I haven’t spoken to one sister in about ten years. We just have nothing in common.
Another sister I haven’t spoken to in about 6 months and when I did I had to force myself- she is an absolute bitch. Everything black and white in her view and no one elses point of view is accepted. Due to this my mother no longer speaks to me. I can live with that.
My daughters- well- they speak if they want something but I don’t really care much anymore. I won’t pander to anyone.
I worry for my brother when he realizes that he abandoned his mother when she needed him most.
I wonder what it is about my post that prompted this response.
I had a similar reaction as Anaamika to your first post (including the realization that the reaction was about incidental triggers rather than about your actual situation). I considered writing something about how you could be my sister. Your subsequent posts showed me two things, though. One, that my family and yours are far from analogous, and two, that you’re a dude.
Whoo boy - no prizes for guessing who the common denominator is in this one.
I surmised from your post that your Aunt had tried to rationalize and give reason for how your mother had treated you. And your Aunt came to the realization that there really was no excuse for the way your Mother treated you.
It sounds like your Aunt ‘Saw the light’ so-to-speak. And that perhaps, she realized that your mom, her sister, was not perfect.
I worry about my brother in that he will never forgive himself for the way he has treated his mother. Perhaps your aunt saw that the reasons for your mothers behavior was nothing but dust.
Perhaps I need the long version.
None of this is simple. That much I will say. I spent 2 years trying to fix whatever rift it is that my brother has created. I saw my Mom yesterday. And oddly, my brothers Wife as well. She wants to fix this. My brother refuses to talk to anyone.
I also got to see my 80 year old mother cry.
I’m not going to pursue it anymore. I tried and tried and tried. So did my mother to get him to just sit down and discuss what the hell is bothering him. As far as I am concerned, at this point he is a sociopath that does not care about anyone but himself.
I’m not sure what broke in him. But I can’t try to fix it anymore.
I’d say you got the gist of it. 
This family stuff is so difficult, I think, in part because of how much effort we are willing to invest repairing these rifts, sometimes unilaterally (that much seems to be a common theme). It’s hard to let go, and I’m not sure I can, completely. But sometimes it’s the best option out of a handful of crappy ones.
I guess I’m still holding out hope, but I’m done holding my breath.
Good for you. But it is tough. Every time I think this is done, something else comes up. I suspect that the next time I see my brother will be at my mom or dads death. I’ll have to take care of all of that of course.
He would not come to our aunts funeral because mom might be there. My aunt called him 6 times from her death bed in the hospital but he did not call back.
They where very, very close. My Aunt and brother. And all of us where.
But ‘Mom’ might be there. So he never called our aunt.
He’s a fucking coward that likes to masquerade as a tough guy.
I’ll give him tough. In spades. Gladly. You want tough? Listen to your mother cry.
Long story short - my younger brother was always an asshole. We were friendly when we would meet at my parents’ house, but other than that - little contact.
My parents died and we were closer for a short time, but he took something out of context and has been pissy and evil and trying to turn the family against me ever since.
Luckily, the rest of the family knows he is an asshole and ignores his rants.
A part of me feels bad - but to be quite honest - for the most part I don’t give a shit. We have absolutely nothing in common, other than parents - he has thin skin and has rarely had a friend longer than two years in his entire life and - in case any further proof is necessary - this is my younger brother who has been married and divorced EIGHT times - yes, 8 times. His last wife was found by him as he was cruising on the Internet while he was still married to his 7th wife. That speaks volumes. (Warning to any women meeting guys on the Internet - it could be my brother!)
My older (adopted) sister is estranged from my entire family. My parents divorced in the mid-80’s when she was about 12 or so, which affected her greatly. Then over the years, a bunch of other things that I won’t get into happened (though I will note that there was no abuse of any kind) and she basically just turned on the family. She left the house to move to New York in January of 1992.
Though I heard from her through some letters and a couple of phone calls in the 90’s, I haven’t seen her since she left home (I was 14 at the time). I have no idea where she is now nor what she is doing. I’ve tried some basic attempts at tracking her down in the last year to no avail. I won’t be surprised if I never see her again.
Boy do I hear you.
I’m planning on going abroad again on August 16th and not coming back for quite a while. I have to come in person occasionally to do paperwork (my taxes are done at what would be the “state” level and the people in embassies and consulates tend to be familiar only with “federal” law), but will be coming as little as possible. I’ve already traded emails with one of the people who work at the local tax office so I can email her to check whether everything is all right with my e-paperwork.
Haven’t figured out a way to cut contact with the Black Hole (aka Mom) without cutting it with the rest of the family, but I sure can minimize it.
