Many readers discuss the wrenching decision to cut off a family member for good:
My mother is a borderline personality. She sees people as either wholly evil or wholly saintly, and her views can switch like lightning. Her rage is terrifying, unpredictable, and targeted, à la Mommie Dearest. After yet another very difficult Thanksgiving, I decided I was going to “divorce” her, since all the years and all the other techniques I had tried hadn’t eliminated the abuse.
The only complication has been her relationship with my siblings; she is the only topic my sisters and I cannot speak frankly about. They not only tolerate but refuse to acknowledge behavior that they would label domestic abuse if our significant others did it. Our mother married a manic-depressive man who also refuses to acknowledge his own disorder and take prescribed treatment. At what point does one decide that the mentally ill do not deserve the position of power they’ve taken for themselves?
Another reader:
Just today I had a conversation with a coworker about this very same issue. We both have sisters who are (or have been) in desperate need of help. In my case, one of my sisters developed some mental health issues that prevented her from being able to maintain a job.
She was never out of control or completely dysfunctional; she just found it impossible to keep a job. As a result, she struggled financially for years. Our parents helped her out for some time, largely because my mother needed to know that her grandchild – my sister’s daughter – always had a roof over her head. When that grandchild turned 18 and moved out, our mother no longer needed to help. We made one last-ditch effort to reach out to my sister as a family and she bit our mother’s head off, blaming all of her troubles on our her.
After our last effort failed, my sister moved out-of-state. The family has had almost nothing to do with her since. I think every once in a while about reaching out to her, to make sure she’s okay, but then I think of what the last 30 years have been like – again, nothing that’s really, really bad, but just bad enough – and I don’t reach out. Why should I open up myself and maybe the rest of the family to all of that again?
Another:
I won’t get too detailed because I doubt you want to read a ridiculously long email, but in short, she forged a document or two, manipulated the family court system – with which she was very familiar, having worked as a sort of social worker in the county courts – and wove a web of lies in an effort to gain primary custody of my 10-year-old sister and to extract maximum financial pain from my disabled father. This was an extremely difficult time, as I was 17, applying for college (as the first in the family to go), and not mature enough to deal with the almost sociopathic way that my own mother just invented memories – both recent and not-so-recent – out of thin air to justify her actions.
Bottom line: you just can’t get over some stuff people do. Especially when they not only do really bad things but never admit to having done anything wrong – and then insist that you are the bad person for not agreeing. In the end, I couldn’t have that sort of poison in my life, so I had to make a choice if I was to ever have healthy relationships and a healthy psyche.
Another:
I was adopted as an infant. The emphasis on blood kin is perplexing to me even now that I have a biological child, because for most of my life family has been other than biological in nature. Perhaps the blood fixation is simply a human prejudice.
That said: Who cares? If someone is dangerous, indifferent or simply too big of a pain in the ass to engage with regularly, why does it make a difference if they are family? You wouldn’t, I would hope, put up with such nonsense from people who weren’t related to you, right?
The Dish 