There’s an old saying along the lines of, “You can’t choose your relatives.” I’d like to modify that by observing, “You can’t choose your relatives and unfortunately, you can’t turn them in for a full refund either, like you would a really lousy product of some kind, say a hair color that left you with chartreuse waves and irritating poofy dreadlocks that wouldn’t comb out ever.”
Basically, when it comes to family, you’ve got what you’ve got. I’m not thrilled with that but it is a fact, so I’m not going to expend any time, energy, or emotion in trying to change it, mainly because I realized long ago that my odds of changing this person rank right up there with my odds of making the sun rise in the west instead of the east. What I am going to do is be very, very grateful that the one relative I would like to return for a refund (or, being entirely practically minded, just return – period. Sometimes you’re better off with nothing than with something that’s never going to function for more than a handful of nanoseconds) lives on the other side of the country, in an area I can’t think of a single reason why I would ever find myself in (or honestly, why anybody would want to find themselves in), and this suits me absolutely fine. The odds of our running into each other are pretty much zero, and I take comfort, at this point, in those odds.
I’m not going into a whole lot of detail because I did that already (see, “Chopping Down the Family Tree” and “Five Emails”) and considering they were written only a few months, or weeks, apart, you can see by the date of this post that I’ve been on a pretty good run lately of not having my life interrupted to listen to someone go on and on with all the drama of a really irritated five year old pitching a fit in the middle of Safeway because he couldn’t have the four boxes of candy he’d snuck into the cart and hidden beneath the Wheaties. As soon as the email popped up on the Blackberry on Sunday afternoon, as I sat in the Park and Wait at the airport, ready to pick up Roy, who was flying in from an event, I could just about hear that little tantrum on aisle five starting up.
Here’s a free trip to the weird world this person lives in:
In a nutshell, or a thumbtack, or whatever you like, this email informed me that my parents had just left her house, and apparently had expressed what a wonderful time they’d had during their visit to me. And frankly, she knew ‘all about’ my ‘boy toy, Roy’ (I took offense at that, while he was more grounded than anybody I’ve ever known, and immediately saw the humor, and the left-handed compliment. “Oh come on,” he said later, “let me have boy toy, will you?” He was right. Not many people almost fifty, as he reminds me often, are often accused of being boy anything. )
That part of it, mean spirited and ridiculous as it was, I understood. Not that I’ve had any immense training in psychology, but more because I’ve read enough books and seen enough Lifetime Television movies to recognize the ugly head of jealousy when it rears up so blatantly. What a cad I must be, to have found a wonderful person, and found him on the Internet, and had the audacity to have him be attractive and genuinely…genuine. What nerve to actually find a match on match dot com.
So basically that was it, that was the big thing I’d done wrong, I suppose. The cardinal sin of having a nice visit with my parents, and sending them off with a beautifully done collage of candid shots of the visit that Roy put together without my even knowing it. Dad couldn’t stop saying it was the greatest birthday present he’d ever had. How horrible of me to have anyone in my life who could be that great of a person. How terrible that he opened his home to them, helped them with repairs on their motor home, and helped them maneuver the city in search of two needed tires.
He’s got almost as much nerve as me, if you think about it.
The last part of it I didn’t understand, as in I don’t know what in the world she was thinking to write it, but I did understand it meant this lady had gone off a very deep end just as surely as if she’d driven her car off a cliff into the Grand Canyon (provided she had a car reliable enough to get even close to the Grand Canyon, which I can’t remember a time within the last 25 years or so that she has):
“Don’t you ever cross me again! Ever!”
Huh?
I mean, what I’m imagining as I’m reading that is a variation on the Wizard of Oz, you know, the part where the evil witch is staring into her crystal ball saying something about how, “I’m going to get you, Dorothy, and your little dog Toto, too!”
Yeah, um, mentally, I don’t think the lady is in Kansas anymore.
So as I’ve been given some intense, if unasked for, experience with receiving these ridiculous emails, I was prepared, at that point, to just delete it and move on, especially as I’d just glanced up and noticed that the flight from Minneapolis was no longer Delayed but had actually Arrived. It was time to go pick someone up, not give another minute to the rantings of a lunatic. Deal with your own clean-up on Aisle 5.
