Sister is controlling and quite narcissistic in behaviours. There is no pleasing her; and her favourite tactic seems to be to do something unpleasant and accuse you of the very same thing, then declare she has no clue what I’m on about, I’m spoiling for a fight, I always see the bad in her etc when she is really doing nothing wrong. She likes to be the victim and the one who has been wronged. For a long time I blamed myself but I don’t so much anymore now other relatives in the family can see it for what it is. I just have a hard time accepting she won’t change no matter how much I want things to be different.
We have a baby niece who we have only seen a handful of times, again not through lack of trying but my sister has actually used DN as a bit of a bargaining chip before. Whenever we have seen her she’s passively aggressively talked through the baby, to the effect of ‘oh you barely know these people, don’t you?’
We are making our Christmas plans and some of the festive period will involve visiting in laws who live about 50 miles away. My sister and parents are in the same town as we are. I don’t know whether I should try and drop in on sister to see my niece on Christmas Day, or not. The baby won’t know it’s Christmas and my sister’s actions make it quite clear we aren’t welcome there, yet if we don’t go there will be a pantomime about us not being worthy enough to be in DN and their life because we didn’t go over on the day. We have bought DN a lovely, colourful educational toy which we will obviously make sure she gets whether or not we go. To top things off they have two dogs, one of which is an XL bully which makes me all the more nervous and just get mocked for being flinching around it.
Should we ‘drop in’ so she can’t say we didn’t bother, or just swerve it and deal with the fallout? I want to do the latter but also don’t want to be mean spirited given it’s Christmas.