I’ve been on and off this thread and board for years now and wanted to post an update.
A quick recap is that my DSis died from mental health related issues then DF had a bad fall a few months later and never properly recovered, dying several years later. My “D”M caused a lot of extra stress on top of this with completely unrealistic demands, early morning and late night messages, lies and extra drama, to the point I got very ill myself with stress and related physical issues.
She’s also completely tight with money and expected me to cover all the travelling costs, hotel costs, food costs myself. She actually seemed to resent us spending any spare time away from them, and kept expecting me to be my Dad’s carer, although they had a really good package from the council.
My kids were still very young when all this started and I work too. Didn’t want to put Dad in a home (they were eligible for state funding for the whole thing), didn’t want to move somewhere less remote, but wanted me to throw my household under a bus to prop them up.
Any health issues I had or my remaining sister had (sister got cancer which fortunately was treatable) she was almost sneering about; nothing was allowed to take the spotlight off her and Dad.
She’d also been completely awful during my sister having cancer – she was dismissive initially, then, without asking my sister, called around relatives making out the cancer “wouldn’t respond to chemo”, which was a very selective way of putting it, and I had a very upset call from a relative who though my sister was terminally ill. When my sister went in for surgery she sent a message around on the day asking for us to go and see her, even although my sister had already said she wouldn’t be able to travel.
Anytime she wanted some extra attention Dad would have a bad turn, I grey rocked as much as I could but, after months and months of trying to keep a distance, finally blew up at her when she tried to ruin a family holiday with an invented crisis.
I eventually went NC with DM a few months before DF died, a bit more than a year ago.
I had hoped she might have considered why we’d ended up where we did, but around the time of the funeral, when I had some contact, she was back to the same old tricks of manipulating me into doing stuff I said I didn’t want to do, I got put in a position where I ended up having to pay for some things I really shouldn’t have and she told my sister she wasn’t intending to pay me back (I did get the money eventually).
My husband saw her to get the stuff Dad allegedly left me. The list was really vague and dated with a year (no day or month) after he wasn’t really able to make decisions. I wasn’t expecting a lot but got a box of random shit pertaining to one of Dad’s hobbies but without essential items that would mean it was useable to pursue the hobby – and one item of sentimental value. Plus some other crap that belonged to me in the first place.
A few days later I got a message off her on the only platform I hadn’t blocked her on saying she wanted me to get back in touch because of my sister’s cancer checkups so we could “work together to support her”, and that she hadn’t told my sister she was asking me this.
So basically using her old tricks around family illness to garner attention for herself, and definitely trying to create a situation, again, where I was the bad person for saying no.
She used to contact my deceased sister and wind her up, even although everyone else repeatedly asked her not to, and it’s just like she’s hellbent on repeating all these patterns over and over again. And removing the option of her contacting me is the only way to stop it.
Sorry this is long but just… I had to write it all down somewhere. Hope everyone else is doing ok, particularly those of you who have been here a while!