This Christmas I have been with my mum and her boyfriend, my younger sister and her family, nephew, niece, husband and my disabled brother. Mum and her boyfriend have just moved into a beautiful little house in a sleepy seaside town for their retirement. Its so peaceful and much more than I ever could have hoped for my mum. Thankfully her boyfriends divorce payout is providing her with the life she always deserved. My sister who I love dearly is so different from me. Her and her husbands total lack of common sense and social etiquette antagonizes me into someone I don't particularly like. They come out with so much nonsense about the world that I find myself biting my tongue until I feel like I could explode, which sometimes I do.
Visiting my sixty eight year old dad and his twenty seven year old boyfriend is challenging at the best of times but when you are also accompanied by your chav sister and brother-in-law, disabled brother and screaming nephew and niece it can make for a rather challenging environment. My sister and I have always bickered but when we are around my father it becomes worse. Its like we are competing for his attention which is beyond me because he has the attention span of a eight year old and she would always win anyway. My sister seems to have been brought up with a totally different vocabulary to me which relies heavily on phrases such as 'shut your mouth', 'thats gay' and 'yeah, whatever'. Normally I can muster up enough control to not react to her and her simplistic husbands comments but when I hear something which I find beyond ignorant I find myself speaking my mind. Maybe it doesn't even really matter but I hate the thought of her going about her daily life with ideas that seem like they have come fresh out of The Daily Mail, not even the Daily Mail, The Sun. (all tabloid newspapers written for the ignorant masses). Since serving up christmas dinner she has given me filthy looks and ignored me because I told her husband that his comment suggesting that Goldschlager, (a clear liqueur with very thin, yet visible flakes of gold leaf floating in it) caused small cuts in your throat as you drank it was an urban myth. He disagreed by telling me I was wrong and I graciously surrendered to his nonsense. This was somehow enough for me to get the cold shoulder from them both for the remainder of the day which was followed by a few bitchy comments during the gay dad visit. In fact as I write this now she is sat across from me half watching depressing soap operas on TV whilst throwing me the occasional dirty look. The nephew wasn't even allowed to say good night to me before going to bed.
I wish dearly that we could all get on like a regular family but ultimately I left this mess of a family when I was eighteen which has caused a constant feeling of guilt ever since. Despite no being their in person I have managed to put a great deal of long distance emotional support into my them over the years. My mother and brother have received the most of my attentions due to the fact that they needed the most help. I guess that this was the time I lost my sister a bit and she found her own way with the rather misguided support of our father and her chav friends. Basically I feel like such an outsider when Im with my sister, my dad and his much younger boyfriend. My sister and the boyfriend make no secret of the fact that their relationship together is better than anything my sister and I have had together and all I can think when Im around them is I wish just one person in this room had something funny or interesting to say.
As dad drove my brother and I back to mums he asked if it was strange coming back to the village I grew up in. I replied that it makes me feel pretty low because I remember being so deeply sad as a child. His reaction to this was to say that none of that matters anymore because things are better now. He then went on to talk about his favorite topic of conversation, his club promoting work. I just sat in the back seat and cried quietly as he talked. Thank god for my blog. Its so important for me to share this information with the blog because nobody really has the time to listen to it in the real world; unless they're being paid of course.
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