Contact with Mom’s parents has been minimal for years, and it’s still more than I’d like (multigenerational sexual abuse). Mom is an emotional and financial black hole: to be with her and not cut my veins I pretty much have to disconnect “me” (Middlebro has the same problem). At least I do know that my brothers understand it; Lilbro used not to but after several incidents convinced him that Middlebro and me aren’t exaggerating, now he does.
One of my father’s brothers has been estranged from the rest since Grandma died, over some furniture. One of my great-grandmothers married against her parents’ will and got disinherited; same for a great-aunt (different branch of the family).
I am certain that it makes a huge difference if the estrangee has communicated clearly to the person they are cutting out. My sister stopped speaking to my mother for a few years, but never actually said to her, that’s it, I am done with you and this is why. In her mind, they had had enough conversations about my sister’s grievance with our mom that she “should have” known why. But my mom, also a drama queen, made it seem like she had no idea in the world what she had done. I venture to guess that, to her friends (she actually has no family), my sister came out looking exactly like your mom made you look. Drama queens aren’t exactly well known for admitting their contribution to the situation. In the case of my family, though, it well and truly was a drag to be the one who had to listen to my mother say over and over again, “I just don’t understand whyyyyyy” (cue hand-wringing and tears).
(Not saying that YOU should have done anything different, just that I wish my sister had…)
Holy hell - I log on after a long weekend to check and whooo! :eek: When I started this topic, I figured, “Oh, maybe a couple of people might know someone third-hand…” and am truly shocked to see how many personal accounts are here now.
Orr, G.'s comment about “the best option out of a handful of crappy ones” rings particularly true.
I now know two things:
1- this is a far more common problem than I ever dreamed, and (1a.) that it’s nice to not feel so alone
and
2- I’m gonna need more time to re-read this thread before I can make any more comments on anyone’s personal story.
signed,
The Bad Daughter
Hoo boy.
My father was a career drunk, so there was a built-in estrangement there.
I am at a point now where I’m becoming estranged from my mother and my eldest sister. Actually, I’ve never spoken to my eldest sister except when it’s unavoidable - she’s a train-wreck. She has seven kids, and every one of those kids has six half-siblings. She is maximum drama, and spending any time around her at all sucks your soul out through every orifice.
Something of a rift has come up between myself and my mum, because of my mum’s long history of emotional manipulation around her health issues. (It has been more than twenty years since the first time she whipped out the “You need to spend more time with me, because I’m dying” routine. Her health has always been intimately connected to her children, and it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that she was all the subtlety of Fred Sanford in her theatrics. (Years ago, my middle sister was out dancing with my mum – common at the time – and during the course of the night she announced her intention to move to Alberta. The next day, my mum went out and got herself a wheelchair. Not a week later – the next day.)
My mum drew me back in after an earlier estrangement by pressing the guilt button, and after the nineties I found myself spending more and more time “looking after her.” Whenever I was there, she did pretty well, but she had crises that were consistently coincident with anything that got in the way of me being there to cook for her, etc. I had a very limited income from doing freelance web & graphic design, and whenever I talked to her about getting a proper job, she would talk me out of it.
Historically, I had charitably assumed that most of her health issues were hypochondria, with some real issues created by the ridiculous amount of drugs she took for largely imaginary complaints. Over the years, though, I saw clear signs of malingering. (Not to say she was in perfect health, but it’s clear that she was embelishing.) For example, I observed her unconsciously switching from her normal voice to her “frail, sick” voice when my sister called. Frame message: “Oohh, I’m not too bad, sweetie.” Actual message “I may die at any moment.!” Then back to her regular voice as soon as she set the phone down.
I realized that she was manipulating me with the same sort of thing, and that if it kept up, I was well on my way to being forty years old, basically unemployed, and single. I resolved not to respond to the guilt trip any more – to live my life for myself, and to try to have a more normalized relationship with my mum.
Realistically, this meant talking to her on the phone once a week, and seeing her maybe once a month. Problem is, since this was not enough for her, “talking to her” was never anything like a normal conversation, because everything she says is calculated to make me feel as guilty as possible.. And she comes up with some very odd tactics. She developed a long narrative about her relationship with her regular cab driver, who is apparently “like a son” to her, running errands for her, etc. (She has, through the benefit of our social system, a considerable budget for assistance of this kind - she has a full-time home-care worker.)
She started hitting up acquaintances of mine on Facebook, and cultivating relationships with them - and every word she utters about this is transparently designed to twist the guilt knife.
