1.  I’d really appreciate your prayers regarding a relationship in my life … I’ve been fairly upbeat in my posts regarding my family.  Just reporting on the good stuff, keeping the other stuff to myself.  Part of this is because my family is pretty fractured … not much relationship with anyone else but my sister.  Well, this is the relationship that I’m asking for prayer for … because of time constraints I can’t go into everything right now, but this past weekend she really hurt me.  And I’m having a difficult time getting past it, overlooking it, forgiving it.  I know that I’m not the perfect sister, but I have tried to be there for her following her divorce eight years ago.  She lived with us for a time, then moved to our mom’s … during this time we owned the blind business together, and while her nursing school schedule and then her work schedule did not permit her to go on every client appointment, I always split the profits of the business with her 50/50.  It was my way of helping out.  Then a couple of years ago, she “retired” from the business.  But I have still tried to help out by sending our mom money when I could, watching the kids when I could …

I know that my sister has gotten “stuck” with the less pleasant parts of caring for our mother.  Because they only live about 10 minutes from each other, she is much more “accessible” and therefore, Mom calls on her to do more (our mother does not drive due to impaired vision issues).  I don’t know if my sister is going through a mid-life crisis or what (she’s only 35), but lately she does not return calls for days and gets irritated if you say anything about it.  Our kids got into a little tiff recently and I thought we had resolved some issues when we worked through that.  But apparently not.  I had been trying to reach her for four days to find out if they wanted to come to church with us on Sunday and then spend Sunday afternoon with us … I left a very specific message at her office on Friday giving the reason for my call.  The receptionist said, “I’m going to hang up on you and she’s going to call you back on the cordless.”  I waited AN HOUR for the return call, only for her to finally call me, laugh and say “Can I call you back in a little while?”

She never called me back.

On Saturday, I wasn’t feeling too well and was home alone.  She called and before I could get to the phone the answering machine picked up.  She left a message saying, “I’m sorry, I crashed last night, I’m on my way to Melissa’s for the weekend, she’d already asked … the kids are at Mom’s, love you, bye.”

I tried to call her within a couple of minutes of her leaving the message and I’m assuming she’d turned her phone off, because I called back probably 7 or 8 times and every time it went to her voicemail.  The last time I left a message, an angry, HURT message that I’d been trying to reach her for four days and she could have had the decency to call me and tell me she already had plans so we could get on with our weekend plans ourselves.

I haven’t heard back from her and it’s Tuesday.

I think that in addition to being an “orphan” (our parents are totally not parents), I am now an only child, too.  I think part of what is so disturbing about this is that in our conversation after the kids’ tiff, she made a really big deal about not letting anything damage our relationship because our family has disintegrated to such a small number due to feuding between members.  I can’t for the life of me figure out why she would say all that and then treat me like this.

2.  Out of Pocket for a while … our homeschool group starts co-op classes on Thursday, so I will be getting ready for that.  I’ll be checking in every so often as time permits.

Thanks again for your prayers.