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Daily writing prompt
How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?
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As someone with a compromised immune system, my husband and I took the threat of covid seriously from the very beginning. Unlike most of my family, I adhered to precaution and remained sheltered-in-place throughout much of the pandemic. Several of my siblings, cousins and aunts became infected with the virus. One of my sisters had it three times! Even my mother, who faithfully received her covid shots and subsequent boosters at the outset, lapsed into complacency. Residing now in an assisted-living facility, we believed it was just a matter of time before there was an outbreak there. Failing to get vaccinated last fall, despite my repeated urgings, she too ‘got covid’ in January of this year.

My husband and I steadfastly avoided large family gatherings, especially those in cold-weather months when the rates of infection increased, often dramatically. We missed graduations, weddings, funerals, family reunions. Discovering after these events that one or more individuals had been diagnosed with covid, I felt validation. Not getting sick was important to me. Not being hospitalized, was vital. Not dying, well. To us, congregating with family just wasn’t worth it.

My family relations, however, suffered due to our precautions. The dysfunction of my family, the toxicity was only amplified. While I’ll never know exactly what’s been said about me behind my back, what was said to my face, the insinuations, the accusations, the mockeries, were bad enough. So be it. I’ve moved on.

Fast forward to today, to the lives we’re living now. I have no regrets and I’m more confident about my health, more at ease. However, I still employ caution and common sense regarding where – and when – I venture out into the world. Large, open indoor spaces, especially during slow-traffic time frames, are okay. In doctor’s offices or anywhere that I have to come into close, sustained contact with others, I’ll wear a mask. There are no guarantees. I might still get covid. I understand that but I believe the prevalence of infection has substantially decreased over time. As my rheumatologist now tells me, get out there and live, Julie. And I’m doing just that. I have to be more focused and strategic about my comings and goings now but that’s okay. I can live with that.

I can live.

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Is there any lonelier feeling than when one is surrounded by family?

After decades of striving for acceptance and inclusion, it’s become crystal clear that my mother’s legacy has rendered her daughters as being incapable of demonstrating true love for one another. You know what I mean, that unconditional love one hears about, especially when talking about the supposed bonds of family. I guess that might also include myself, indoctrinated, as I am, in the pursuit of our mother’s favor to the detriment of any semblance of sisterly camaraderie, true love, genuine caring and concern for each other. I’ve never felt a fierce, nurtured compulsion among us girls to have each other’s backs. Instead, Mom has always, ever so subtly, pitted each of us against the other.

I have endeavored, my entire adult life, to present myself in such a way that my sisters, and my mother too, might finally accept, embrace and enthusiastically love and care about me, the person, their sister, her daughter.

There was the time my son lost his memory while pursuing his PhD in another state halfway across the country. He was hospitalized for almost two weeks. True, one of my sisters was there for me, helping to make arrangements for my husband and me to fly to Florida. For that I’ve always been grateful. As for the others, two of them called once or twice. The other sisters, not a word. Not a one of them sent cards or flowers.

When my husband and I got married – a second time for each of us – one sister called to inquire as to why we were getting married in his hometown, about an hour and a half away. Because I was Catholic and had no idea where my first husband was, it just seemed easier to get married in the Lutheran church where he grew up than to pursue the rigors of trying to get my first marriage annulled. When I explained this to her (and why should I even have had to?!?), she asked why we didn’t just pick a Lutheran church in our hometown. My husband’s aunts threw a very nice bridal shower for me and all of them wondered aloud why none of my five sisters were there. Well, I sure wondered too…

My passions, my achievements, my fears and concerns are met, consistently, with a ho-hum indifference. I now realize — it should have been obvious long ago — that they are never going to suddenly welcome me into the fold. Never. I can’t imagine what it might take to cause them to change. So. Change is something that I must do.

For my own sake, I must just live my own life, keeping a polite distance. I refuse to give them the satisfaction of knowing how many times their apathy and disregard has wounded me, instilling doubt after doubt after doubt. If a quote unquote ‘friend’ treated me the way my sisters have treated me throughout the years, I would not have hesitated to sever our interactions. That these women are my sisters, my own flesh and blood, has lost its power to keep me coming back again and again for more of their lack of interest in who I am as a person. It’s just too crushing and life is too short, dammit.

I’m no longer content to look on the ground for their tidbits of favor, nurturing hope that things, this time, might be different. My future, indeed, does lie beyond my own yellow brick road.

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The world can be such a sad place, so full of disappointment. Not the world itself per se but the people who inhabit it: Folks whose hearts are cold and cruel and only self-serving. Individuals who, by rights and connections – none of their own making really but there you have it – should be the guardians and nurturers and caretakers of those closest to them but fail utterly in that regard. Relationships where love and gentle regard is sorely absent.

