I think the time has come to cut ties with my DS. I've been awake for much of the past night worrying about it. It seems so final and so sad. She's my only sibling and my parents died a few years ago. She's the only link to my childhood and past and I feel grief-stricken to think of severing contact, but I don't think I can take much more.
Some background. I'm the oldest by two years. We had a stable upbringing together in a polite sort of family where, even when people disagreed or were upset with each other, they didn't resort to insults or name-calling or hurtful behaviour. My sister and I were never very close. I've searched time and time again for something that happened in our childhood to explain it, but I can't find anything. She has occasionally said that she hated being the little sister. There's nothing I can do about our birth order: I had no control over it. We are different personalities and I suspect she's never really liked me. I feel full of goodwill for her but she's never seemed to feel that way about me. I don't seem to have problems making friends and feeling close to other women and I feel gutted that I can't be friends with my sister.
She's had a nice life viewed from the outside, she's been married, has children and a nice home and steady job, but she doesn't seem like a happy person. She doesn't seem to want to talk about it so we don't go there. We tried to work together to support our elderly parents but whatever I did or suggested was never enough or wrong, often for reasons I could have had no knowledge of without her telling me. We struggled through and made the end of their lives as easy as possible, but I think the experience caused more damage.
That was a few years ago and now we're both getting older and any hopes I had that we would mellow and be able to get over whatever it is between us have faded. She and her husband visited us last summer and there was an uncomfortable atmosphere. I tried to be relaxed and welcoming but my partner observed how angry she was with me: how the volume of her voice went up and she'd jab her finger at me over minor things. He said to me that she was behaving like someone looking for a fight. The more I danced around her, the worse it got. Her husband is a very quiet man who just eats and drinks and smiles politely and seems to me not to want to be involved. I don't blame him.
For the past year we haven't seen each other, partly because I feel quite nervous about being around her. We've talked on the phone every few weeks and I've tried very hard to do a lot of listening and limit my talking, because anything I say seems to wind her up. Earlier this year she started putting the phone down on me if I said anything she didn't agree with, so I resorted to email to stay in touch. But now she's become abusive even on email.
In recent weeks there has been an issue with an elderly family friend who lives quite close to my sister but a long way from me. My sister has stepped in to help. I've tried to support from 300 miles away but she has become steadily more resentful and abusive to me. Everything I say or do, no matter how carefully I phrase it, causes offence. I have almost daily emails telling me that I'm stupid, useless, warped (that was a weird one), cold, disapproving, delusional, out-of-touch, living in a dream world, fat, a millstone around her neck... In some ways it feels like a toddler throwing insults at me randomly, with the intention of causing hurt. I know that when people behave like this it's sometimes because they're hurting, but I can't even ask if she's okay: when I've said I was concerned for her and was she all right she wrote back scathingly, telling me she didn't want my fake concern.
Over the years I've asked on several occasions if she'd like to see if talking to a third party (a family therapist probably) would help us understand each other better. She was furious with me for that. I've also asked her outright what's going on. She's says it's the fact that I can't see what the problem is that's the problem. She's clearly increasingly angry with me and I still, after years of reflection, have no idea what it's about. I sometimes wonder if it's the fact that I exist that's the issue — in which case cutting contact may be the best thing for us both. I still, even knowing this, feel devastated.