A back story is warranted. Said sister has had a drug/personality disorder problem since her early adolescence. She went through a couple of marriages, one of which was a jailhouse wedding, while both parties were doing time for armed robbery. When she was out of jail, she tortured our mother by alternatively begging and then threatening mom for money. Always $20, and always for drugs.
When I got married, during our rehearsal dinner, said sister and her "friend" broke into my parents house and stole money, checks and jewelry.
Once my parents passed away, and after the sister got out of jail for the last time, it was now my turn to watch over her. Needless to say, her time with me could be characterized as tough love, but minus the love part. I forced her in any way I could to be as self sufficient as possible and maybe make some positive choices in her usual cork-in-a-stream lifestyle. The end result was her spending almost a year in a local homeless shelter until the shelter's social workers managed to get her signed up for SSI disability payments.
That SSI allowed her to have and maintain a small apartment at a local low income complex. Sounds great, until she let some low-life hang out in her apartment (drugs again) with the result that her apartment became infested with bed bugs. Around this time, her already frail health took a major turn for the worst, as her COPD prevented her from navigating the single flight of stairs to get into and out of her infested apartment. Rescue was called, and she was taken to the hospital for what would become an extended stay in intensive care, rehab, and ultimately an assisted living facility. When her abandoned apartment was finally cleaned out, we lost a lot of bedbug-infested family keepsakes that she had managed to take from our parent's house.
So now sister is a resident of a fairly nice assisted living facility that is thankfully paid for in full by SSI and Medicare/Medicade. She has been on hospice for over a year now as her COPD has basically rendered her bed bound and almost helpless.
So this brings us to the 2017 holiday season. Sister calls several times every week on the phone I bought her (service through Life Link) to ask for things and to tell me how shitty she feels. She has recently escalated her requests because it's Xmas. And here I sit trying to be gracious to a person that has never done anything for anyone else.
Anything I do for her is because I am trying to be compassionate to a very unfortunate human being. It has nothing to do with being related to her. Both of us were adopted, and by the luck of the draw, she and I were thrown together and raised by the same family. We are certainly a case example for nature v. nuture. I'm not saying I didn't and don't have my issues, but I have managed to not spend almost 20 years behind bars. And with that said, every once-in-a-while I need to tamp down the resentment and memories of how cruelly she has treated my entire family.
A lot of these emotions are tied into the general expectations that come with this time of the year. Hopefully, with the New Year on the horizon, I can once again help sister out with a feeling of basic compassion without the deep down resentment.
Yeah, right.
