Certainly hope those who celebrated Thanksgiving with their families enjoyed themselves. Mine was…well, interesting, and if I hadn’t seen the appalling spectacle with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Just returned home from my brother’s place (about 1.5 hours away), where the evening ended with a) my brother screaming at my mother to “get the fuck” (his words) out of the house, and b) my younger sister and my sister-in-law (SIL) physically attacking each other while I tried, not entirely successfully, to keep them apart.
If it matters, this appears to have been sparked by a cruise my brother and his wife were planning to take next March. During the ten days or so they’ll be away, someone needs to watch over their two kids. My sister had volunteered originally, but apparently has withdrawn the offer, citing the fact that her marriage is breaking up, they’re selling the house they live in, and she’s not sure whether she’s even going to be still living in the region by that time next year.
So my brother has sort of put the arm on my mother to babysit. Thing is, my mum buried my father two months ago, after having waited on him hand and foot during a two-year illness, so she was not immediately enthusiastic about taking on the kids, as they are not the best-behaved and especially since my brother seemed to treat it as an obligation on her part.
In any event, mum arrives at my brother’s place for what was to be a three-day stay. My brother, unfortunately, follows his own time-worn tradition when he doesn’t get his way, spends the entire time sulking, more or less refusing to speak to my mum directly, and caps things by announcing after Thanksgiving dinner that he’s cancelling the trip because “no one can be bothered to help us out, after all we’ve done for you, and you couldn’t care less about us, and now I’m out the $500 down payment”, etc.
Well, by early evening, my mother decided she’d had enough and announced to my brother that if he wasn’t going to speak to her, she was leaving. He did not take this news charitably, to say the least. Next, my sister completely loses her control and steps into the fray, at which point SIL suggests that if my sister had kept her ‘promise’ that none of this would have happened. It all got a bit hectic after that, but at least it ended without injury, although my mother’s car knocked down a couple of garbage cans as she peeled out.
Hey, maybe everyone had a point, maybe not. But was it really necessary to end up in a vicious screaming match, in which a pair of children witness their 41-year old father attempting to push their 72-year old grandmother out of the house? Was this issue so freaking urgent that a decision had to be made right bloody NOW, on this particular day above any other? Did my sister really think that shouting incoherent obscenities at my brother and sister-in-law, in their house, would somehow help resolve the situation?
Jeepers, what a pack of cementheads.
The hell with 'em. Next year I’ll just go have some nice seafood somewhere.
Just had to share.