Ah, spring break in Vacaville. It’s not Mexico, but it’ll do.
And unlike Mexico (or for that matter, Scotts Valley) one can drink the tap water.
So my sister finally told me she’s pregnant.
Okay, now that you’ve reacted with horror, it’s not Kerry I’m talking about; I have another sister named Shannon, and I’m about to get another sister… once my brother gets married this May.
I’ve known about the pregnancy since February—Mom asked me, “Has your sister called you yet?” and I said, “Why?” and she said, “Something important,” and I deduced the only important thing that she’d have to talk to me personally about would be that she’s having another child. While great news, it would have been nice to hear it from her, but my sister figured that since I “heard it through the grapevine” there was no point in telling me personally.
This is why my Dad never talks with his family. None of them contact one another when they have news, good or bad; they just assume the gossip will get around soon enough, or they’ll catch up at the family reunion. Really, it’s because they don’t care.
That’s the part that bugs me about the whole bloody thing. Of course, when I complain about this stuff to my sister, she shuts down or diverts blame. So I either have to complain to her husband or rant on my blog. Guess which one I’m picking.
Part of the problem is that my sister and I are about a year apart, and grew up together, and I was a miserable bastard for nearly all of those years. It was hard enough living with a substance-abusing control-freak dad and a codependent mom; I didn’t make things any better. I was too busy looking out for myself to care about her; that’s no excuse, but that’s what happened.
We both moved out of the house as soon as we dropped out of school and got careers; and though I’ve since apologized for my awful behavior, I don’t know that she thinks of me as any different of a person. There isn’t much I can do about that either. Sometimes only God can fix stuff.
And sometimes I’m forced to… My brother and his fiancée have decided to get married at Mom’s house (which is what my sister did when she got married in 1997) and Mom decided to take advantage of the circumstances (as she did in ’97) to renovate the house. So she’s having a new floor put in the kitchen. And since I have the week off, guess who people are trying to draft into doing it.
“Oh, man!” I said. “I gotta get back to the campus…”