…it’s time for some chest-clearing about history. My personal history, that is.
My mother died a couple of years ago. I hadn’t spoken to her for some months.
The reason why was because at a time when it was nearly impossible to find a place to live that a) we could afford and b) was big enough for us, she evicted us from the house we had been renting from her (another way of saying “we were paying her mortgage”) for something like 15 years, and had spent a ton of money on with intent to buy it.
Of course none of this was contractural; it was a mutual agreement that we would, eventually, buy the house, and it absolved her of the need to clean everything out and make the house ready to sell. Though to be honest, we really couldn’t afford to buy the house, but we were trying to find a way to do that. The point was that we were trying to get Mom into a place that was small enough for her to manage (she was complaining about the house being too big, and 4 bedrooms/3 bathrooms is pretty damn big when you’re one elderly person with health issues) and trying to take care of the problems she was leaving behind in doing so.
So in 2022, up pops my sister, who lives in New York State, saying she and her husband were wanting to move to Indiana for various reasons including less snow and less expensive and so forth. They wanted to buy the house from Mom and also wanted to have Mom come and live with them in the mini-apartment in the back, to save on retirement community costs for Mom.
This all sounded reasonable to my wife and me, so we started looking for another place to live. (It should be noted that a friend of ours was renting our condo from us at the time, so moving back to the condo wasn’t top of the list.)
So Mom started bugging the hell out of us about when we were going to move, how was the house search going, your sister wants to move back before winter, blah de blah de blah. I got sick and tired of it and stopped talking to her.
She had a lawyer write us a letter telling us we were evicted as of date x.
We had a lawyer write right back telling her lawyer that we would be happy to leave by date x+15 and oh by the way, she owes us $7,500 in amortized improvement expenses from the last 15 years we had lived in her house.
There was some fighting back and forth but Mom capitulated and we did indeed move out (back into our condo, displacing our tenant, who managed to find a place right down the street that had happened to become open just at the right time).
Then come to find out my sister never actually intended to move back here and it was all a ploy to force us out of the house so it could be sold and Mom could bank the profit. And it did sell, almost immediately, for probably twice what I charitably think it was worth.
I never spoke to my mother again. She died the next January. I refused calls from my sister and my nephew because I was JUST THAT FUCKING ANGRY. And I did not attend the funeral. Haven’t been to the grave. Don’t fucking care.
So I don’t speak to my immediate family anymore. Nor to my cousins on my mother’s side, who were assholes about the whole thing.
This post is in the way of getting my side of the story out there. I don’t give a damn if they ever read this or not, but what I can tell you is that they can all take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut before I will ever speak to any of them again. In Jewish parlance, they are dead to me.
Now my Dad’s family have all been neutral and I don’t think they actually know what was really going on. Well, that’s what was going on, if any of my cousins see this.
There’s a point where the Good L-rd’s admonition to honor one’s father and mother sort of goes down the tubes. Because the fact is, if your parents don’t honor you, there’s no reason to honor them in return. I imagine my Dad was rolling in his grave over all of this, but it is what it is.
In due time, I will go to my grave satisfied that I fulfilled my duty as a son so long as my mother fulfilled her duty as my mother. My hands are clean. So my mother’s family who continually try to communicate with me and tell me how horrible I am as a son to have treated my dying mother that way can all go fuck themselves.
In particular, my sister can fuck off with the emailed birthday greetings every year. I don’t block her outright because I’m being the bigger person, but also because I need the occasional reminder of how she betrayed her own brother. I just toss her messages in the trash unread. (I know they’re birthday greetings because they come on my birthday.)
The main problem with family is you can’t choose them. My Dad’s family, they’re the best. My Mom’s family, though…I should have taken a cue from the fact that we never, ever had anything to do with them when I was growing up. Just a bunch of assholes, up to and including my mother and sister. Fuck them all.
Now I can get on with the holiday season.
