Just wondering if anyone else has problems with family.
Cutting a very long story short - I relocated several years ago to look after my elderly mother (as full-time carer) near to family who had promised me all sorts of help with this. It turned out that I ended up doing 95% of it all myself. My dsis claimed that it was my choice and she was far too busy with 'her' family which quite clearly didn't include me and our mother. This continued for the next 7 years.
My mother passed away almost a year ago and shortly after this I had a major fall-out with my dsis after she sent me a long email telling me all my faults and basically what a bad person I am. I suffer from clinical depression which has caused me major problems over the years and one of the points in her email was how much she had tried to help me with this but in the end she said she just didn't understand it. Agreed, she did try and help on occasions, but being the cunning person that she is, she made sure that she every idea of help she came up with she would somehow make sure that it didn't work. For example, she would offer to look after our mother for a day to give me a break but would leave mum on her own all day saying that she was okay on her own and didn't need anyone with her. Basically we had a very different opinion on how much help our mother needed. She also made it clear in her email that my illness has been a big inconvenience to 'everyone in the family'.
So, following this email, which left me devastated, I decided to have no further dealings with her. Unfortunately, her children, aged late 30s, then decided not to have anything to do with me. There was no big argument between me and them, they just stopped contacting me, ignoring posts on facebook, one of them also ignoring my birthday despite the fact that I have remembered his and all his families'. I was very hurt by all of this as I have had several little squabbles with my dsis over the years -because she is a control freak and I don't like being told how to live my life-. She controls everyone's lives, her husband and her grown up kids and they all allow her to do it. Over the years I have never asked her children to take sides between us so I was very upset when they cut me off, especially when they hadn't even bothered to ask me my side of the story. On top of that, they have often fallen out with her too because of her controlling ways and always came running to me at these times.
Now, almost 12 months on, it still hurts although I have to say, not as much as it did. I realise now that I didn't know these people at all. I thought they would be concerned as to how I was getting on living alone in the house I shared with my mother but now I realise that I was probably expecting too much. By the way, we all live within 3 miles of each other. Also, I have other family members who live further away who I get on perfectly fine with so I'm hoping that it's not 'all my fault'.
I haven't bothered to try and fix this problem by speaking to them, mainly because I am so disgusted by their behaviour that I don't think I really want them in my life anymore after seeing their true colours. I guess I'm not looking for answers on how to solve this, just more interested if others have/had similar problems with so-called 'family'.