It's been years since my sister and I've been able to really enjoy each others company. She's 10 years older than me and when I was a kid, I freaking adored her every move. I wanted nothing nothing nothing more than to be her shadow. I would tell her she was my favorite sister and she'd say, "I'm your only sister, silly." And I'd say in earnest, "Yes, but if I had another one, you'd still be my absolute favorite-est." This is all typical, I know. She bought my first sex book, she bought me my first drink, she took me to Florida when I graduated High School. She was my mother, my best friend, my mentor, my idol.
When she was 20 and I was 10, she got married. That was a bad marriage. Her husband was abusive and being with him caused us to drift apart. She still tried to make time for me, but he made things difficult so the drifting was inevitable. I was too young to understand then that she didn't not want to take me to the zoo like she promised, or spend time w/me anymore. I didn't know there were other, more grown up reasons to her strange new behavior, so I built a wall. It was slow-going, like I said, she took me on my senior trip, but that was after the overbearing husband shot himself in the head in front of our house while we ate spaghetti inside because she finally left his sad (literally) ass.
This happened when I was 16 and completely self-absorbed. Of course, I responded accordingly, I wasn't stupid. I knew what was going on, but I never got the details. Everyone wanted to make sure "the baby" was protected so it was quite a few years before I put all the pieces together. He'd abused her physically and mentally for about 5 years and this did serious harm to her mental wellness. She went to a counselor for about 2 years or so after the incident but then she got remarried and I don't think she ever really recovered. But again, I didn't put all this together until maybe the past couple years. Currently, my sister's married to a money-hungry, workaholic w/4 children and one on the way. She's a born-again Catholic, he's a Southern Baptist convert and she doesn't work (tho she has a college degree) to home-school the kids. Andrea Yates scares the hell out of me. I'm scared for my sister, and I can't decide if I'm being mello-dramatic. She's so fucking religious now that I can't get through anymore and I don't know how to deal.
The whole family jokes about her crazy fanatical lifestyle, but it's more often than not behind her back. She's also very sensitive and no one wants an uncomfortable situation, so the concerns just continuously get pushed under the rug. She emailed me right before the election about how Bush is the right man for the job and I'd had enough. I emailed her back asking her, in what I thought was a nice, respectful, relatively passive way, to skip me when sending out that crap in the future. I didn't say that, but I made it clear that I didn't think we should be discussing politics. I want to get along w/her and I just knew, what with the climate just before the election, I wouldn't be able to be very respectful if she made me talk about my views with her. Her bible thumping has really begun to get under my skin and I've done such a good job of keeping my mouth shut. She didn't take my email well, so she wrote back that she thought we could have a mature, adult conversation and she was sorry she was wrong. That did it. I let a lot of things out when I wrote her back. I didn't limit my discourse to current events. Then her response was that she was so hurt by what I said that she deleted it immediately and she was going to refrain from telling me how she felt so as not to say something she might regret later (taking the moral high ground, I suppose). I didn't write back.
That was, well, right before the election. I should also mention that I got married in August and she still hadn't sent my new husband and I a wedding gift. She was struggling to decide what to get us, knowing we weren't church-goers or religious in any sense of the word that she could understand. I told her in one of the emails not to get us anything if it was so difficult for her to decide, I didn't want a gift for me to cause anyone stress. I meant that sincerely, my mother had told me how she was fretting about the appropriate gift for a couple of newlywed heathens. My husband asked, "Why didn't you tell her to just get us a toaster or something?" This is not the point! She tries too hard. With everything, church, kids, friends, her weight, everything and this is what concerns me. Apparently, though, I didn't convey my concern so much as piss her off.
Since that last interaction w/her, I had an epiphany, so to speak. I was sitting w/my husband one night watching TV and it occured to me how incomprehensibly devastated I would be if anything ever happened to him. I took the abuse out of her relationship w/her first husband and realized that's exactly what happened to her. Years after it happened, she would tell me that it was hard for her to remember the bad times. He really was her first love and even now as I think of it, I cry imagining what she must have gone through. And I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed of myself for not feeling this before. I've been so self-righteous for so long that I literally did not consider how devasted she must have been.
This is where I have the problem. I decided to write her a letter telling her about this new perspective. I've started the letter several times and I've written it in my head, but I can't seem to get it right. And then today, I get a wedding gift in the mail from her. She got us a stand mixer. How do I go to her now without looking like I was guilted into writing? I want her to know how sorry I am, but I'm afraid whatever I say now will be clouded w/this gift that I know she didn't really want to give. I say that because she wanted to get us a cross, but she was afraid we wouldn't like something like that. It's not true, I would've loved anything she gave us, especially if it was something she wanted us to have. I appreciate the mixer, of course, it's what I wanted but I feel bad that she can't feel good about it, too. I know she doesn't. I just want to take her now and fix her so she can quit being so afraid of losing the things that mean so much to her. No letter I write will convey that, though.
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