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Sharing Simple Social Time

Today I achieved a major landmark with regards to the way I want to interact with my sister, and with regards to the kind of involvement I want in her life. Today we went out for lunch.

Just lunch. No “business” to take care of. No meetings before or after. Just going out for lunch.

It has been my goal to a weekly social outing with my sister, just sharing time and not “working” on anything in particular. The last few weeks with her have been very taxing for me, since she had a slew of medical appointments, sometimes as many as 3 a week, and I accompanied her to all of them (usually with my 4-month old baby). It was too much, and I got burned out. It may have been too stressful for her as well, given how she blew up on me after one of them.

I have since decided to ask my mother to step in and accompany my sister to medical appointments. My mom and my sister have a very difficult, complicated relationship, and my mother has Stage 4 cancer (which miraculously doesn’t cause her pain or debilitate her). All this makes me very hesitant to ask my mom to help, but at some point I realized a few things that resulted in my asking my mother to help:

  • Scheduling the appointments is taking up a lot of my time
  • Arranging transportation for my sister is taking up a lot of my time
  • Accompanying my sister to the meetings is taking a lot of my time (and almost always takes much longer than I expect)
  • My sister’s medical appointments won’t always be this frequent
  • Whoever accompanies my sister needs to be very well-versed in her medical and psychological condition

I had considered hiring somebody to take care of my sister’s medical appointments, but I think it would require a lot of training for this person, and they would need to be available at all kinds of strange times. It could be done, and I was close to doing it, and then thought again about my mother, and decided to give it a try.

The results was that, this week, for the first time in many months, I went out on a date with my sister. She had a medical appointment earlier this week, which my mother took care of, and I was glad to realize I have time to go and just spend social time with my sister. We went to a diner and ate and talked for about an hour. Although she doesn’t have a lot to talk about, I learned long ago that the easiest way to have a real conversation with her is to talk about myself (which used to make me uncomfortable, but now I’m grateful to have this option). These days my sister also asks about my son, and so we talk about him and laugh about the stories I tell her.

I was driving her to work after we finished eating, and she suddenly said: You know, it’s funny that this is one of the first outings I’ve had as an adult. And I asked her: What do you mean? We’ve gone out before to restaurants or to walk around. And my sister said Yeah, but usually with mom.

Which factually is not true – we have gone out many times without mom, but that was before my mother moved near us. Since my mother arrived, I’ve had almost no social time with either my sister or my mother – it was all “operational”, taking care of necessary logistics and appointments. And in this way my sister was totally right: This was the first date we’ve had in a long, long time. It felt good to spend some human time together. And, not surprisingly, my sister did not call me later today, and her helper did not contact me about any special problems after seeing my sister today.

I feel good about accomplishing my goal of a weekly date. Next week may be very different, but I am continuing to move in the direction of offloading “tasks” and becoming more of a “manager” than a “worker” with respect to my sister’s care team. Because it allows me so save time to just take her out to lunch. To just be her brother, and help her feel more like the human that she is.

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Block Her!

Today I hit yet another breaking point with my sister. She had been getting increasingly agitated over the past 3 days, shortly after she stopped taking her morning Lorazepam, and has been shouting and screaming at me every day over the phone at some point. Today she asked that I help her schedule her ride for tomorrow, so she could get to work. I did this, then called her back to and told about the time the ride was scheduled for. My sister, already agitated, cut me off with an incredulous “WHAT?! No, I’m sorry, this is just not acceptable!” and hung up on me.

I was left standing in the entrance to the restaurant where I went to place the call, baby strapped to my chest, friend waiting for me at the table, shaking with anger, taking deep breaths. It just felt so ungrateful of her, so inconsiderate, so entitled, and I was livid.

I choked down the urge to call her back and shout at her. What’s the point? It won’t change anything, I’d just get angrier, and it would take more time.

I also didn’t want to hear from her again. Never would have been ideal, but I realized even then that’s not realistic. However, I decided it was time for a break. So I blocked her on my phone.

I had blocked my sister before, for a few hours at a time, when things got too intense and I felt I wasn’t going to handle well any additional conversations with her. But this time, I’ve kept her blocked since.

It’s been amazing.

For starters, she seems unaware of the fact that I’ve blocked her. She is used to leaving me voicemail and me calling her back later, sometimes much later. So from her perspective, very little has changed. In fact, she told our mother that I said I won’t be available for a few days because I’m busy–which I didn’t, because I hadn’t spoken with her for the first few days I had her blocked–but the point is that my sister made up a reason why we weren’t talking that she was comfortable with.

The improvement in my quality of life is immense. I used to dread her phone calls, would always have a quick and intense internal debate about whether to pick up when she calls, would feel guilty if I ignored her call and stupid if I picked up too often, and all this was costing me a lot of energy. My beloved partner has also experienced the same improvement in quality of life, and mentioned it spontaneously to me – the frequency calls from my sister have been hard on my partner, too.

If I’m wondering how my sister is doing, I can always go into the “Blocked Messages” section of my voicemail and see the many messages she’d left.

This is only possible because my sister already has some support network in place in addition to me. She can call my mother, she has her housemate, she has her personal aide. If there is a true emergency and she is able to use the phone, I will hear about it before long from one of those people.

I would like to call my sister more frequently, maybe once a day or every couple of days. Even without doing this, it seems to be working well. I’m a lot less on edge, when I do speak with my sister she doesn’t seem to have an issue with my not answering, and she seems to be doing well overall.

In the past I would have thought this was a cruel thing to do, or demeaning, or at least inconsiderate. Right now, it seems to be a great act of self-care that is helping me be less annoyed and more emotionally present with my sister, less burned out overall, without really costing her much. So, at least under our current circumstances, it seems to be a very good solution.