dealing with adult siblings

Family Matters


Mom called me Thursday afternoon. Because it was the tenth anniversary of my marriage to my late husband, I thought for a brief second she may have remembered. But the phone call was about her. Another streak unbroken.

“DNOS sold your father’s car,” she informed me. “And I am pissed.”

The car, if you remember, was a huge bone of contention in the days following Dad’s death last October. My brother, CB, was desperate for Mom to sign it over to him because he didn’t have a reliable vehicle back in Nevada and the truth was that without dependable wheels, he was never going to find work. But DNOS would not hear of it. CB behaved poorly during Dad’s last days and even worse in the aftermath. They don’t get along anyway, but DNOS was Dad’s favorite. She was the one who shouldered the load during his illness. She thought that CB should have manned up and acted his age instead of mining his childhood grievances. He was miffed that no one would at least allow him the right to have issues with the way he was parented. They are both a little right and a little wrong.

In the end, I sided with DNOS. I am the swing vote. I swung incorrectly in this instance. DNOS sold the car in the spring – without a word to Mom – because she wanted the money to pay for repairs to her jeep. Mom had signed the title over to her but on the condition that the car would be available for Nephew1 when he turned sixteen next year. DNOS did not mention the sale of the car until Mom showed up at her house yesterday and asked where it was.

It isn’t a huge deal really. Nephew1 will undoubtedly nag Mom into buying him a beater anyway and my cousin’s husband runs an autobody shop where such vehicles show up regularly. The issue is the money. DNOS, apparently, helped herself to grocery gift cards that Mom had in the house while Mom was visiting us in July. About $400 dollars worth of script which DNOS claims was just $200 and that she “borrowed” to give to BabySis who was broke and begging while Mom was gone.

DNOS has repaid the $200 she claims she borrowed for BabySis, but the kicker is that BabySis had no idea what Mom was talking about when Mom brought it up to her over the past weekend. BabySis was begging again for cash to buy cigarrettes (how does one find the balls to ask for ciggie money from a woman whose husband died from lung cancer?) and Mom reminded her of the $200.

“DNOS never gave me any gift cards.”

Here’s the bottom line. DNOS was Dad’s favorite and she used him like a private credit union, borrowing and repaying in amounts and on terms that only the two of them knew. Dad is dead. DNOS’s spending habits live on.

Mom had a conversation with DNOS about everything. What did she say?

“Don’t tell Annie.”

As if. I am most likely to hear from our mother when things are awry.

I told her what I thought she should do. Whether she will do it or not is debatable. I didn’t even entertain the thought of calling my sister. I like my sister. I like her husband and her son. And I know, more than anyone I think, just how taxing the caregiving she did for Dad was and how much heavier the burden was because I upped and remarried and left the country. I don’t feel like causing a rift between us because Mom has been unclear about her new position on handouts to her children and grandchildren. I handed Mom my two cents, Canadian, and she will do what she will do. I did tell her this,

“I could go all drama about the unfairness where money has always been concerned in our family and remind you of the differing standards you and Dad had for each of us kids, and how DNOS, and me especially, where always left to fend for ourselves even in times of crisis, but I won’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what do you want to do with your money and what is your criteria for lending money and giving away possessions now.”

Grrrrrrr


My youngest siblings cannot be counted on for anything except their knack for injecting melodrama into my mother’s life whenever her attention is focused on something happy and it includes me. For some reason, my having Mom’s almost undivided attention forces one or the other of them to a full code blue.

Last June, as some of you may remember, it was my younger brother CB’s emotional implosion and suicide attempt coinciding with Rob, Dee and I coming back to Iowa for a visit and family reunion. This year, Mom is preparing to come for a visit here with my Auntie and the culprit is Sis (aka BabySis).

Mom and Dad uncharacteristically got a hold of their spines simultaneously last spring and ejected both Sis and her son, Nephew1. Nephew went to live with his father and paternal grandmother in a river town to the south of Dubuque where, not surprisingly, the boy is thriving. Sis moved up to Wisconsin to move in with her boyfriend of more years than I care to remember, LawnMower Man.

I have written a bit about LawnMower Man before and if you care for backstory, you can find it here and here. But the short version is that when he was 21 and she was 16, he knocked her up and then ran off. The baby was put up for adoption thus mercifully escaping knowing either of them and is hopefully a better person today for that one act of selflessness on Sis’s part. Sixteen years later, he showed up again. Divorced and a full-blown alcoholic, he professed his deep and forever feelings for her and she swallowed the whole revolting package – literally – but I try not to go there.

It was the perfect set-up for him. She lived with my folks and visited for booty during the week and stayed on the weekends. She neglected her son for him. She gave him half her paycheck – because she was eating and using utilities while she was with him – and she picked up the check whenever they went out. A sweet deal.

Lawnmower Man never came to the house. My dad’s hatred would have melted him to a puddle such was the heat it gave off. Lawnmower Man stayed away even after Dad was semi-disabled that’s how afraid he was. He is not afraid of Mom. Ever since Dad died, he has been after Mom to let Sis move back in. He calls the house and harasses her. 

Sis came home tonight. Bruised and professing in her childishly prattling way,

“You don’t just stop loving a man after seven years.”

Even if he is belting you upside the head and had left welts on your legs that the old southern plantation masters would have been proud to call their own.

DNOS is dealing, but this is not her territory. She took wonderful care of Dad and has dealt with Mom beautifully, but the crazy younger siblings have always been my cross to bear. I can’t do much from this distance and told her so.

