I am home now. After everything, all the things, everything worked out and I got home. It was a long, sad drive to the airport with my sister. She had a friend with her as a buffer. She probably arranged it just like that so that I wouldn’t talk to her; wouldn’t trap her in the car on the long drive and force her to talk to me. Since then she has contacted me to pay for her hotel. Rudely, with no kindness, and with the tone of a teenager. She is now 34. Turned 34 on the day our mother passed. This could be seen as Mom’s final act of narcissism, we joked about this before it happened. It is not so funny now. In our dealings over the last week I was there, I found her full of rage and sadness, but mostly rage. We had one good night together, re-potting plants at Mom’s place on her little porch, with me sitting and smoking. Maybe she wanted my help? I have no idea, because she has the same problem I do, she has w very hard time expressing what she wants and then when someone doesn’t live up to her unexpressed expectations, she gets mad at them and totally resentful that they haven’t read her mind. Same as me.

I’m certain how she feels about me now, after this trip. She hates me, despises me. It’s a venomous hatred, sly and cunning, like a rattlesnake stalking its prey. I can do nothing right by her. She has her reasons, and they are valid, let me be clear about that. From years past, when I fucked her over, deliberately. I thought we’d moved past it, that I apologised enough, but apparently I haven’t. She hasn’t forgiven me, and has no plans to do so. I can do nothing right by her, even now, especially now. I have to consider grief in this equation, and give her room to be however she needs to be. This was one of the mistakes I made years ago, when our father died. I expected her to act a certain way, to show me basic care, respect, and consideration and when she didn’t, I punished her for it, just to prove that I could. To prove that I should be listened to, to prove that I was in control. I broke her in a way that she had never been broken before. I knew I would break her, and I did. I did what I did with calculation and precision, with full awareness of how much it would hurt her. I knew it would destroy her, and I did it anyway. How was this so easy for me? What was I doing, and why? Perhaps if i can fully admit to what happened and why I can fix it, or maybe I can’t ever do that, and maybe I have to live with that for the rest of my life.

I came home to zero fanfare or welcome from my husband. After 3 weeks away and the loss of my mother, I’d hoped for a nice warm lunch to welcome me home. Nope, not today. There was practically no food in the house, no fuss made at all, so I ate a bowl of cereal and I went to sleep. Woke up briefly to the smell of some sort of dinner cooking, and fell straight back to sleep. I woke up in the night with a dead phone but had my watch on, and it read 5:30, so I started to get up, and stumbled downstairs to make coffee. Come to find out there is no coffee. After weeks away, filled with tragedy, loss, fear, abuse, sadness, and difficulty, I am not even welcomed back by coffee. There was not thought given to me, to what I might like. Is this too much to ask of your partner of 14 years? Too much to expect? I really don’t think so.

But based on these two people, maybe I deserve this. Maybe I’ve been such a fucking asshole in my life that it doesn’t matter what I do now to make up for it, these ‘loved ones’ are going to hate me. This is what I’ve sown. So what do I do? Divorce, move on, take the kids, in the hopes that I can save them at least from the years of dysfunction that would inevitably follow? Put up with the grief abuse of my sister? This fucking sucks, all of this on top of the one thing I need and want to do, which is to grieve the loss of my mother.

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Hell is other people. – John-Paul Sartre