Stranger in a familiar land

I’ll be the first to admit: I don’t go over to my parents’ house as often as I should. Once a week for laundry and watching Project Runway and maybe dinner if we can swing it. I mean, we’re moving in right next door, so we’ll theoretically be there more often soon, right?
Well, maybe not. Apparently, visiting Mom whenever I get the chance and trying to get her to go to the doctor when she’s been sick for over a week and not going along to the dog training classes for her new service puppy qualifies as being “disrespectful” according to my little sister’s out-of-the-blue texts this afternoon. No warning, no prior complaints of lack of respect from her, but now it appears I’ve been treating Mom so poorly that sis “can’t watch” much longer. What. The. Actual. Fuck.
Never mind that our brother is in a constant state of getting himself arrested, lying to Moms face, bringing unsavory individuals into Mom’s home…I could go on, but that’s a blog for another day. Suffice it to say, I’ve suddenly been blacklisted in my parents’ house and I have no idea where this is coming from.
My sister has made her…distaste, let’s say…for my husband known for quite some time. She doesn’t like him yelling at the dog who jumps up on him and chews on his arm, and rather than be rational about it, she blows up. He doesn’t hit the dog, doesn’t make sudden angry movements. He yelled. And when he was instructed not to yell anymore, he stopped. But I guess not praising the dog when he didn’t know that praising was part of the training is “disrespectful.” We’re supposed to know the rules even though we didn’t even know the new training was going on until last Friday. And the few rules we were taught on Friday, we followed. But no, we are apparently not treating Mom right by not knowing how to train the dog.
There’s gotta be something else going on, something underlying. The dog training thing can’t seriously be the straw that broke the camel’s back unless there was a fucking crapton of straw piled up. If our brother can be the Grand Poo-bah of Fuckups that he is without repercussions or consequences, there has to be something that I’m missing.
I’m just too pissed to ask what it is without making things worse right now. I can’t be trusted to use my words in a productive manner until I’ve had a chance to calm down.
I haven’t broken the law. I haven’t brought a criminal to have dinner with Mom and the family, lied about still associating with said criminal, then gotten Mom involved in the legal ramifications of hanging out with said criminal. But I’ve been “disrespectful.”
Why the double standard? Why does our brother get away with his bullshit when I am living a responsible life and not getting Mom caught up in drama that only serves to further stress her out?
Okay, I guess I’ll go over it in this blog today. Why not? I’m venting familial frustrations, might as well go all out.
So if I were to list his transgressions here, the Web would run out of memory for it. He has been the playing the victim in his self-destructive actions for years, and he’s been pulling Mom into his insanity–both figurative and literal–for years as well. Don’t get me wrong; I love my brother, but I can’t condone or enable his actions any longer. He. Doesn’t. Learn. He just doesn’t. I don’t think he really wants to. Why bother learning from your “mistakes” when they’re 100% forgiven and forgotten? Clean slate #72. Time to fuck up again.
Me? I try to learn from my errors. I take my meds for the most part. I take responsibility when I forget or run out and I get a little “off.” I don’t go playing the blame game, sidestepping any true accountability. I have never been in trouble with the law, never gotten arrested, and the few times I ended up in the wrong crowd, I’ve extracted myself from the situation without getting my family involved in my mistakes. But no, I’m the disrespectful one.
I’ve got a stable, successful career. My first book is in the process of being published. I’m in the process of getting my own house built so I can get out of apartment life and have even more stability. I try not to impose on my parents unless I absolutely have to. If I didn’t need to do laundry there, I wouldn’t even use their house for that. I’d come over to visit and watch Project Runway and have dinner and then go back to my home and do laundry in my own washer and dryer.
Is that her issue? Does my sister think my weekly visits are 100% about the laundry? If so, she is woefully mistaken. I could easily DVR the show on my own and watch it from the comfort of my own home. I don’t have to go shopping with Mom on occasion to have some “us” time. I do these things to keep from losing all connection with the family that is growing into strangers, especially my mom. How is that disrespectful?
Maybe if I ever get over being so angry I’ll calm down enough to respectfully ask why my sister is so angry with me. She doesn’t seem to have a problem with our brother, so I don’t understand why this dog training thing suddenly resulted in a bunch of texts detailing what a horrible person I am.
I don’t want to become alienated from my family, but it’s looking like that’s the way the cards are falling. I typed up a post a few days ago about my brother and the fact that he was hospitalized last month after getting the shit beat out of him and no one in the household told me. No one. My own brother. In the hospital. With a broken orbit among other things. Not a freakin’ word. Combine that with today’s drama, and it makes the jabs about “disrespect” sting all the more. Perhaps that’s why I sound so hung up on my brother’s screw-ups. He gets himself beat to shit (likely because of associating with the criminal element I mentioned earlier), and not only does no one “respect” me enough to tell me, but they take him in and coddle him while I’m being cast out.