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Dealing With Faulty Family Members

Nobody is perfect. At least nobody that's alive today. So it's normal to have weird family members and to have relationships that suffer as a result of faults and personality clashes. Still, it seems so much more difficult when the relationships are your own. I've been growing more and more frustrated with my relationship with my sister, we'll call her Mary, over the past few years. That's where this story begins.

I'm older than Mary by three years. We grew up fighting like cats and dogs. Most of the time it seemed that my mother took her side, or even started the fights by pointing out an injustice that had been overlooked by Mary. As we grew older, she and my mom grew really close. I felt pretty ostracized from the family. Things changed a lot when I finally moved out of the house. I got married a few months later and Mary was the maid of honor at my wedding. She was wonderful. I started to believe that our relationship was turning around. She was the perfect sister throughout the engagement and especially on the day of the wedding. While we were getting ready in the bridal room at the church, she hooked up a karaoke machine and we all took turns singing cheesy wedding songs. That memory will forever remain golden and perfect in my mind. My wedding coordinator finally came up there to tell us that we were being too loud and the guests who were arriving could hear us. We all giggled like school girls and proceeded with our hair and make-up. That day seemed like a magical beginning to happily ever after.

Things changed though as time went by. To be honest it took me about four years to see the changes. Apparently the fairytale magic was a short term offer. We rarely saw each other at first, because I'd moved to a new city shortly after my marriage. A couple of years later, she moved to the same city. I was elated. We could actually spend time together and be sisters! For the first six months that she lived in our area, I invited her over for dinner every Sunday night. She actually came over about once a month because she had such a busy study schedule. Once she invited me to come watch her play intramural football and Hubs and I went, with our newborn and shivered in the cold. We really tried to make the relationship work.

It seemed that every time I took a step closer to her, she pulled a step back. The bottom fell out a few months later. My husband was out of town for nine weeks for an on-the-job-training thing and the baby and I both got sick with the flu. When my fever spiked to 101.5, I called my sister and she came over to help. Now, to be quite honest, I was really awful that night. Chalk it up to being sick and being paranoid. But when she started to make a grilled cheese sandwich in the skillet on the stove and the dog was jumping at her feet and my baby was being held in just one arm, I sort of freaked out. I needed to rest, but I felt that I couldn't trust her. It was a disaster. The next day she sat down with me and basically told me not to ask for her help ever again. I took that to mean that I shouldn't count on her at all. Things got really rocky for us after that. We didn't speak much. Finally I asked her to have breakfast with me and she agreed. We went to a Waffle House on a Saturday morning and decided that we would never be best friends. I don't think it's in the cards for us. We'll be doing good to maintain a civil relationship at all. About a year later, her boyfriend proposed. She accepted and immediately assumed that I'd be the maid of honor. A few weeks later she told me that I would be doing the flowers for the wedding too. I told her that I'd be more than happy to do whatever she needed, but that I couldn't feasibly do both at the same time. She freaked out. I was told that I was not being supportive enough. She called our mom and they both agreed that I was not being a very good sister. Long story short, I was demoted to bridesmaid and told that mom would worry about the flowers.

So basically, they don't want me to do much of anything now that I've shown how "unsupportive" I'm going to be. The whole thing upsets me and my husband whenever we talk about it. I feel like I'm really fed up with the way she's treated me for the last few years. Yet, I can't shake the way that she selflessly undertook the role of maid of honor for my wedding. She truly did a fabulous job. Part of me feels that I should do everything in my power to make her day just as special, because she made mine so much fun. I need some advice from objective bystanders. How should I handle this and what would you do in this situation? Is it horrible of me to wish that I could just make the whole thing go away?