Warning: The following rant has nothing to do with food or eating disorders and is really long. I'm sorry.
I think I might have mentioned this before, my brother and I currently aren't on speaking terms. Haven't been for more than a month now. Maybe that wouldn't be so weird but we live on the same street (he goes to college in the city I live in). We both have a nasty habit of saying things we don't mean when we're angry, just to hurt the other person, and so our last conversation about why I don't like his girlfriend ended in him calling me a bitch and me telling him that his girlfriend "dresses like a slut". Straight out of a Jerry Springer episode really. To be fair, I am a bitch sometimes and once, when I got home from some family event, the boyfriend asked me in regards to my brother's girlfriend if "the boobs were out to play". So maybe neither of us was that far off the mark.
Regardless, we have to patch things up because our dad's 60th birthday is at the beginning of next month and he wants to do a trip to the snow. (Yes, I live in the magical land when going to the snow is considered a vacation. Hate me if you must.) I can see it now, us all locked in a cabin when some blizzard hits. I might kill myself. Thank god people will be escaping to the slopes.
The problem is I genuinely dislike this girl my brother's seeing and I have so many issues with her and his relationship. I know, I know. Any advice columnist would tell me to shut up and be nice and that I'm a bad person, and it's true, but seriously. If I have to listen to her shriek one more time when my parent's dogs come near her or watch her hang off of my brother or hear her baby talk to him or see those damn booty shorts she wears to my parent's house, I might murder her. I just don't understand. She goes to the same really good college my brother does, doesn't this mean she's supposed to be smart?
My boyfriend keeps telling me to stay out of it and he's probably right but I'm kind of offended that my brother brought her home. I guess it's part of me always having a plan but my boyfriend was the first guy I ever took to meet my family and that wasn't until I knew for sure that he was the one for me. I had great, long-term relationships before him but I never brought them home because I knew they wouldn't fit in with my family or wouldn't have gotten along with, let alone been good influences on, my younger brother. Why inflict that on any of the involved parties? It just doesn't make sense to me. So I'm upset that my bother brought this girl home who so clearly doesn't fit in that I can 100% guarantee if he wasn't dating her, he would hate her. Neither of my parents really like her but what can I say? They're better people than I am. I've never known how to be friendly with someone I don't like. It's just one of those skills I completely fail at.
Even more so than my issues with this girl I have issues with how my brother acted when he started dating her. It went from him calling me once a week to have dinner to never, instantly. And I could even handle this since he's very young for his age and this is his first serious relationship but when I started dating my boyfriend 3 years my brother threw a fit. He told my parents and even some of my few friends that I was ignoring him. And it's half true I guess, we went from seeing each other a couple times a week to once a week. But it seriously damaged my relationship with some friends and he didn't even try to talk to me first. I guess I'm still a little bitter over that. And extremely bitter over him acting the same way he complained about. Nothing drives me more crazy than hypocrisy.
But my family is really important to me and I do want to have a relationship with my brother so I know I need to get past all this. I'm supposed to have lunch with my brother tomorrow. I plan to apologize for not really making much effort to talk to or get to know his girlfriend. I did some but when she started annoying me I gave up. I have to find some way to ignore that. But I'm also going to tell him how upset I was by his actions. I should have when we had the last conversation and I'll never get over it unless I do. I also really, really want to say that although I'm going to be nicer that he needs to be realistic about her fitting into our family. My boyfriend (and okay, probably common sense) says I shouldn't but I'm worried that my brother's so immature that he just can't see it. But I don't want to make things worse and so I'm really going to try to contain myself. We'll see.
I just don't handle conflict well. Never have. I say too much or too little and then invariably I cry. It sucks. But I guess it's one of those things I'll never get better at unless I work on it so here's a chance. Hopefully we'll be speaking again after all this.
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