She is 5 years older and we had a poisonous, bullying mother who lived in victimhood. My sister would side with my mother to gang up on me, constantly humiliating me and thwarting anything I enjoyed. I wasn’t allowed friends (I didn’t want to bring anyone to my home anyway).
Recently when I was with my sister, brother-in-law and niece she asked if I had ever seen Oasis in concert as there was a news article about them and she knows I saw a lot of live music as a teen. When I was 15, all my friends had planned to go to the big concert they were playing. I was away staying with my aunt and uncle and my friend called me to see if I was coming (this was mid 1990s). I thought I had savings in a pot in my bedroom but couldn’t remember (I usually kept my savings there because I knew if I took them on trips I would spend them). I phoned my house to ask my sister to check if I had money in my pot to go to the concert and she shrieked down the phone and screamed that I was a selfish bitch and we didn’t have any money at the moment and my mother was throwing up blood from the worry about money. I apologised and said I wasn’t asking for money, I was asking her to check my own money and her and my mother could use that money if they returned it before I got home and could pay my friend back. She screamed I was a selfish bitch and hung up. I phoned again in the evening and she picked up and I said I wanted to check if I had the money and she screamed she’d checked and I didn’t have the money and how dare I be such a selfish bitch. I got home over a week later and checked my pot and I had the money in it.
She also told me that she makes sure no one talks about appearances in her family. Which is rich because all she has ever done is slate my appearance. Making fun of my size when I was a kid, telling my mother I was anorexic and how dare I let her son see me like that when I lost weight on Ozempic a few years ago, reporting to my mother what I was wearing as a teenager and saying to her son, in front of me, how pathetic it was that people are so vain that they would put a hole through their body to have earrings (something she would never say in front of another relative that she is per formatively delightful in front of). She’s also pulled her ears out to make fun of her in laws saying they have big ears, made mean comments about my jewish friend who wanted to go to drama school, saying the only thing she could play was Anne Frank, saying she felt sorry for various teenagers we know for wearing make up. I bought a pair of funky mini mouse style polka dot heels when I was 20 and she went mad saying they were slutty (non of her business) and then I came home and she was prancing around trying them on.
I hate going to her house and don’t go anymore. I went a lot during my 30s to help with childcare when she went back to work and she used it to correct and neg me the whole time and scream at me, under the guise of being a caring liberal. Once it was hot and it looked like my niece was wearing two t-shirts. I pulled back the collar an inch and said ‘why are you wearing two T-shirts, you must be boiling’ before I realised the second one was a crop top. My sister pulled me aside and screamed at me for being inappropriate and violating her child’s physical boundaries and body autonomy and said I had to apologise straight away.
I have a second cousin on the coast and my sister went there one summer as a teen. My cousin was out smoking pot and snogging boys and my sister was there. My sister came home (aged 17) and told my mother and they both talked about what a slut my cousin is and that she was a drug addict. Then my cousin got pregnant at 19 and my sister screamed at me that I was loving it because I was such a bitch and she was going to have to get the train down there and make sure my cousin had an abortion because she was always a slut and she and my mother knew she would get pregnant early. My cousin lost the pregnancy and had a baby a few years later and my sister went to visit and my cousin said her husband had been cheating on her but she didn’t want anyone to know. My sister came back and told my mother immediately. My cousin later trained as a nurse and my sister repeatedly made fun of her saying ‘she’s just a nurse’. My cousin had 2 more kids with big gaps and her final birth was really difficult. My sister by then had her own kid. She got the train down there and turned up at the hospital uninvited to save the day and get involved. And the rest of the family were like how nice she was to do that.
She’s cut me off from my niece because last year for the first time in 40 years I told her to mind her own business about my life and that I think things about how she conducts herself, treats people, behaves in relationship, approaches her health and appearance and raises her kids but I don’t say anything because I don’t know her circumstances and it’s none of my business. Since then she’s stopped me and my niece writing to each other (which I’ve done since my niece was born) and has gone out of her way to ensure I have no contact with her daughter but thinks I don’t know this as she always has an excuse. But I am respecting her boundaries and am not going to use my niece as a weapon by continuing to write letters, engineering ways to see her.
My other sister lives abroad and is coming over in a month with her kids. She had an argument with my older sister last time she was over. My sister has now arranged to come over to my mother’s to see my sister’s kids when my sister is away one weekend, without even asking my sister. Everyone has to tiptoe around her and respect her boundaries but she does what she wants and doesn’t respect anyone else’s.
Also, she had cancer quite a few years ago and it was awful. If I could have had it for her and saved her and her kids the pain and stress I would have but I can’t. She is fully recovered but now uses this as a manipulation technique. Whenever anyone calls her on her bad behaviour or disagrees she starts fake crying saying she’s trying to do her best and doesn’t know how much longer she’s got and if I can’t accept that she had cancer and will die then I’m a bad person.
But to extended relatives and friends she’s delightfully charming but it’s all such BS. I want to tell her about the concert ticket and all the things I remember she did to be really cruel and bully me as a kid but then I will be meeting hate with hate and she will deny it/conveniently have forgotten.