It’s sad to discover there are members of the human race who possess these traits of ugliness, brutality and disregard. When the knowledge that the world is filled with this caliber of humanity becomes apparent to us, it’s as devastating as when a young child first discerns there really is no Santa Claus, if the child was fortunate enough, that is, to have lived in a family where the perpetuation of this loving tradition was cultivated in the first place. To recognize that some children have never even had that… Well, that’s a sad realization in and of itself, is it not?

I won’t lie. I still struggle with resentments of my own. My father drank a lot and rarely put his wife’s and his children’s well being before his own. He was a good provider, however, and did love all of us, of that I am certain. Perhaps it was just the era but I don’t really fault him for this. I can’t explain why. So the duties of child-rearing fell to our mother and with a husband who drank and six girls under the age of ten to raise, I can only imagine how difficult it was for her.

I suppose, then, that I should be a bit more charitable and excuse her for her lack of affection, for her utter disinterest in nurturing us (maybe she just didn’t know how?). For failing to foster strong sisterly bonds (rather, she chose to exploit and corrupt them instead). For her, then and even now still, her only regard was and is herself. Her neediness seems to know no bounds. And, here I am sixty years old and it still rankles. Especially when she bemoans the fact that the six of us don’t get along well at times. In her mind, she apparently thinks she was a perfectly wonderful mother and does not believe there is any cause for her to feel regret or remorse. Oh yes, that rankles too.

Sigh. I know it could have been worse, glaringly, shockingly, horrifyingly worse. I get it. We weren’t abused – not physically, anyway – but still we’ve spent a lifetime of distrust. A lifetime that could have been spent as friends, we sisters, where we had each other’s back instead of using them as targets. We could have spent these years delighting in each other’s company rather than merely tolerating our sibling relationships. This small artifact of truth, that our mother does not recognize this consequence, this fall-out of her non-mothering, speaks volumes of her refusal to accept responsibility for her own actions – all the while she readily chomps at our own failings and misdeeds.

Yes. I need to move on. And quite often, I feel that I have. But every so often I’ll read or see or observe others’ realities, and the niceness of their relationships, and I’m hit on the head – soundly! – with what we were denied. It’s less – much less – than the brutality and depravity of much of what lies in the world, I know that. I do. But it doesn’t make it hurt any less, not for me, for my five sisters and me, that our childhoods, our family’s bones were so lacking in love, nurturance, warmth, safety and structure.

There is beauty and love and resilience and nurturing in the world, this I know too. I must strive to seek it on my own, and to find it within myself. The past is the past and while I know it will always serve up small reminders of what was (and what was not), I must actively choose to see it for what it was and nothing more. I’ll get there. I’ll be fine. Sometimes, a body just has to fess up and recognize those nagging voices from the past, deal with them, and push forward. Get right with one’s own soul and enjoy the sunshine of today.

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I have five sisters. But we ain’t got no sisterhood — that, you can bank on.

Oh, we go through the motions. We hug each other when we reunite after a long period of no interactions and then again when we part ways. We may occasionally end our texts and our phone calls with a cursory ‘love ya’ but there’s no undercurrent of stability or history or bonding there to support these proclamations. Not really….

This week, while doing some spring cleaning, I unearthed some old journals of mine, a few of which go back ten years or more. I made myself comfortable, sat down with a hot cup of tea and read through every one of them. A recurring theme, scrawled in my messy cursive which has since given way to a neater, tighter printed hand, was the hurt and anger and the renewed insistence on my part – time and time again – that I was going to, once and for all, keep my distance from my siblings. I was no longer going to allow myself to be disappointed and frustrated, I was tired of trying to fit in and be accepted and liked by them. And yet, I still tried.

How was it that my friends and co-workers found me to be a positive, fun and creative person but in the company of my sisters I was often little more than a bumbling incompetent, someone who’d made too many poor life choices, someone whose comments were often ignored, mocked or berated? I so wanted their approval. I wanted them to, a la Sally Field, simply just ‘like’ me – was that too much to ask for? Above all, I very much wanted the six of us, as well, to delight in and seek out each other’s company. I wanted the media-fed image of sisters as best friends, to experience a camaraderie amongst those of us who had been born to the same mother and father.

It’s gotten somewhat better over the years although a recent interaction makes me question even what little gains I thought had been made. And now, at age sixty, as the oldest of six girls, I should perhaps be wiser (and serene in that ‘wisdom’) but I still find myself feeling only cynicism and a grudging acceptance that what we are, what we have, of what our sisterly relationships have become, as being cast in stone. Knowing this, accepting this, realizing this may help me to manage my expectations but it doesn’t make this reality any less sad for me – or for any of us, really.