And her health issues ramped way up, of course. “Oh, you’d better not come over today - I’m on a new medication, and I’m losing control of my bowels. I tried to get to the bathroom from the couch, but I just couldn’t make it, and I don’t have the strength to clean it up myself, I’m just too weak. It’ll have to wait until [her home-care worker] gets here.” Except, when I visit her the next day, it’s clear that there has been no poop on the carpet, and it has a few days’ worth of undisturbed regular stuff still to be vacuumed on it. She made up this humiliating, pitiful anecdote, and she actually got me with it.
Now she has cancer. Really, I think. It’s difficult to tell for certain exactly what’s going on - how much of it is genuine, and how much of it is enhanced. This is ridiculous because if she were just straight about it, cancer is generally a sympathy jackpot. It’s cancer. Somehow, though, she manages to present it in such a way that the sympathy evaporates - by milking it. Straight to “Will you still love me when my teeth and hair are gone?” before she’s even had the biopsy.
Endless tales of her doctors’ office conspiracy to kill her. They throw all her corrospondence away, don’t answer the phone, you go down there and the door is locked, all the time. Somebody could die!
And of course, she had a hard time finding a doctor that would agree to do the surgery, because it has to be done without any anasthetic, because her heart stops whenever she sleeps deeply.
…and of course, “that bitch” at the doctors’ office accidentally included some of the wrong paperwork in with some forms that she was supposed to sign. A form that was meant for the doctor to fill out, and which she was not supposed to see at all - which says that her cancer is unambiguously terminal and that the surgery isn’t going to do any good.
I resist getting drawn back into this drama, because it’s a bottomless pit. I will take a wait-and-see attitude, and we’ll see how she responds to treatment.
By all means, keep me posted - let me know when your surgery is scheduled, etc.
Naturally, I feel a bit wierd to be this detached about my mother’s cancer, but it is absolutely necessary for my own mental health. Ordinarily, I think it would be normal to be much more anxious about the situation. The natural worry just sort of evaporates when she crosses the line into invented melodrama, though… and she does that pretty much out of the gate. If her situation doesn’t seem serious enough to *her *to stand on its own without dramatic embelishment, then I don’t feel too bad about just taking it as it comes.
More importantly, experience has shown me that if I respond to her they she wants, her demands will grow until everything else is swallowed up.
The idea of her dying doesn’t really provoke the expected grief any more. It’s diffused over the past twenty years of being told that her death was coming any time now.
Now my eldest sister is out from Alberta and all set for some grand opera. (Like my mother, she learned everything about life from daytime television.) She is scandalized by my distance from the situation, and insists that I only feel this way because my middle sister has “filled my head with all this garbage about mum being manipulative.” She says that this is clear, because she’s heard the same thing word for word from her before. Actually, the first time I discussed any of this with my other sister was a full three years after I’d made up my mind to stop letting her manipulate me and start having a life of my own. …but as it happens, we had pretty much perfectly parallel experiences.
No way am I spending any time over there while my sister is in town - she sucks all the air out of the room, and has a gift for turning even the most banal thing into High Drama: “You put mayo in the mashed potatoes?!?! But [her six-year-old son] is allergic to mayo! He could die!!!” Kid eats scrambled eggs, sucks up lemonade by the quart, and drowns his salad in vinaigrette, but he has a potentially fatal mayonnaise allergy. (This may sound like a small example, but this is typical of the sort of thing you are guaranteed to hear every few minutes if you are unfortunate enough to spend any time at all in her company.)
Anyway, long (sorry) story short, the two of them will no doubt talk each other up into how monstrous and callous my other sister and I are. We’re inexcusably selfish because we’ve turned our back on our poor mom, when in actuality what’s happened is we decided that we needed our own lives, and for this offense my mum has made any attempt to have a normal relationship with her unbearable. It’s just a constant guilt trip, there’s nothing else there. I don’t know what she’s thinking… I guess it worked before, if it’s not now, it’s just because she’s not laying enough of a guilt trip, so she’d better crank it up a notch. So talking to her is unbearable, and instead of getting as much contact as you’d expect from an adult child with a life of their own, she gets as much contact as is absolutely unavoidable. Brilliant.
I hope my mum’s treatment goes well, and that she lives long enough to realize that she actually has qualities that are sufficient to make us want to talk to her from time to time, and that while pushing the guilt button may have worked for her the past, eventually it becomes repulsive. No, I don’t feel guilty for deciding (at 35!) that I deserved a family of my own and a job to provide for them.
I don’t know how I’ll deal with it if it doesn’t go well for her. One thing is certain, though - I’m not getting back on that carousel. If she is estranged from two of her kids at her death, that’s pretty sad - but if you start your swan-song in the eighties (when you’re still going out dancing and drinking every night, instead of doing anything that might put food on the table) you ought not to be too surprised when you lose your audience before the coda.
