Dear Eric: I am the oldest of four sisters. Let’s call us Ann, Bea, Claire and Dina. Bea is challenging. Since early childhood, she has lied and compulsively schemed to get her way. She perpetually makes bad choices. She had sex with Dina’s husband; she stole some things from our mother’s house the night she died; she drunk calls people. And she has perpetrated dozens of small, vindictive tricks against Claire (for whatever reason, Claire receives most of her ire).
She can be quite pleasant in small doses, mind you. But then at other times, she’ll snap, be mean or do something underhanded when you least expect it, so that it’s all just very tiring.
We don’t call her out on anything she does. It just doesn’t seem worth it when we know she’ll just lie about it.
A few months ago, Bea slipped and admitted the truth accidentally about a years-old lie. Claire took the slip as the last straw. She said, “I’m done. I cannot have a relationship with this person. All she does is hurt me and she’s incapable of being honest.”
My view, as the peace-keeping oldest, has always been more like, “I just look at Bea as someone who is probably mentally or emotionally damaged. Whatever it is, I can’t fix it. Therefore, I can be polite and friendly at the occasional social events we all have to attend. I don’t know that freezing Bea out now after she actually told the truth for once, even by accident, is the correct move.”
But maybe Claire is right? Is blood enough reason to keep someone in your life when they are so deeply problematic and so exhausting and hurtful? It’s easy for me to say, oh be nice, when Claire is the one most likely to be targeted.
– Sister Split
Dear Sister: Even though you’re united in sisterhood, each of you is going to have a unique relationship to Bea (and she to each of you). It’s built on the vagaries of temperament, of course, but also on years of interactions. So, Claire is never going to see Bea or Bea’s behavior in the way that you see Bea. This doesn’t make Claire’s view more or less right. It just makes it the right one for her.
For your part, you don’t have to maintain a relationship simply as positive reinforcement for telling the truth. Telling the truth is the bare minimum and it sounds like she has a lot of repair that’s yet to be done. However, if you feel compelled to keep Bea in your life, at a comfortable distance, don’t worry so much about keeping peace between your other siblings.
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