Lines

So here it comes. The relenting. The I-don't-want-my-hard-feelings-to-contribute-to-the-overall-hard-feeling jumble mess that is my relationship with each male of my immediate family. I have thought about writing or texting the youngest brother a form of apology that comes from understanding, whether or not he does, my role in the whole being "offended" reaction. After all, as it was painfully and wonderfully put to me, playing the "offended" card is just another way of saying "I can't control what I do with my feelings, you have to change your behaviour" to the other person. And Lord KNOWS how hard a crunching lesson self-control or being controlling has come to be in my life. However, I just can't. I just can't do it. I just can't bring myself to open a door that would be rife with misunderstanding from the onset.

And not in a way that isn't worth working through or attempting to offer an olive branch of any kind, because I still believe that is very much worth it. But that my efforts have been lost on them, either by my own hand or their impression of me; and I don't think that the inevitable sum is worth the means. I can't undo or help the strained lines of communication that have been hacked, massacred, or otherwise impeded by an overwhelming siege of poor communication skills, easy defensiveness, easy aggression, and a plethora of other equally bad habits between us three that have been allowed to sour or curdle over time, most certainly due to the time and space between us, which offers no day-to-day interaction to undo, redo, or reset our impressions of each other. But however I have attempted to try and try again, my efforts have been laced with language that puts them off and a concerted opinion by all three that I am a hysterical and self-righteous bible thumper (I could laugh so hard at this! Except it sucks that that's how they see me and it sucks that they don't know me, either.)

But I just have no idea what more I can do. I haven't done much, and what I have put forth has only added to the toxicity (emails ripping them all together and chopped up moments of boundary-setting that only enforce their perceptions of my "misaligned" hysteria for setting them) and their posturing toward me. I haven't helped myself much in this regard, I realize, but I've also only had just moments of time to squeeze and inject snippets of my own world and my own perceptions in between their own snippets; and it's more than just probable that they just don't care about having a deeper relationship with their sister/daughter. I guess I was just going off the belief that we were raised with (to love each other and be each other's best friends) and the belief that the love we say we have for each other was more than just words. And so there's nothing more to say. Only doing. And there won't be any doing. Because I can't afford to visit them regularly enough to build a comradery and I know they can't afford it, either.