My brother and sister are like nitro and glycerine. You can figure out why close proximity would be an issue. She's clinically insane and on disability, and he's an angry, pathological control freak and has checked out of that relationship.
Her phone calls (because he never calls her) typically involve him insulting her and eventually hanging up. She is unfazed by this behavior. For this, I have to thank Abbott Labs and Roche Pharmaceuticals.
My sister is married to someone who is also on disability, and they live about 250 miles away in rural Missouri and cannot easily afford the gas to travel to/from St. Louis. They have one reliable vehicle, but that's not the problem. The problem is they seem to be surgically grafted to each other, as hubby is highly resistant to being apart from wifey for any length of time. The only way the two of them can come to St. Louis together is to stay in a hotel, cuz my brother doesn't want them in his house, and hubby is a little too creepy for me to be comfortable with him in my house.
So they must stay in a motel.
But they can't afford to.
But my sister
can visit by herself and stay with me.
But they can't be apart.
But they can't afford a motel.
But they can't stay at my house together.
But she
can by herself.
But they can't be apart.
Yadda...
Last summer, she was strapped financially and missed meeting our niece at the huge family get-together, which was for the expressed purpose of meeting our newest family member. So after several indecisive months later, and realizing the trip wouldn't work financially with the two of them, a decision was made: my sister and her dear hubby would be surgically separated and she would come to St. Louis around the holidays to meet her niece.
The efforts that I went to to make this happen so that she and my brother wouldn't have to meet was delicately and judiciously handled by yours truly.
(Not that the holidays didn't suck royally in spite of all my machinations.)Well, as it so happens, sis became ill. Some bout of flu, including fever and congestion. She had to be on an inhaler and antibiotics and had to regretfully postpone the trip. A couple of weeks later, she phoned my brother and informed him she would try again for our niece's first birthday in February. That hit a snag.
Why, you ask?
Hubby, who barely registers 5-feet-tall, has a lifelong dream to learn bullriding.
Yep. Bullriding.
There is some rodeo workshop that meets once a month in various cities and Kansas City is the closest destination. So that is where they will be the same weekend as our niece's first birthday. My sister and her mother-in-law simply MUST accompany this budding soon-to-be-stomped-into-a-bloody-pulp cowboy. If they don't, it will "crush his heart".
Personally, I'm betting the bull will take care of that.
Of course, this choice will further anger the angry enigma, wrapped in an angry riddle that is my brother. Actually, it won't anger him so much as add to his arsenal of anger and guilt-laden blow darts of death.
So... my sister is yet to meet her niece, who will soon be 11 months old. Maybe by the time the child graduates high school, my sister might manage to stop by and say "Howdy, little lady. Ahm yer aiynt!" Then again, if by the time President's Day rolls around, my sister is dubbed the Widder Jones, it might be sooner than that.
Stand bah yer may-annn, sis.
