Bad relationship outcomes weren't just limited in this last year to my everyday colleagues. Family issues continue and as of this writing I am alienated from both my mother and brother. My mother has told my son I am dead and, despite discussions with both Austin and my father and my brother, she is absolutely unrelenting in stating that she will not ever mend the fences with me.
It has been over a year and at this point I have been separated enough from her and the negativeness that I don't regard it much. It concerns me that there is a constant strain in the family. I have been fortunate enough to keep in contact with aunts and uncles and cousins. I have not gone into detail about what actually transpired conversationally between my mother and I in that last blowout. I maintain that it was between the two of us and didn't involve anyone else in the family. Unfortunately, she has decided that she needs to tell her side of things and I am left not defending myself. I don't need to. It is what it is. I think she is happy having me out of her life. She didn't want me in the first place, so this is a nice way for her to have a new beginning in the last part of her life. She is still, by all accounts, an unhappy person, but I don't have to be a part of that anymore. I no longer have to worry about pleasing her. I am sad sometimes and feel a lot rejected, especially in family related things that I am not allowed to attend. Rather, I said she can go and I will be absent as a nod to her old age. Let her be happy. She has spent most of her life unhappy and damaged. Anyone deserves to life you life happily as much as you can.
My brother is another story with a decidedly different outcome.
On again, off again. He didn't have anything to do with me because he was angry that I just didn't let my mother's words and actions just go last summer. As usual, he operated upon HIS truths and beliefs and didn't bother to get all of his facts straight. At Christmas he did send a text (I was home by myself during Christmas as I had blood clots as a result of my second knee surgery in early December.) He made an attempt to talk deep brains with me through text messaging and some other telephone conversations. The truth of the matter is that I don't much care to talk to him even when we are talking. Why? He is self oriented and has an inability to settle on what the truth is. I have heard so many versions of things that happened to him/us as children that I can't believe anything he says. He accused me of having no boundaries when it comes to sharing information, but in reality, he has forced his inconvenient truths on me numerous times despite the fact that I have told him over and over I was not interested. He doesn't care. It usually is all about him, period. He will not let go of the past and seems so focused on wanting to expose ugly things. At this stage of my life I don't see the point. Why confront people with these accusations? What possible good could come from it? Apparently, he doesn't care. He gets focused on his needs, and then it is all over. He has so many various lying personas that I never know who I am talking to. And there is no such thing as a conversation in which he isn't the center of some sort of problem, and then that inevitably leads back to the childhood crap. How much of that do you have to hear?
He is just a fucked up person and I feel sorry for him in a lot of ways, and I don't feel sorry for him in a lot of ways. He and mom are both cut out of the same bolt of cloth. They have memories like elephants and any transgression goes into the hopper of things-to-hold-against-you-forever. They both constantly bring up incidents from the past, but my brother has so embellished them that you almost want to believe him since he has such precise detail. But therein lies the rub. Too many precise details, and then too many changes to these stories. It is interesting that I am three years older than he, yet I have virtually no memory of these incidents and certainly do not have the details ready to be reeled out at any suggestion. My conclusion is that he absolutely believes all the things he says when he says them. He has convinced himself. I am NOT convinced, and now after a lifetime of these stories, I doubt the veracity of most of them. At one point there might have been a kernel of truth to them. But over time these stories have warped into something that is hard to believe. He just doesn't have any credibility with me anymore. Not that he really ever did, but now I think it is terminal and I don't see him changing much.
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