Still, experience taught me that when it comes to my sister and emails, it’s much like the old jingle for potato chips, “Nobody can have just one”. I’d barely put the car into gear when the second email came through, and that’s the one that made a real decision for me. Even I have lines that can’t be crossed, points beyond which you go where it’s just not possible to ever go back. While I’d felt these lines had already been crossed, let’s just say the final email turned them into the same Jersey Barricade placed around the last hotel the President stayed in, to keep the bad guys out.
She said something about how she knew Trent Babcock had committed suicide (well, of course she would know that, my parents had been told that, and they’d been very, very sorry and Mom talked about sending flowers) and she said something so very ugly about that, closing with, “I love you, you Moron.”
OK, I’d been upgraded to Moron from Misfit, which prefaced the first email, but then again, as I said, I realized full well I was dealing with someone who needed serious help of the kind I certainly wasn’t qualified to give them.
“What kind of a person is so hateful just because you’re happy?”
The same person, I thought, who was hateful whenever anyone was happy. When my brother and sister-in-law bought a house. When they expanded their family. She years ago had angst and anger over the fact that they used a diaper cream she couldn’t afford, and I actually listened to the rant for over twenty minutes on the phone.
I’m not making this up. Seriously. Although I could write it word for word as a psychotic character in a short story or novel and it would come out perfectly believable because there’s a certain element of the unbelievable in all good fiction, so she’d be a no-brainer to write about.
I got this “What kind of person is so hateful because you’re happy?” from several people today, people I could only have been so lucky to have been related to but no, I got the bad haircolor and the dreadlocks, instead.
“I don’t have any idea,” I said, and that’s the truest thing I can think of. I don’t know this person, I don’t understand this person, and frankly, I think this kind of instability is creeping me out, much like a Stephen King novel.
I quit reading those years ago. The story was always good, but nothing is worth being so wound up and scared you can’t sleep half the night. You reach a point you realize enough is enough, and you don’t even notice them when you go through the bookstore.
I waited a few hours, and left a voice mail. She should never contact me again. Frankly, it would have been nice if she’d stopped contacting me months ago, about the time she first contacted me to tell me never to contact her, which I hadn’t done anyway. It’s a ridiculous one-sided game of volleyball where she has to reach out every few months and make contact, say mean, stupid things, and dramatically exclaim, “Never contact me again!!” as if I’d contacted her at all. It’s like a movie, sort of….that one with Sharon Stone where she kept stalking Michael Douglas because he didn’t want her in his life, only she’d be Sharon and I’d be Michael (which is really weird, because had I been a boy, I was going to be named Michael Douglas, anyway).
She’s not even in touch with reality enough to realize that it was she who made contact. Repeatedly. Do not contact me again, I said. And I am removing you and your son as my beneficiaries. Not that I’m planning to kick the bucket any time soon, it’s just that at this point, not only do I not want that kind of ridiculousness in my life, I don’t want it within spitting distance of anything left after I’m gone. Not when there’s a world of great animal shelters out there who have homeless dogs to feed and cats to take care of. Maybe she doesn’t understand that she doesn’t have the right to harass me the way she does, but I certainly have the right to say I’m not going to put up with it.
So that’s that, and it’s not the greatest thing that could be and it’s not, really, anything I had hoped to see happen and wind up being the Blog Post Du Jour. What would have made more sense to me instead of her emails would have been, say, a little silver saucer descending from the sky and landing in the Park and Wait and having little green men climb out and offer Two For One Trips To Planet Xori or something.
If I have to see it in any light, I’ve really only got two perspectives at this point. The first is that whole Wizard of Oz visual I can’t get out of my head, i.e., “I’m going to get you, Madeleine, and your little dog Basil, too!” but which isn’t really disturbing, just sort of humorous in the way train wreck humor is humorous because getting a chuckle out of it beats the alternative of how painful it really is, and the second is the truth of another platitude that can’t honestly be disputed:
“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to keel over.”
She’s had herself on such a constant diet of it, it’s a wonder she can stand upright at all, and she’s still waiting for me to be the one to get sick.
I’m sorry her world is so small she doesn’t even realize how pointless of a wait she’s looking at.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get back to my boy toy.
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