“Sis cannot be allowed to stay at Mom’s while she is visiting up here,” I said. “Mom will never get rid of her and you know within a week she’ll be sleeping with that turd again and he will be coming around the house.”

I went on to point out that he is a drunk and wouldn’t think twice about abusing our mother right along with Sis.

There is a shelter in town. Sis could go there tonight, but no one will make her. DNOS’s brother-in-law is the police chief across the river in Illinois and urged DNOS to have Sis file charges. Instead, DNOS called our cousin and his wife and went up to LawnMower Man’s to retrieve whatever might be left of Sis’s stuff. I will get the lowdown on that before the night is over. DNOS was shaky and in tears when she called me. I don’t blame her. Mom fell apart. She’s had a rough last few weeks with the six month anniversary of Dad’s death, her birthday and then Father’s Day.

“I talked to your Dad tonight and told him I just can’t do this,” she told me on the phone.

If I were a 5 hour car trip as opposed to plane ride away, I would simply pull Dee out of school a few days early and go down and take care of things and bring Mom back with me. And trust me, things would be settled before I left. I am a force to be reckoned with. LawnMower Man would have no doubt which daughter was the chip of the Simmering Block. But I am here. I can offer advice – which no one will listen to let alone take.

“This is why I am estranged from my siblings,” Rob said.

And he wasn’t being unsympathetic. Just pointing out a fact that at some point the siblings have to be neutralized and left to fend for themselves. His own mother is now far enough away and finally able to turn down cries for assistance that his sisters and brother are no longer an issue for him. Ultimately this is for my mother to deal with, but she and I need to have a talk, I think.

Shit? Meet Fan.


The cosmos just knows when you are burdened to the point of mental dizziness, loaded up like a wagon cart heading for the promised land which just happens to lie a couple thousand miles off – past the prairies, over the Rockies and across the desert. It also knows that the only thing you are likely to find is a junior wife position in the Lion’s House.

Things stack up. A little bit at a time, but eventually there is nowhere left to pile. Kind of like the inside of MIL#1’s double wide. An Oprah intervention in the making.

For the last week my younger brother, CB, has been calling to vent his spleen and general mental unhingedness on me. While I continue to feel quite badly for him, I am not unaware that he needs me more as a go between than as shoulder. He gets nowhere with our parents when he is in one of his “moods” and though it seems to me that he is no longer effing his life up on purpose, it is really effed up, and he is going to need some cash to start righting it. Cash, by the way, is not something that a 42 year old high school drop-out armed with just a GED and a couple of decades worth of working under the table contracting is going to be able to come up with easily in the economy today.

Because Dad has been ill and largely unable to hold up his end of a conversation, I have been reduced to leaning a bit on Mom. Have I ever mentioned that she is not a crisis manager? Pressure and Mom mix like oil and water.

I know I am heartless, but I believe that despite what they have given monetarily to CB in the past – they still owe him a bit more. The sum he needs to escape Marin and retreat to Tahoe to “get a grip” is pocket change to the parental units. My position is pay him. It will ease the situation for a while, and we could all use that.

However, another wrinkle – that sly universe again – came into play when Dad’s doctors hospitalized him yesterday. Pneumonia and fluid on a lung. Serious in an 81 year old man with pulmonary disease.

My conversation with CB yesterday went something like:

Me: Dad’s in the hospital. Mom will talk with him about the money when all the testing is over, and they know what is going on.

CB: Okay, so when do you think that will be? Because I need the money by the 1st.

Yeah, CB is a bit ego-centric, but as Rob reminded me – aren’t we all – in this life for ourselves kind of thing? Unless you are Mother Teresa that is. Oops, bad example. Or maybe an apt one because as self-less as we are all capable of being, what ultimately makes us happy, content or whatever, is having a life that is stable with people who care about – even love – us.

I googled the whole “fluid on the lung” thing last night then. It was not cheery.

  • infection
  • the beginnings of congestive heart failure
  • cancer

Dad’s lung doctor doesn’t think it has anything to do with his existing lung issues or the pneumonia. This leaves us with two ugly scenarios.

Mom called me after they siphoned off two litres of bloody fluid. She told me – without my bringing up the subject – that she simply could not deal with CB or his request. To which I replied,

“So just send him the check then.”

Because the way I see it, she will worry and feel bad if she doesn’t, and since money isn’t an issue for her – why not use it to buy a little peace and happiness for herself and CB?

And me. Let’s not forget about me in all this.

Later in the afternoon, DNOS calls and tells me not to bring up CB again.

“I didn’t,” I tell her. “Mom brought it up.”

“Oh.” Clearly she had wanted to be bossy and now couldn’t, “Well, Mom had one of her freak-out’s about it.”

I go on to explain my theory and plan. DNOS reluctantly gets on board and agrees to make sure that the money goes out this week and then says,

“I really don’t care about CB anymore. I would be upset if he…expired…but I just don’t care about him.”

And I get that. I have a list of people I should care about more than I do too.

My gut tells me I need to be prepared to hop on a plane and go soon. I know I will have to go without Rob. He and BabyD will remain here until Dad dies. I will have to do the hospice thing again on my own and being the rock and go-to on top of it. I don’t know if I am up to this or not, but life doesn’t need our permission for anything it decides to do. There is no point looking for a whale belly to ride out the storm.

Bad timing and life. Go figure.