I continue to not get it.

A confusing day, all shot through with the wild colors of family drama...

If I haven't made it clear by now, my brother married a girl who turned out to be psychotic. They got married in May (and for your lack of reading enjoyment, here is a post from my old blog in which I spew vitriol about their honeymoon) and the day after they returned, she gave my parents a letter that told them how awful they were, how cheap they were (they only gave my brother and his wife $500, while her parents gave them $5,000), what terrible people they were for "making" her and my brother get married with people in attendance instead of letting them run away and elope like they wanted to, and how she never, ever wanted to see them again. She has not let my brother see any of us since they got married. He gave her some slack; he told her he'd put up with that until the end of July. It's the end of July, and so they had lunch with my parents yesterday.

During the lunch, she completely ignored both my parents and kept her head nuzzled into my brother the entire time. She did not speak when they spoke to her. She wouldn't even look at them. I talked to my mom after it and she almost started crying. Needless to say, my blood was absolutely boiling. NO ONE hurts my parents like this. I actually said the words "fucking bitch" in front of my mother, which I've never done before. My mother is purity incarnate. She doesn't drink, smoke, or cuss. And she's not at all holier-than-thou about it; she's one of those completely modest, genuinely *good* people (and there are far too few of her in the world). She's been dealing with this situation by trying to understand this girl more, and trying to feel compassion for her, whereas I've been dealing with it by being absolutely furious that someone would say such horrible things to my parents. I know my parents have their faults. The faults they have are not among the things this girl said to them. If she didn't want a wedding with people in attendance, why did she videotape it with two different video cameras? It was very nice of them to pick a place like Red River Gorge that required two miles of hiking over very hilly terrain when my dad is facing back surgery. Whatever. I'm not going to waste my time pointing out the multifarious holes in her logic.

What really blows so much about this whole situation is that even though I don't have a perfect family, and we argue, we have this undying loyalty to one another and to maintaining extreme closeness even when we piss each other off that was brought about when this same brother took a forty foot dive out of a pine tree in 1996 while trying to retrieve a Nerf football and broke his neck. University Hospital in Cincinnati managed to more or less bring him back from the dead and despite a broken neck (and back, and a kidney that "died" because the artery to it ruptured, and two collapsed lungs, broken ribs, a brain contusion, and multiple other injuries) he is still alive and their surgeries were amazing enough that he can do almost everything he could do before the accident. Having a family member go through that, well, it sort of pulls you together as a family. You sort of forget all the petty shit you were dealing with when you're staying overnight in the hospital with your sixteen-year-old brother who is being kept alive by tubes and is coughing up disgusting chunks of blood and is confused because of all the morphine and is in a neck brace and can't move. Everything else falls away. You become one. You promise God all sorts of things if only your brother will live. And when your brother lives, everything in your family is different. You spend a lot more time together. You love one another a lot harder.

And then some crazy bitch comes along and keeps him away from you because she hates you.

What are you supposed to do. I mean really.

Anyway, so I was completely thrown for a loop when he called me up out of the blue today and asked if M and I wanted go up to the farm (the same one M and I went to last night with my other brother and his wife) with he and his wife and their two dogs.

I was like,

what?

I managed, after some stuttering (I haven't spoken to him at all since my mother and I picked he and his darling wife up in Lexington after their honeymoon), I told him we already had plans with my other brother in his wife to go up to Cesar's Creek and do some kayaking. He sounded really disappointed. I told him not to be a stranger and we hung up. I sat there holding the phone at a complete loss. I feel very weird about it. I still feel very weird about it.

When his wife wrote this letter to my parents, apparently she said that I was the only member of the family she liked because I am straightforward and I tell it like it is. Those two things are true. But I don't understand this. My whole family is like me; we have no patience for bullshit. Why did she single me out? Is she trying to forge some sort of bridge between herself and my parents by using me? Should I allow that to happen in order to alleviate some very hurt feelings? Despite all that's happened, my parents are still giving her the benefit of the doubt (or at least my mother is; my dad, I think, has nearly reached the end of his rope). They are better people than I am. I am, to put it mildly, extremely pissed at her. To the point where if I saw her, I don't know how willing or able I'd be to hold back the caustic pressure of the steaming rage that has built up within me. For my parents, I could do it. I could bite it and deal with it and maybe have a conversation with her about, say, dogs. But it would be hard. And that is putting it mildly. That is an understatement, to say that it would be hard.

At any rate. I see I've managed to write another damned novel. I keep telling myself to keep these posts shorter, but when the fingers start flying, my mind takes off and the words just come. And look at that, no picture today (gasp!).

In other news, M and I are both extremely sore from moving all that rock yesterday. We were filling in a giant mudpit that we have outside our back door. Our yard is high in the back and slopes down toward the house, which means that when it rains, all the water collects right outside the back door, and with three very active dogs, that spells disaster. I've been muttering curses about the raging mudpit of doom for months now, and yesterday we finally got our shit together enough to do something about it. And now we are feeling old and achy and like we just moved 2,500 lbs of rock. Oh wait, we did.

This morning was off to a fortuitous start when M pulled a tick out of Steve's ear and I pulled one out of my shin. GROSS. Bugs, I normally find interesting, and I like to take pictures of them, and look at them, and they are cool. Ticks fucking suck. Down with ticks.

I banged the holy tar out of my ankle on the wheelbarrow when I was doing some yardwork. I walked by it to open the gate and didn't see the metal around the tire and just whacked the hell out of the bony part. I have it iced.

M and I engaged in all-American mundanery tonight by watching Simpsons and Family Guy reruns while drinking beer and playing a SpongeBob card game.

And now, I ought to go to bed.

Sheesh. Families.