Dear Prudence,
I haven’t spoken to my sister in over a year. She has severe anger issues that she refuses to address and obvious envy over how the lives of our brother and I turned out compared to hers. My girls live nearby and we talk every day. My brother has a large gaggle of grandchildren that he spends time with and a loving wife. Our sister burns through relationships like they are made of tissue and is estranged from both her kids. They live on the opposite coast and rarely visit. No grandchildren either.
My sister has always taken her unhappiness out on us. She would pick fights and make wild accusations like I flirted with her first husband (I hated the guy) or our brother deliberately slighted her at his granddaughter’s wedding because he didn’t stop by for lunch. Being around her was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. She has blocked my number more than once and turned around to play victim because I didn’t reach out. The last straw was that I missed wishing her a happy birthday on her birthday but instead sent her a text a few days later. I was dealing with a flood in my house and didn’t have power. She called me up to just scream at me. I told her I was done dealing with her anger issues and she shouldn’t call me until she gets help. My brother agrees with me. Life is too short to deal with this.
The problem is my other two sisters. They are far away and have rarely had to deal with our sister’s wrath. They kept putting pressure on me to reach out again. I have told them to stop and drop the subject, but both of them are meddlesome. I am supposed to take a trip to visit them, but I don’t want to spend the entire trip dealing with this. Any thoughts?
—Too Short