Half-Sibling and Full Trouble

As my oldest half-sister passed me on the way out of probate court, she hissed to me that she wished I was in a coma. Our stepmother lay in a coma in a nursing facility, the result of an accident she would never recover from. My half-sister was trying to take advantage of the situation by making a bid to grab whatever she thought my father had left behind when he passed on years ago. She made sure that neither the judge, her lawyer, or our stepmother’s lawyer could hear her comment to me. I did not reply. It was the first time we had seen each other since our father had passed on twelve years earlier.

A few weeks earlier, my half-sister’s youngest daughter had admonished me for my continued refusal to make nice with her mother. She kept insisting that her mother wasn’t that bad. “We talk a lot, and she always says that she loves you,” my niece said. I knew better. I had lived through years of what my half-sister passed off as love, and I’d seen and heard enough. “You have to understand that I love my mother,” my niece said, a statement that was a veiled warning that she was going to defend her mother. Well, good for her. But I had a different opinion.

The only thing my half-sister and I have in common: we have the same father. She was the result of an unplanned, teenage pregnancy. I never met her mother, but I heard through the family grapevine that my half-sister’s mother abandoned the idea of being a parent almost from the beginning. My half-sister had been bounced around between her mother’s relatives until she landed permanently at our paternal grandmother’s home. Even though they were now in the same city, Dad was too busy worrying about his own concerns to look in on his oldest daughter. Reportedly, Dad told Grandma that the only reason she took my half-sister in was she “always wanted a girl”. My late grandfather had several kids, but Dad was the only child he’d had with Grandma. Grandma married another man, but they had no children of their own.

Grandma spoiled my half-sister which not only included downplaying what trouble she got into but also fudging the truth about her heritage. Early on, Grandma would pass her off as being her own daughter. My step-grandfather went along with the ruse. Dad waivered between acknowledging her as his flesh and blood as suited his purposes at the moment, so he played along, too. When he married my mother, he gave her my grandmother's story. While I was a toddler, Ma was cleaning the house and found papers proving that the twelve-year-old girl who had been giving her attitude from day one wasn’t her sister-in-law, but her stepdaughter. The news further cracked the foundation in a marriage that was quickly disintegrating due to Dad's numerous character flaws. After the divorce, neither I or my younger siblings saw much of our half-sister. Ma wasn’t friendly with her former in-laws, and she didn’t want us hanging around our half-sister. As a kid, I heard whispers about Ma’s reasons for that. I didn’t understand them until I was in my late teens. A falling out with Ma ended up with me living with Dad, and unfortunately, I saw up close how ugly my half-sister could be.

By that time, she had three kids, two out-of-wedlock before she was twenty years old, and one from a marriage that crashed and burned early. She and her kids lived with our grandparents who allowed my half-sister to destroy what little peace they had in their later years. She was a high school dropout who had no ambition. Before her kids aged out of the system, welfare checks were her main source of income. Other money came from whatever she could con out of family and friends. One sunny afternoon, my half-sister, my youngest sister, and I sat around the dining table. I had lost a job. My youngest sister had a job that barely paying above minimum wage. We were trying to figure out how to improve our lot. My half-sister told us that my younger sister and I were stupid for going to work every day. “All I have to do is go down to the mailbox and get a check,” she smugly pointed out. I never gave her a dime after that, which widened the resentment between us.

The money that she received seldom went towards anything important – like taking care of her kids, for example. If it wasn’t for me and my younger sister's efforts, our nieces and nephew would have started a many school year without pencils and paper. Nor would they have had Christmas gifts. But my half-sister could always use the money to lose in a card game, buy lottery tickets, and get a new outfit to attend the party of the week.

The biggest waste of money went towards alcohol and drugs. My half-sister is not a pleasant person to be around when she’s sober. The use of substances makes her personality even worse. No amount of pleading from anyone could make her see she was committing slow suicide. Once, our younger sister found marijuana at our grandparents’ house. My grandmother flushed the stuff down the toilet. When my half-sister found out, she went into a rage, threatening to hand out a beat down to everyone involved. During a drunken rant, she nearly assaulted our grandmother over some slight. Luckily, my younger sister was there and my half-sister was forcibly put out of the house. But Grandma was a soft touch, and before the end of the next day, my half-sister was allowed to take up residence in the house again. It was a common scenario. A short stint in rehab was an insincere attempt to avoid losing the roof over her head – again. The day she walked out of the drug program, my half-sister stopped somewhere to get a beer.

Dad had his favorites among his children although all of us were equally victims of Dad’s neglect and disrespect. I was the golden child as far as he was concerned. I made good grades, didn’t hang out on street corners, and I looked like I had a future. Dad had made it clear he had given up on his other kids, especially my half-sister who had represented nothing but embarrassment. “I trust Hillari,” he told a group of his buddies within earshot of my half-sister, “but not the rest of them.” The fact that he thought my mother was good enough to marry before having kids with her always rubbed my half-sister the wrong way. She took out her jealousy, openly and underhandedly on me and my younger sister in many ways, but her anger was always focused in the wrong direction.

It was easier to cut ties with her after our younger sister and our dad died in succession than to be continually be locked in conflict. I had to accept that we had different values, lived different lives, and there was never going to be any agreement between us.