My cousin’s posts on Facebook are all copy and paste “If you love ___ post this” type annoyances or requests for prayer.
She believes every single hoax on FB and warns us all daily.
My sister is now very religious and always prays for me. When I went to California to visit, she wanted me to join her for a Women’s Prayer Retreat (capital letters of course).
I declined. She was very disappointed.
How does your brother manage to knit yogurt? That’s quite a feat for anyone, regardless of their politics or lifestyle choices.
My sisters and I run the gamut.
Me, the oldest: Live in the Northwest in a very rural, organic, tie-dyed vegan kind of place. I fit in pretty well here. Staunch Democrat, don’t dye my hair, Birkenstock wearer. Never married, no kids.
Middle sis: Unrepentant low-income, beer-drinking redneck who spends her weekends at the dirt track. Still wearing low cut jeans and belly shirts at 45 (and 40 pounds overweight). Doesn’t know who the presidential candidates are, or care. Four kids, four daddies, married 3 times (the only reason it isn’t four is because she hasn’t seen #3 for 7 years and can’t find him to get him to pay for the divorce). :rolleyes:
Youngest sis: Upper middle class, Junior Leaguer. Big blonde hair and fake boobs, dresses in conservative (but ALWAYS “designer”) clothes. Staunch Republican and helicopter mom. One marriage, two kids.
Eating lentils makes one a certain type? What about quinoa?
My brother, who had about zero interest in religion or politics until he married into an ultra-right wing, Christian Evangelical family is now a rabid republican and god-whore. I think we were once related, but his genetics changed. We are no longer on speaking terms. He is no longer even on speaking terms with my parents, who are republican, but don’t spend much time thinking about politics.
My dad is like that, but because we live in Australia substitute Alan Jones (not the racing driver but the ignorant, right-wing shock jock) for Rush Limbaugh and John Howard (Australian version of Bush) for GW Bush.
He frequently rants about socialists, the global warming conspiracy, Indians, the French, Blacks, Muslims and communists. By frequently I mean every time I see him.
He’s also out of touch with reality:
[ul]
[li]He thinks the Vietnam war ended in the late 1980s. [/li][li]He was a teenager in the 50s but does not know who Jerry Lee Lewis is. [/li][li]He thinks the US budget and economic problems were caused by Obama and that there was no problem when Bush was president. [/li][li]He believes the moon landing was a hoax [/li][li]He believes the environmental movement is a communist plot to take over the world and that there is no global warming[/li][li]He does not believe Einstein’s theory of relativity is correct. His reason has to do with the speed of light being a universal speed limit - “why should it be?”. He has not actually made any effort to understand Einstein’s theories yet has an opinion.[/li][li]He believes that he is always right and anyone who disagrees “doesn’t have a brain”.[/li][li]He believes that I am a communist because I don’t share his extremist views[/li][/ul]
He gets falling over drunk every day. He once claimed that his glass of beer lifted itself off the table and moved on its own. He doesn’t actually drink much beer, but has been known to drink almost 2 full bottles of scotch in a single day.
Both my parents are alcoholics but my mother is a kind, compassionate person. My father is a mean spirited SOB and stupid with it. In fact I suspect he may be a sociopath. My reason being that you would need to be unhindered by a conscience to be able to stop paying child support for your 4 young children who consequently grow up in poverty and end up attending the roughest high school in Australia. He wasn’t poor - he was working all that time and could have paid if he wanted to.
The more I write down the more I loathe him.
I read that twice, and then decided it was an auto-spellcheck-error for knitting yurts (A type of round tent some hippies use).
My brother is a bit of a whack job, but not nearly as crazy as some described here.
I so want to hit on your sister. I’m the one in my family who ended up closest to that. (Truth in advertising: my only tsunami experience was this year’s. I happened to be on Kauai, where it was all of a foot or something. The closest I came to rescuing anyone was buying t-shirts and things at fund raising drives.) But, I guess an affair with a married man with kids isn’t the next adventure she’s looking for.
I’m the nice one of my siblings. My brother has a temper, but my sister is over the top. I don’t remember the last interaction with my sister that didn’t end with her screaming at me or mine. I no longer talk to her.
My brother, who, even though I love him, is impossible to have a conversation with. He LOVES Sarah Palin, calling her “his girl”. He’s a Goldwater Republican and thinks GW did a fine job. He refers to black people as “niggers” both in private and in public (it was most amusing when his step-daughter came home with a black child: I thought he’d stroke out). He makes comments in front of his wife and daughter and our sister (and strangers) about not getting enough sex (he’s 75, and probably hasn’t seen his penis or his toes in at least 20 years). He still celebrates the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, i.e., “I was glad when those fuckers got killed”. The sad part of this is that he is extremely intelligent and witty, yet chooses to keep all this hate at a rapid simmer. Even so, with all these faults, he’s positively liberal when compared to my brother-in-law.
Evangelical sister. Or at least twenty three years ago when I last saw her.
My older niece is turning into a far-right reactionary knee-jerker just like her folks.
