdays and stuff. This year, she didn't even indicate she knew about our granddaughter being born or our son getting married. I had to ask if she knew. Both times she did. She just hadn't mentioned it. I couldn't even tell if she was seeing my Facebook stuff. I literally heard from her two times in 2013 and it was those two times when I contacted her. We've seen pictures of her visiting Branson, Missouri (an hour from our house) with my aunt. She's been down there a couple times in the last year and never even let us know she was here. We found out months later when she'd post pictures. I don't know if she's still married or not. She's never said and I've been afraid to ask. That's part of why she was fighting with my mom. She acts like it's none of our business. I just kept in touch to be in touch.
I sent her a message earlier in the year letting her know I had my brother's car. One of the things she was fighting about with them was looking at my brother's car. It bothered my mom so much after she left that she signed the car over to me. She didn't want it around anymore. I wanted to post some pictures of it for a friend to see and sent my sister a messsage first explaining. I didn't want her to be shocked. She never even acknowledged she got the message, so I posted the pictures. My mom has tried several times to reconnect with cold results. My step-dad has since tried to apologize. He was on a lot of medication at the time because of massive vascular surgery. He thinks the medication made him irrational. Cold results.
She has a lot of issues. I wish I could talk with her about it. We're the only two people in the world who share this experience of losing OUR brother and losing OUR dad...the only two. At some point, we'll be the only two left in our family.
...and she decided a "like" on a picture she didn't like was siginificant enough to block my only means of contact with her. I suppose she divorced herself completely from our family. This will be hurtful to my wife, my kids, the grandkids. She doesn't seem to care about them at all. None of us have ever done one thing to hurt her. We've always reached out to her. We keep asking her to let us know when she's in Missouri and we'd come see her. We send her cards, presents, invitations..we've worked hard to keep her included in our family. My wife and kids love her.
When this Facebook thing happened and she blocked me, my wife said,"It's like she was watching you for a reason to get mad and cut off contact." It looks like it took her four years, but she found one. She didn't find anything I said to her. Nothing I did to her. Nothing I did period. I clicked "like" on a picture she didn't like (maybe...sometimes things get clicked on my tablet accidentally). She's going overseas to Burma sometime soon for a year. It's a military dictatorship. The only way I had to keep in touch with her was Facebook, and she blocked me over a "like". I barely even remember the picture she was talking about. It was a joke about Muslims that she found offensive. She quoted it and said I was extremely insensitive to "like" it knowing her close ties to the Muslim community. I was flabbergasted. I've never said anything negative about Muslims to her because I DID know her close ties. Her husband (?) and a lot of her friends are Muslims from south Asia. She's spent a lot of time there and in the middle east. I haven't done anything to offend them or her, but it wasn't really a struggle. I don't care what religion or race anyone is. People are people to me. She should know that after forty years of knowing me. I had no recollection of even seeing it, but I couldn't tell her. She sent me a cold message and blocked me immediately. Then she posted about the moral high ground she was on...how supporting "hate speech" was intolerable no matter what the source. My wife is actually still friends with her on Facebook. She found the rant the next day about it so bizarre she showed me. If I didn't know she was talking about me, I'd have no idea. She was talking about "supposedly religious people who are always talking about praying and love" supporting hate. I am mildly religious and barely even mention it. Some might even call me irreverent and have. I almost never mention religion, but I do pray. It helped save our son. I sure am not a publicly religious person, though. That was her rant. I'm a LONG way from supposedly religious. I don't know who she was talking about, but that does fit my mom better than me. The person she was describing was nothing like me. Her friends told her to "wash that person our of your hair". It was all so cold. I don't know any other way to describe it. It was emotionless like she'd never even met me...like she'd quit feeling anything a long time ago and was just waiting for a reason to eliminate me. I guess she found her reason to eliminate me from her life, and I don't even know why. I never hurt her. My wife has never hurt her. My kids and grandkids have never hurt her. We actually have treated her well. We struggled to keep her family even after she disowned my mom. She just wanted me gone. It meant something to me that she was my only surviving sibling. Apparently it didn't mean much to her...a "like" on a picture's what it took.
She hasn't been much of a sister for a long time, anyway. If she's going to treat me like this, I'll just focus on the people who don't treat me poorly. I've got my own life to live.
There's some more blanks filled. I don't really get it. It's been a strange year.