Re: Don't know what to do with siblings and parents

[Anonymous]

bouf68 – I hear you on all of this. My mom, who was the family organizer in terms of get-togethers and status reports, passed away almost 3 years ago. My family basically died with her because none of them (3 siblings) ever calls me or gets in touch (we live in different cities, my husband and I have no children, my sister ex-communicated me a month before my mom passed away).

My 84 year old father has moved in with a new partner and although he does call and write me, I haven’t got much of a relationship with him because he was largely emotionally absent when we were growing up. He’s the only one I’m really interested in seeing, and we do that on our time, not associated with holidays. It helps that we practice buddhism (NOT a religion, folks, just a set of tools for working with the mind) and are vegetarians, so we don’t follow religious holidays or eat the foods that are typically served.

Why listen to the guilt trip on tuesday morning? You have a choice in all of this. Our choice was not to bother about it, not to be guilted into anything, to do what we feel like doing, to see who we feel like seeing. Yes, holidays when there are usually family get-togethers are challenging, I often wish things were different, but then, that’s one of the elements of buddhist teachings, that our suffering is based on wanting to change what our experience is. We can just live with it as it is.

If you go, pay close attention to what’s going on without reacting to it in your usual way. That might be hard, but it will be interesting. If you don’t go, pay close attention to your emotions and thoughts surrounding this. Equally hard, equally interesting.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if you go or not, but it is your choice.

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