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The holidays are a fantastic time of year because I go home to Vermont and smell the house and see my family and hear their laughs. I watch them beat each other up in greeting and say, “So! What’s up?” We sometimes talk about things that make us sad, but happy in our shared communication. I try my best to be funny and make my brothers and sisters laugh. When they do, I always feel good. It’s a child’s cry inside me to get good attention. To be funny. To act as if it comes naturally. To see people smile because of me. Inevitably however, and mostly on Thanksgiving, I bring myself to laughing-tears because I realize how unsuccessful I am at being truly funny. We are all laughing more at my attempt than the joke. In that way, they are laughing at me. I am funny. It’s like looking into a mirror. I try to make funny faces in the mirror, and while the image sticks there and my own face goes slack, it’s the slack face they laugh at. They can see me trying. It’s the trying that’s funny. I think that’s funny. Funny funny funny.
But then there’s the other. The infamous other. The part of the holidays I can’t endure but must every year. The stress of figuring out who I will see; wondering who I want to see. Listening to the arguing, the feelings being hurt, the anger, the selfishness, the reaching out, the insincere sincerity. I can’t take this anymore. It’s too much. I want it to just all end; just shut up already. It’s obvious to me that I can’t fix anything. If you call me because you’re pissed off at somebody and don’t want me to think badly of you but of the other person—hang up! You’re all my family and I’m so SICK of listening to each sister talk bad about the other and I’m sick of hearing my mother talk bad about each daughter, including me. Isn’t it time we all grew up?
My youngest sister calls me last night to tell me: “I heard the version that JPR gave Mom so I’m assuming you got it too. It’s not entirely accurate so call me back.” So I called her back to let her know that while said incident was “going down,” JPR had me on the phone. Since they were all screaming every word, I heard them and therefore: I’m pretty sure it can’t get much more accurate than that.
To boil it down, LR told me she did not agree with her boyfriend that JPR was speaking to her because LR suddenly came into some money. Fact is, JPR was mad at LR for not supporting her when my mother wanted JPR kicked out of the house. At some point, LR offered to braid JPR’s hair, and JPR took that as a peace offering, a sign that she really did care about her. LR’s boyfriend didn’t agree. When LR was passing her boyfriend’s theory along to me, I asked her if she believed JPR was really that shallow. She said she doesn’t, “I just think it’s interesting.” I told her it sounded like she agreed, and I expressed that I hoped she did not. We’re family. You can’t stay mad forever. “She has to live with you, LR. She probably just wanted to get along. It’s easier to live with each other that way.” She became angry with me when I told her how angry and pissed off she sounded expressing her boyfriend’s theory. I told her I believed she believed him, judging by her tone and her repeated “I just think it’s interesting” response. Her response was: “Well, I’m really sorry you feel that way. I’m sad to hear that.”
(For all parents out there, take it from me: a girl who has lived with seven sets of parents and innumerable teenagers, and also living with them with my keen sense of observation—NEVER tell your children as a way to end an argument “I’m sorry to hear you say that” or “I’m sad that you feel that way.” This does not solve anything; it only teaches them to give up by assuming the other person will suddenly “understand” because you suddenly feel sorry and sad for them. It’s a cop-out answer to use when you’re tired. By doing this, you are teaching your children to say something they don’t care about. Teach them instead to work it out and be patient and tolerant in their explanations. I would have rather heard my sister explain something to me to the effect of: “I’d like to think that’s not true, but I can’t help feeling it right now.” That’s acceptable. That’s reasonable. But the other response is only a way to insult the person you are arguing with. It demeans their opinion and their attempt to communicate.)
Moving on: in the end, she insisted she didn’t believe it, but “thought it was interesting.” JPR was finally sick of being ignored, however, by LR’s boyfriend, to whom she had become good friends while LR was away up here with me and my mother in Connecticut. So she confronted him. He told her what he thought; according JPR, LR said she agreed when JPR asked her about it. JPR was shocked and hurt to see that her sister believed she only loved her for her money. Granted, JPR had said mean things about LR while she was away and when JPR was angry. My mother was kicking her out and LR’s response, according to LR’s boyfriend, was that like our mother, she didn’t care what happened to JPR either. (Following?) She repeated those mean and rotten things when she got into her fight.
Talking to my sister after the fact, I learn that she takes those comments to heart and because JPR said them twice, despite that she said them while she was angry and hurt each time, she must really believe them. This hurts me. I know my both sisters are kind and loving and can't believe that one would believe what the other said in anger. Granted, I know JPR better than anybody else, and with both my mother and my sister LR feeling angst against her they too are going to naturally ignore any protest I make against their slander of her. They are both impatient and will not simply listen and take it in. LR, I can understand why she reacts this way. I did too when I was 16. She’s eighteen, but she stopped growing up when she was 16. She lost her friends from home, she dropped out of school, she didn’t get a job: she basically lost the connections that are needed to understand what happens to people as they get older. She lost communication, she lost interaction, she lost the ability to realize that things change, because she herself has not changed. I’m no guru, and I may be wrong, but this is how I feel right now. I’m sure that in three years, a new experience of life will offer me a different explanation for her insistence on interrupting, on yelling, on being adamantly defensive. It’s really quite ridiculous how she responds to something I say without even realizing that her response has nothing to do with anything I’ve said. She does not realize it because she’s so fixated on defending herself. Yet rather than simply saying, “This is how I feel and this is how I reacted,” she attacks other people. “I said that because she did this and said this and did this.“ I’d rather heare, “It hurt my feelings and this is how I reacted and this is how I feel.”
