ghost of Christmas Past

The year after my mother died, when my daughter was a baby, we scattered her ashes. In the interim, my volatile father had got extremely hurt and angry at me because I didn't want to spend the first Christmas after her death in the family home that she'd had to leave, with him and his new fiance. Yes, perhaps I was playing the part of the protective daughter to too great an extent, but it killed me that her worst fears had come true - we'd all be together playing happy families in her home, and she would be eradicated from the picture. I couldn't bear out that nightmare of hers, in good faith. And I was 4 months pregnant, 5 months married and still shell shocked. I just wanted to be in my new home, trying to climb out of the awfulness of it all.

After a week or so of driving to and from work in floods of hysterical tears everyday, I managed to sort it out. But then, I assumed that given the things he'd said about her, he wouldn't want to participate in the scattering of her ashes the following year. He never mentioned it. And then it transpired that he did, and I copped out and stalled on telling him I didn't want to. I should have just sucked it up and not gone, if I'd felt that way... but at the time I'd turned it in my head into a final goodbye, after which I would make nice with him and his wife, and fake it, and try and just forget about it and get on with life.

Except, he was again very hurt and angry, and stopped talking to me, and cut me out of the money he'd been intending to give me from the sale of her house. His wife apparently told my brother that that wasn't set in stone, and he was waiting to see what I'd do. But I just can't get into that sort of game, I don't have it in me.

I tried to get in touch with him before that Christmas to resolve things, but we missed each other, and alarmingly, Christmas went by without contact. Then I went to talk to him in January and tried to say I was sorry, that I should have bowed out of the ash scattering, as it was my issue, that I was sorry that he was missing out on his granddaughter... his response was that 'given how much of a disappointment you and your brother are to me, and how ripped off I feel by you, grandchildren are an irrelevance'.

Which pretty much told me what I needed to know. I don't feel I can give him the full extent of the relationship he wants with me. While not seeing him over the last years has been uncomfortable, and this unresolved conflict is bad, on the other hand, the decrease in my general anxiety has been worth the wrongness of it. Sometimes we chat politely, when I go to see my granny, or even pop into his house, if there's a particular reason. But he has never extended any invitation or anything beyond that.


A message just rang on my phone. Oo, I thought. Christmas wishes!

'While your self
 righteousness and
ignorance
 is extremely
irritating,
I wish you
and
yours a happy
Christmas,'

Signed by my father.

Yes. Happy Christmas, eh?

The irony is, I've been following his lead. And there's no self righteousness in it. Some self protection, maybe. But what's the point in answering, right? I don't want a horrible text dialogue on Christmas Eve. That one was enough to get my adrenaline pumping and my hands shaking. So I wrote a reply and didn't send it. Because he'd respond the same to anything I said, without hearing a word. Just waiting, to pounce.

I saw a letter my mother wrote him once, a heartfelt, thought out letter, trying to explain things, trying to make things right. And it was covered in his bitchy, insulting, mean, dismissing responses, in red pen, scribbled over her words. That he couldn't understand. It was so sad. I already feel scribbled on enough by his red pen, I don't want any more.

Update: well, my brother came to see me on the way home from my father's and said that he'd confessed to the drunken texting and seemed less than proud of himself. And that his wife had been angry with him for doing it :)

The sad thing is, my brother agreed with me that what he really means is 'love me, I miss you'. But even if he had said that instead... do I want to? It's never going to be easy...