I Now Pronounce You

WARNING; This blog post is me opening up with both barrels about something I do not ever write about. If you aren’t in the mood for double barreled bile spewing, please stop reading now. Tomorrow I will write something cute. Thank you.

Recently, a good friend of mine said that what he likes about me is that I am accountable. That when I say or do something wrong, I will be the first to say so. Honestly, I don’t know that anyone can pay me a higher compliment. If there is one thing that I take pride in, it is that if nothing else, I am fully accountable for my actions.

When he said this to me, I responded that I learned it by process of elimination; having never really seen it, I had to figure out what it was on my own. I did so by figuring out what it was that I saw (or rather, didn’t see) in my parents that drove me so nuts and made it harder and harder for me to like them as I got older. What I realized was that neither my mother, my step dad, nor my father, ever took responsibility for a damned thing. They were both, however, excellent at casting a wide net for blame, which of course goes hand in hand with a lack of accountability.

For example; When my younger brother was a child he found my step father’s hand gun. It was “well hidden” between the mattress and the box spring of their marital bed, so how could any kid find it? This, it was decided, was my fault. Of course it was…I had “let him find it”, so I was too blame for the terrifying reality of what almost happened.

This would be the norm for most of my life; being blamed for things that parents are supposed to be doing because at that time my ‘rents were too miserable to do anything on their own. My step father terrorized the house with mood swings and screaming, my mother popped pills and went to bed for her “migraines” and my sister, brother, and I were to blame for anything and everything under the sun. Of course, as the oldest, most of it fell to me. A good chunk of the rest fell to Kid Brother. Very very little ever made it all the way down to Kid Sister.

So yeah, accountability gets to me. On both ends. A lack of accountability will send me in to a rage…I can’t handle it. On the other hand, I respect nothing more than a person that can look me right in the eye and say “I was wrong”. Nothing.

Which leads me to the one person that I haven’t really ever written about on this site.

Kid Sister.

My sister, the youngest, is the least accountable person I know. It’s not even close, folks. Her ability to deflect responsibility is like a perfected art form. She is the Michael Jordan of it, and of generally being a pain in the ass. She makes demands of everyone, will throw fits, manipulates situations to get what wants, and the whole time will look you right in the eye and deny it. Kid Sister will also not hesitate for a second to tell you why it is exactly, that you’re to blame and she’s pissed off at you. As I’ve gotten older, it gets harder and harder for me to even be in a room with her. The only thing that gave me any pause was I that used to feel bad for her because I could see all of the reasons she had become the way she is in her childhood. She was all but destined to go through a rough patch, which she most certainly did. I lost that however, when she had a baby* and instead of getting better, she got worse.

Now, she lives right next door to my mother and her husband and does nothing ( and I mean nothing) on her own. Her husband works two jobs as a chef. Kid Sister does nothing. She sits around popping pills, dumping her daughter on my mother, and eating. In essence and in reality, she does absolutely nothing. But she will tell you all the time how hard it is…she actually said this to my Sister in Law and Kid Brother when they asked her why doesn’t work. She said to them that she’s got a child…

Kid Brother and his wife both work full time. They have 3 kids. The balls it takes, I tell ya….

And the pill popping?

My parents actually have a lock box for my mother’s prescriptions because Kid Sister will take them without batting an eye. This has been going on for years…years! She’s also done this to my sister-in-law right after she had a baby. I mean, who does that? Hell she’s done it at damn near every house I’ve ever brought her to and every house she’s ever been in and yet…

She will look you right in the eye and say “I don’t know what happened to those (insertdrugnamehere) or why you just filled it this morning and it’s 10 short. The pharmacist must have miscounted.”**

Pharmacists being so irresponsible and all. But yet, I’ve heard that more times than I can count.

Talk about your chickens coming home to roost…

So imagine my shock and surprise when Kid Brother informed me that Step Dad actually said to him “I know that this is the way it is because of how I was when she was younger”. In that moment, 25+ years of frustration literally eased up. Finally, someone had said it…that there was a cause and effect in those years and one of them finally said, out loud, “I did this”.

It dumbfounded me because for so many years, Kid Sister was a mess and no one wanted to talk about why. Well, no one but me and Kid Brother. It was not a welcomed conversation topic, and it actually almost cost me my relationship with my mother…in many ways, it did cost me that. At any rate, in and out of rehabs she’d go; she’d check in, flunk a drug test a few weeks later, deny that she had done any drugs in the facility, say the test was wrong, and go to another one to repeat the whole process again. At some point she got herself together enough to wind up back at home only to wear out her welcome and call me asking if she could come to DC and live with me.

Saying “yes” is something I regret to this day. Being face to face with someone who is so literally a train wreck, living in your house? She ran up bills. She got drunk and high and made passes at my friends. She stole prescriptions from people I knew. It was too much. Of course, when I told my parents that she couldn’t stay with me any longer, they wanted to blame everyone from me to my girlfriend for making it “too hard” for her.

That marked the beginning of a long period of silence between me and the ‘rents.

Over the last few years, Mom, Step Dad and I, well, we’ve started mending fences. The Old Man and I did this years and years ago, as I’ve said before but a lot of the fall out with Mom and SD didn’t come out until years and years later. So during the time that I’ve been in DC, we haven’t been all that close. I’ve avoided holidays like a coward because I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to deal with them all at once in that headspace. Hell, in any headspace.

This year, however, I’ve decided that I’m not ducking anything. I’m going to Vermont for Thanksgiving to see my ‘rents, my sister and my niece. I have, what? Two months to get myself mentally prepared for this, and I figure I can do it. I’ve even gotten pointers from Kid Brother, who has confirmed for me that she is a bigger pain in the ass than you could ever imagine these days, and you just have to remember to breath and try not to lose it.

Got it. Remember to breath, try not to lose it. Maybe see if I can get the combination to the lock box full o’ pills.

Thank you for allowing me to rant. I feel much better now, as this isn’t something I talk that much about, let alone write about. Tomorrow, back to baseball, broken hearts, guitars, and sex.

*Kid Brother and his wife had their first baby, Cameron, while Kid Sister was living in DC. Shortly thereafter, she “accidentally” got pregnant. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that for the first time in her life there was something else prying attention away from her I’m sure…

Of course, when Kid Brother and his wife got pregnant again with Braelyn…

Well, one guess.

She’s a peach, lemme tell ya.

**The great irony of the lock box story is that my Step Dad, will buy a sixer of some microbrew, and my sister and mom will give him a hard time because “he drinks too much”. I never thought I’d ever feel bad for the guy…but these days, I do.