To cut it short, it ended up with me telling my sister that if she truly did not believe her boyfriend’s theory about JPR, she should have told JPR. Instead, she let her boyfriend convince JPR that both he and LR thought she was shallow and insensitive and basically rotten. My sister’s defense was that she couldn’t get a word in because the two were screaming nonstop. I told her that if she cared enough, she would have. They were, after all, arguing about her. She, more than anybody, had the right to say something. And if she can’t look at her boyfriend and say “Stop speaking for me, that’s not how I feel,” then she either was still lying about her feelings to me, or she didn’t care enough about JPR to say anything. It ended with her boyfriend threatening JPR and JPR leaving the house to drive from Florida to Connecticut. My sister LR did not like me telling her that if she didn’t feel that way, she should call JPR when they are both calm and explain that she does not feel that way. She actually hung up on me.
I called my sister back for one reason alone: I wanted her to understand what just happened. When JPR said mean things about her in anger, LR believed them on a very dramatic level. LR does not yet understand how dangerous it can be to believe things so intensely. She thought that because JPR said them that she not only really believed them, but that I would believe them as well. She then surmised that she was alone and had no sisters. I did not want her to misunderstand what she was doing when she hung up with me. So I called her back and told her “I want to make it very clear that you just hung up with me and in doing so, told me you no longer want to talk to me. So I’m leaving it up to you to call me and talk to me when you think you can. You made that choice by hanging up on me.” She interrupted me and said, “Maybe I will when you stop treating me like a second grader” and hung up on me again.
It’s true that I feel I understand the situation better than she does. It is true that I think she behaves like a teenager and won’t listen to reason and is just generally angry. It’s true that I believe I know what’s best for her more than she does. It is true that I sometimes can’t stand her anger or her attempt to appear mature and reasonable. It doesn’t sound sincere to me; it only sounds as if she’s trying to make me think she’s mature. Her responses to me on the phone after JPR left, however, shatter any illusion that she is.
I hate feeling this way about my sister. It’s an artificial feeling that doesn’t run a quarter as deep as my love for her. We grew up on separate paths, and there was a time when she listened to what I had to say about her and how she could handle the stresses in her life. But any suggestion now is taken as an insult because it insinuates, in her mind, that she is “weak” and “irresponsible.” This hurts me incredibly that she would feel this way. I only care about her. But this is how parents feel. My foster mother Ellen has always had a knack for talking to teenagers. She’s learned how to train them to be calm, to think, to be reasonable. She keeps working on them and doesn’t let them slide away. I feel her frustration now and hope I can succeed as she does. I also hope I'm not deluding myself into thinking I'm diong it right.
I am, however, only a sister. But there is nobody to be a mother. My mother is a wonderful person inside and she knows more about life than most I know . . . but she’s dying. And in the grief of that knowledge, she wants not to disappoint her youngest daughter, who ran away from her adoptive home to be with our mother. So my mother let her drop out of school, spend the night with men, let her boyfriends move in. My mother didn’t teach her about men. She didn’t teach her about the value of education. She didn’t teach her responsibility by telling her that if she’s not in school, she needs a job to contribute to the house. Instead, she smiled. She told LR to follow her heart. She told LR that life was meant to be happy. She told LR that if she’s happy, that’s all she needs. Except it isn’t about being happy anymore. It’s about being independent in a way that leaves her depending on somebody to take care of her. My mother does that now. But my mother is going to die. And if LR can’t listen to me and can’t be reasonable, and if she chooses instead to “feel sorry” about how I feel and to hang up on me, she’s going to convince herself that she is alone and that nobody will help her. She’s not going to recognize that it’s okay to be stressed; that it’s okay to be hurt; that it’s okay to be angry and say rotten things. She’s not going to understand that it’s okay to need your sisters for support and that no matter what she's said to us: we still love her. I hope she can learn to do the same for us.
It makes me sad that I may never be seen as a big sister, but only be seen as a bitch. Even though she’s only angry and young, I still can’t stand the fact that she doesn’t like me. I feel as if she’ll always resent me and not like me. And the more she does, the more my mother does. It seems to me that LR believes what my mom says and my mom believes what LR says. LR’s argument will be that I only listen to JPR, but she doesn’t understand that I disagree even with her. That I lecture her, that I get mad at her, that she doesn’t agree with what I have to say. But we’re still the closest. And besides: I can only believe JPR when JPR is the only one who calls me or writes me letters or visits me. LR doesn’t even know me, and already…she can’t stand me.
I feel like a baby when I think about it. I’m ranting about it. It seems incredibly childish to me, but it affects me more than I thought. Besides, it’s the holidays. I’m always more stressed around the holidays because it’s…family. And I can’t find mine except in the house where nobody shares my blood. They are my family. And I feel so guilty for preferring them. There, I feel loved and accepted and secure. Elsewhere…it’s just “family.” But nobody knows me. They only know what they think I am like.
Kind of like you, I suppose. *smirk*
Be good this holiday, and make room for letting things go. I’ll upload my journal entries when I get back, and if possible, add to my blogger page while at home in Vermont.
Peace. –c.
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