Soooo Not the Cleavers

I come from a dysfunctional family. I was completely ignorant to this until I was pretty much an adult. I never knew it wasn't normal that my father lived with us on and off pretty much throughout my entire childhood. When I asked why Daddy lived in Illinois while we lived in Maryland, the answer was always "so he can be closer to his work." I had no clue that my parents were even divorced until my father announced that he was marrying the woman who is now my stepmother. This was when I was about 14 or 15, and apparently by that time they had been divorced for years. It was just that no one felt the need to tell me. I thought it was just normal big brother behavior to bully your little sister to the point that she has to go to the hospital to rule out broken bones because she was pushed into the wall, or be treated for hyperventilation because she was punched in the stomach. Don't all mothers fall asleep on the living room couch at 6pm due to the side effects of migraine medication, leaving their elementary school-aged children to entertain themselves for the evening? And don't all fathers have children at age 58 with their third wives? And don't all boys grow up to spend much of their 20's avoiding their fathers' phone calls and emails because they are angry but don't know how to verbalize or repair their feelings of abandonment? They don't? Really.....?

Now that we're all adults (except my little half-brother Charlie, who is now 12) we've settled into a type of what we consider normalcy. We are not a close family but there is an underlying unspoken love. No, it's more like respect. Or maybe it's just lack of judgment? Ok it's more like toleration of each other. My older brother and I live less than 10 minutes away from each other but don't really talk to or see each other except on holidays or birthdays. My mom makes the rounds and comes to visit and invites us over to visit, and undoubtedly cares for her children, but we're all pretty ignorant to each other's personal lives save for my mother's medical concerns. (She has multiple myeloma, a rare form of cancer that eats away at her bones, and was misdiagnosed for about 2 years, so despite its slow-moving tendencies, it was pretty advanced by the time it was discovered. She's been undergoing treatment for about 3 years now and we are all very concerned about her.) So on the outside we appear to be a pretty normal family but we all know better. We're just not all that close, and we don't really know how to communicate with each other. And some of us (me) don't really want to.

We all deal with things in different ways. My mother is a very private person. Hence the whole Let's Not Tell Our Daughter About The Divorce thing. When she was 4 or 5, she and her sister were sent away to a private boarding school in England that was run by nuns. So in her defense, she doesn't know what a normal childhood is, especially an American one. We never had heart to hearts. I was never told about the birds and the bees. I was never warned to stay off drugs or to use birth control or not have unprotected sex. In fact I'm pretty sure my mother has never said the word sex in my presence. When my grandmother (with whom I shared an incredible bond) died, my mother sent me to school that morning. I was alone with my grandmother when she passed and was a complete wreck but my mother sent me to school as if nothing had happened, with no explanation as to why she would do that to me. We simply didn't talk about things in our family.

So now I just don't really like to share personal information with my family. It makes me uncomfortable. I put off telling either parent that I was pregnant until it was practically and obviously awkward. TB and I got engaged days before I flew to Florida to spend a weekend with my father and his family on their boat but I left the ring at home and didn't tell them until later. That's just how I work now.

So when I got an email from my father inviting my brother, his fiancee, and my family down to their house 4 hours away in Southern Virginia because his two brothers happen to both be coming there at the same time, I was uncomfortable, to say the least. My dad settled down in So. VA when my stepbrother was in college. I'm pretty sure they chose that area because of its relative proximity to my stepbrother's college. It's interesting that he now lives somewhere in Baltimore. So all their adult children live in Baltimore and they are isolated 4 hours away with no family nearby. I'm not sure how that's working out for them. They pressure us to come visit all the time, but it's just not practical to make that trip with a baby or a toddler, so we've only been once or twice in the 5 or 6 years they've lived there. So that alone is enough to make me uncomfortable about responding to the email.

But it also happens to be the same day that we're holding SB's birthday party. And I didn't invite my dad. And my brother and his fiancee were planning on coming to our party.

I know that after all I just explained about my family's estranged relationships it might still seem weird that I didn't invite SB's own grandfather to her party. But it was just too much for me to handle. We would have to coordinate my mother coming early and my father coming later, because my mother is not comfortable around my father and his new family. Understandably so since my older brother and I kind of suspect my dad cheated on my mom with the stepmom. And my half-brother has some kind of issue, which we're not sure about since no one really talks and I don't really care enough to ask. So let's just say that even though he's 12, he needs to be watched pretty closely while he's at our place. So it would have been a headache. And totally not worth the trip for them. They came last year and I felt bad because I was busy being a host so I couldn't really talk to them and they didn't know anyone so it was weird.

But despite my seemingly apathetic attitude toward my father and his family, I still feel bad. So now I have to figure out how to tell them that my brother and I can't visit them because we're having his only granddaughter's 3rd birthday party, which he wasn't invited to. So how have I been dealing with this inevitable confrontation? By completely avoiding it. The email's still sitting in my inbox. I'll probably just put it off until my father calls or sends another email then stutter around about how it's a last-minute party and I have to work the next day and TB has to work the night before so we couldn't make it down to VA anyway, blah blah blah.

I know. I never said I was proud of any of this.