Sticks and Stones... Amiright?

A little under a week ago, I got off work from the bakery and came home to find my sister, who lives with us, had still not registered for school. For the past year, nearly daily, I've asked her, gently, "Hey, did you apply for a new job today?"

"How's the search for a major going?"

"Called your parents today?"

"Will you please do the dishes? If I have to do another thing in the house I'm going to puke all over you."

And her answers were varied..."No." was just as common as "Yes."

You see, she's a really good person, my sister. She loves puppies and sunrises and such. She's the flip side of the coin that I am. Where our shared life experience pushed me into the superlative and gave me some serious brass, it made her gentle. It made her quiet. It made her avoid confrontation At. All. Costs.

So, sometimes, her desire to avoid confrontation comes off a little bit like being a huge effing liar liar pants on fire. But she isn't...she just isn't going to speak her mind if you bulldoze her. Which is why I had to learn this past year how to be more empathetic. How to stop. How to repeat. How to listen. She taught me that, my sister, when no one else has been able to.

So when I came home from my shift at the bakery, already raw from being told what to do all day and cleaning the espresso machine to the extremely detailed specifications of my manager and delicately handling pastries so as to not destroy them...when I got home, I needed to see some progress. Any, really, from my sister. Because she has been telling me for a year she was going to enroll and hadn't yet. And on this night she did. And I was so proud. I still am, especially in light of the shit show that ensued.

I have loved Facebook for nine years now. It has chronicled my life through my wilder twenties, through two pregnancies, a wedding, and lots of holidays. Facebook was there for me when I lost a baby I desperately wanted. It was there for me when I got my degree(s) and for so long, it has served as a tool to connect me to my family, who are so far away.

So I posted her acceptance into school onto Facebook. Before she told her mom. Before she told her dad. And they noticed.

It is a long conversation that happened. And it was ugly. There was miscommunication stemming from a visit to her mother, a voiced willingness to think about the idea of moving home with her parents (our parents) and a decision on her part to not do that. And a conversation during which I displayed what my friend Vicki would call an heroically level head. I am not a level headed person. I'm Kali...destroyer of nations and feelings and relationships. But I love these people who spoke that night. Intensely. And so I kept my head. Until 2 am when weeping in the bathroom and wondering how everything went so wrong.

I don't tell you all of this, dear reader, for sympathy. This was implied in the conversation that night...that my "pathetic attempts to garner sympathy from the internet are sad" and how stupid am I to have gotten my PhD when so much money can be had without one. It is not for your sympathy that I write, my friends, it is so you can know what this struggle is like so that if you ever experience it, you aren't alone. If you know someone who is less prone to introspection than I, you know how to help. And yes, it is a vent for my boiling, churning, undercurrent.

Because I didn't realize how angry I am about my life right now. But I am. And I am fighting like a woman possessed to change it. And now you know more about what it is to be under loved, under paid, and under appreciated.

P.S. The next day, my chosen family in North Carolina, out of the blue, called to tell me they were going to clean our house because "It wasn't dirty, but it'll sell better if it smells clean and fresh."

Just because.

Just because THAT is what family does.