The Warm Fuzzies of Family

I went grocery shopping tonight and ran into my sister while I was in the store. Let me back up a few steps to say that she dropped over the kids' gifts today. Uh huh ... she called our house from her cell phone while in her car and told my son to come outside to get their gifts. She didn't bother to pop in the house for a visit, didn't bother to come in and spend some time just talking, nope, she stayed in her car and phoned the house from my drive-way.

So, I ran into her while grocery shopping. As per usual her mouth was running a mile a minute about herself. I tried to tell her about my worries about upcoming tests but she just talked straight over me as if she didn't hear me. Her next story was about a 41 year old man with 4 kids who was feeling perfectly fine up until this month and now he's dying and they don't think he'll make it until February. Oh yes, and a friend of hers who has something wrong with her liver and they don't think she's going to make it. The subject switched back to herself. I might as well have not been there. I decided at that point to just walk away. I didn't say bye, I didn't say anything, just left. I ran into another relative of mine in the same store so stopped to talk to her for awhile. I noticed she hadn't stopped to talk to my sister either.

I felt two emotions after this encounter ... hurt and anger. I'm so sick of my sister's behavior. There's no point making the suggestion that I need to talk to her about our communication problem and blah blah blah. She wouldn't listen anyway. I'm so tired of having to deal with this woman. I'm tired of being invisible. I'm tired of hearing her mouth prattle on non-stop about herself. I'm just plain tired. It's awful to feel that way about family but that's my reality. That's the honesty of my reaction.

In other news, I stuck to my smoking schedule. Up to this point I've had 18 smokes today. Because I'm so worked up I'm going to have the 19th before going to bed. Tomorrow I was be determined to drop that one cigarette and get it down to 18. Well, I think I'll go do that now then go to bed, I'm wiped.