On 11/14/2014 Snowpuppy said: On 11/14/2014 hckynut said: If what you describe above constitutes dysfunctional families? Our family get-together years ago we never had anything or anyone that fit into the category. With many of my immediate family no longer with us, our holidays are much different now.
My mother had siblings that I did not like, but we did not associate with them much at all. They were in the upper social class and to them my mother was in a lower social class. My thoughts were that with her raising 4 of her kids in public housing projects? Guess they were ashamed of her and my feeling for them?
John, did they ever DO anything at all to help our your mom or did they just stand by, judge, criticize and ignore the issue?
One of my sisters criticized me for years when she would plan elaborate holiday dinners at her home 1200 miles away. I told her thank you but couldn't afford to attend. She never offered plane tickets or even Greyhound tickets that we would have gladly accepted. But she sure could criticize me for "not wanting to be a part of the family......and if you would just TRY harder!".
She hung up the phone on me one day and it's the last we ever heard from her years ago.
Life is far, far better for us now but I've never picked up the phone again.
They did absolutely nothing. My grandmother pretty much disowned my mother when she married my drunken father. We lived just across the river from her relatives and they were the wealthiest people in that city. In their social status they could not let anyone know the my lowly mother was related to them.
You would like to think that someone from that wealthy family would offer some help to my mother when my father left her with 4 kids to raise. Not a single penny ever came her way from any of them. She earned every cent needed to support us until we were old enough to work to help her get enough money together to put a down payment on a home of our own.
I was born in the public housing projects and I was almost 15 years old before we got enough money together to put a down payment on our own home. My oldest sister got married to a man in the Army Air Corps at age 17, so she was gone before I was old enough to even remember her living with us. It was pretty much myself and my 2 older sisters most of that time.
Started working at 8 years old and at 12 years old I was working 4 nights a week until 12:30am as a carhop at a drive-in restaurant. Only 1 day off a week as I worked Saturday and Sunday nights until 1:30am. Was 1951 and I was making over $100 per week working and most all of it went to my mother. Never a penny from the rich high society members of her family. She had 5 brothers and a sister and all buy 1 of them pretty much had nothing to do with her or us.
Unlike your sister, her brothers and sisters live just miles from where we grew up in public housing projects. My mother knew they would hang up on her so she never wasted time, or phone calls(we had a 40 call phone, that is if we had one at all)so there was no correspondence except for 1 brother, which also was eventually disowned because he married someone my grandmother did not give him her approval to marry.
My grandmother and my mother and her brothers and sister all came to the USA from Italy. There were, ahem, devout Catholics? Sure they were, but that meant nothing when it came to not claiming their children if they did not approve of whom they chose to marry.
As an adult I got to know some of them but by then I was pretty schooled in how real life worked. For me it was easy to understand how they deserted my mother and the only reason I even spoke to them was because my mother wanted me to do so. She forgave all of them for not recognizing her, or us, until we had our own home and I guess they felt we were closer to being respectable citizens worthy of them speaking to us.
One of her brothers even stood my mother up when she was in the hospital the last day of her life. She got all prettied up because he said he was coming to visit her. My sister did her hair up real nice and to me she looked beautiful. She waited and waited and waited and he never came. I was working night and had to go to work. My brother-in-law came to my house when I got home from work about 1:00am and told me my mother had died. It was Valentines Day of 1969.
When that brother died my sisters wanted me to sign a card they were sending along with flowers. I told them "NOPE", and told them not to dare put my name on anything connected to him. They did not live with my mother and I did till the day she died. I was the one with her while she was waiting for her brother to show up and there was absolutely no way I was going to acknowledge his death because I honestly could not have cared less for that man for what he did to his sister, my beloved mother on that Valentines Day.
I have only 2 of my oldest sisters left. My youngest of the sisters, she was less than 2 years older than myself, died of cancer at age 52 in 1989. My oldest sister lives in another state far away but we still stay in touch. My other sister lives less than 3 miles from us and we are as close as we both love each other very much. I see her and talk to her quite often, and she too is an animal lover. She has 3 horses and 1 Malamute and 2 felines in her brood, and at over 80 years old she still does all the work taking care of the horses/barns and so on.
Wish I knew what to say about your issue with your sister. All I know is I would have done the same as you, and that includes never picking up the phone to call her again. A person can do only so much and without a semblance of a connection with both sides? Will leave it at that, and my best to you.
hckynut(john)
Blogs & Forums
Forums
Blogs