Man my family is a walking train wreck, I find it hard to even make it coherent.
I didn’t speak to my father for nearly ten years, because I hated my step-mother and because he was a tight wadded bastard. However, he has mellowed and it took alot of effort to forgive him, considering I tried to patch things up before I went to Uni, and he had said to my brothers ‘I hope he’s not making up with me to get money for University’
Then there’s my mother, who recently got married, and because of some government ramifications I won’t go into, completely cut my Grandmother out of her life, the very person who supported her for years on end and me and my three brothers. She has also decided to cut me out as well, since I didn’t want to pretend to play happy families, considering that my step father battered my brother. She’s got like this bubble fantasy she has to keep maintained unless my step dad ‘finds out’
And I have an Uncle who used to constantly want to psychoanalyse me, he was right on many things, however it just got boring after a while, and I felt like he was trying to control me, I wanna make my own choices.
As for my brothers, I hardly ever speak to them, I live with one, but one has a possessive girlfriend, and so has been pretty much absorbed into their family, so I never get to see him. The other, well, he has his own life.
It depresses me, because although I know families grow apart when they get older, they shouldn’t be as fucked up as that. So for as long as the majority of my family remain like this, then I will not bother with any of them.
Maybe I should start a seperate thread for this, but I have a followup question for all the estranged folks out there: Have you tried reconciliation? How did it go?
I harbor fantasies of us dragging ourselves into a therapists’ office where a kindly and experienced person will patiently say the magic words that will make each party understand where the other side is coming from and I can’t even finish typing that sentence because I realize how profoundly naive that hope is. Stupid, really.
But has anyone out there pulled it off?
Tell me I’m ridiculous for even thinking of trying. Remind me that I’m setting myself up for the same pain over again. Smack me upside the back of the head, if necessary. This is the worst kind of wishful thinking.
When this was just between my brother and mother, I tried again and again (about a dozen times) to get my brother to open up and just talk to me or my mother. I was lucky to get a grunt out of him.
My Mom did the same. No go. So did my Dad and my brothers wife. They can’t get him to talk to anyone either.
He’s acting like a 12 year old.
You would be setting yourself up for the same pain over again, which can be instructive. A lot of the specific dynamics of my family came to the fore when I made the attempt to reconcile. In my case, it was a learning experience as opposed to a therapeutic one.
I don’t know that it’s ridiculous to even think of trying, but I do know that for me, being attached to the idea that I could make them understand gave my mother and sister a lot of leverage.
I wouldn’t presume to guess at the prognosis for anyone else’s family situation, though, especially since my experience in this area isn’t particularly broad.
I live about 1 hour away from my sister but we haven’t seen eachother since our mom’s funeral 7 years ago. We send occasional emails but she never talks about what’s going on with her and her family. If I ask, she doesn’t reply. She’s more likely to reply if I talk about myself or my family.
Right before my mom died, we had just started to see eachother again after a 10 year period. During that period, she was always busy with work and I was trying to stay on the good side of a controlling MIL, who didn’t want me to have contact with my family. I still hate that I was so easily manipulated. My sister is the only one left of my birth family. My son missed out on that part of his family.
But, I have no idea why we’re estranged again since the funeral. If anything, it should be me who doesn’t want contact with anyone who was there, because my husband and I were not treated well by my mom’s son. He and my sister arranged everything without involving me. We were next to the last car in the procession to the cemetary. And I know they were looking down on us for the way we were dressed because we’re not wealthy like most of them.
My husband thinks it’s because I cried at the funeral, (imagine that). My sister has always been a little weird about showing emotions.
The only good thing I remember about that day is the look on my uncle’s face when he first saw me. It had been over 20 years since I had seen any of my realative’s, and he was the only one who seemed happy to see me.
I think a separate thread, maybe “talk to be about successful family therapy” or “Talk to me about family reconciliation” might be a good way to get the stories that ended happily**.
I’ve sent emails to my brother, and occasionally he’ll send me an email, usually a single question. I’ll answer and then it stops. I kept sending presents to him & SiL and children for Christmas, but never got any response, so I stopped (after about 15 years, I guess I’m an optimist or insane). There’s no hate, but no interest either.
**In showers of tears, laughter and reconciliation. I realize some people have come to terms with never speaking, and are far happier that way.
I’ve got 33 days to go to the end of my latest attempt at having a human relationship with my mother. It’s been a no-go, completely.
There’s a sentence in Spanish, “two don’t fight if one doesn’t want to.” Well, two won’t have a healthy relationship if one refuses to admit there’s any kind of problem, either!