My husband is a conservative, Fox News watching, white bread, straight arrow, lawn-mowing, very proper gentleman of the old school in most things. (Please. Don’t ask how we ever got or stayed married. We just don’t discuss certain subjects.) His cousins came to visit. One is a single dad of 18 with a young sprout named Thorin, courtesy of a cool chick in a commune type living arrangement. Another cousin, single dad’s sister, lives in a yurt in the middle of the woods. (She told us she was a vegan, and Mr. Sali looked at her totally serious and said, ‘now, is that something to do with Star Trek’? :p) And yet other cousin got married at age 20 to a 54 year old man (still married 25 years later). I guess Mr. Sali is the odd man out in that family. He thinks they’re totally outrageous. Well, compared to him, yeah…
My parents have exiled me from the family. We’re still in contact, well at least I’m still talking with my mom. My dad hasn’t refused to talk to me, but clearly he’d prefer not to. I say I’m “exiled” because they haven’t allowed me to visit in several years. I’m not allowed in their presence. Of my 4 sisters, at least 3 are with my parents on this. (The other one of them visited me last year, though. Except for her, I haven’t seen any of my birth family in nearly 5 years) It’s my dad who has declared me persona non grata, and while I don’t think my mom would issue such an order and she probably doesn’t even like it, she’s not about to take my side against my dad, so she’s totally backing him up on this. There’s a long history in the background of my dad yelling at my mom for going too easy on me. My mom has this weird denial thing going on. She insists I haven’t been banished and claims not to understand why I would say such a terrible thing about them. But I’m still not allowed to visit. She even forbade me from attending their 50th anniversary celebration. That was 3 years ago but I haven’t gotten over it. If that isn’t banishment, I wonder what is.
I’m a mom too, and I love my (grown-up) children so much it’s literally unthinkable I could ever banish them from my life like that. Even if they were convicted felons, they’re still my children and I’d still love them just as much and want to see them. No matter what, my children are always welcome in my life. I haven’t committed any crimes or faux pas, or even disrespected anyone. My only offense is being myself.
I just cannot understand how could any parent do that to their own child. It doesn’t even seem human. I feel like I’m on some alien planet. I have a really hard time dealing with the fact that I came from these people. How can that be?
I feel for you Johanna. My brother has abandoned, disowned our Mom. See she dared to question some of his horrible decisions that he kept repeating. It has absolutely crushed my Mom. Listening to your 80 year old mother cry is absolutely heart wrenching.
Johanna, your story is so sad. I can relate. I’ve always been ‘the black sheep’ in the family, and I myself have gone years without any contact with my own horrible family. Years. (When I was a new mother and we were all alone on Christmas - oh, they sent a box of junky toys for my daughter, without even a card enclosed.) This kind of thing happens all the time, I guess. And now that my mother is old and feeble and all alone, guess who is supposed to step up to the plate and do things for her? Which I do, because it’s the right thing to do. But I certainly don’t have to like it, there are years of resentment to battle against. “But it’s your faaammmillllyyyyy! You have to help out your faaaammmmillllyyyy!” FEH!
There isn’t a tactful way to propose this, but is there any chance that you are not your dad’s? Or, maybe a sister’s, or other relative’s, and not your mom’s? I remember a “Dear Amy” letter from a woman, who is now old herself, saying that her family disowned her at 18 (as in, changed the locks the day she turned 18, and kicked her out of the house). When her mom was dieing, she was told that she was actually her oldest sister’s kid, and her family handled the whole situation about as poorly as can be.
I’m definitely my parents’ daughter, genetically if not spiritually. In me the family resemblance of both parents and also my sisters is visible. They’ve banished me for being unapologetically out queer. Everything was fine until I came out.
Johanna, that’s so sad!
In a much more light-hearted direction, I’m continually amazed by my daughter. When we found out we were having a girl, I reassured my husband that there was no way she’d be a girly girl. After all, I was fairly tomboyish and his own mother isn’t especially feminine. Should not have said that, I guess, because just tonight he was playing Barbies with her. She is five, and totally into everything pink and sparkly and girly and princessy and fabulous. She is irritatingly concerned with gender roles and distressingly interested in weddings. Also, she is completely unwilling to eat fruits and vegetables, which I also find mysterious.
If she didn’t like climbing trees and doing gymnastics as much as I do (or look exactly like my husband), I would swear that I’d brought the wrong child home.
I haven’t seen any of my family in years either, simply because I have different interests and values than they do, the most major one being I had no interest in having children. The evening my cousin screamed at me for daring to say I was tired (from working three jobs) because I wasn’t a mother and therefore couldn’t know what tired was, I decided I’d had enough of my extended family. The night my father told me that I couldn’t know anything about my local city politics, 1200 miles from where he lived, I decided I’d had enough of all of them.
There was simply nothing I could do right as far as they were concerned, since I didn’t grow up to be a mommy and home maker. For some reason, it’s OK that two of my brothers haven’t had kids, but that’s only one of a million ways they showed that girl children were not as important as boy kids… :dubious: