To My Possible Future Little Sister-in Law

Dear "Little Sister",

I’ve written you twice now in hopes of repairing the damage my presence has done in your family.  The first time it was clear that you didn’t want to hear what I had to say.  It felt like you were looking for a reason to hate me.  Many of your responses conjured the feel that you’re looking for a fight.  You wanted me to get angry and retaliate.  It seemed like you were trying to get me to respond in anger.  Instead I answered you with reason, understanding, and explanation.  While I keep trying in hopes that you will change your opinion of me, I doubt my efforts will make much of a difference.  You’ve already set it in your mind to hate me from taking your brother away from you and your father.  No matter how hard I try, until you are willing to open up to the possibility that I am not what you make me out to be, you are never going to give me a chance.

Let me tell you that I love your brother very much.  It hurts me to see how pained he is by the events that have shaped his life and the distance that has come between you in all of this.  If I could fix it all, I would, but many of his wounds are going to take time to heal.  I understand and respect that.  If I didn’t, I never would have given him another chance after he left me for some other woman.  While what he did still hurts, I’ve come to accept it, forgive him, and am waiting as patiently as possible for him to be ready to talk about it.  It’s not always easy for me to be patient with him, to accept that he won’t change for the better overnight, or change the negative patterns that have been programmed into him by the way he was raised.  It would be easier, in many ways, if I was there for all of it, but if I were, I wouldn’t be able to offer him the same perspective of being an outsider.  Were it not for the love I have for him, I would have given up long ago, written it all off as a lost cause, or simply left as soon as I saw things in him I didn’t like.

I’m not saying your brother is perfect in any way when I talk about his past, nor am I relieving him of any fault in his history.  There are simply things about him that I can acknowledge as being part of what has damaged him, and as a result, made him who he is today.  There are things about him that neither you nor I will never be able to understand.  We weren’t there.  We didn’t live through it.  We don’t even have close to a similar experience, so we couldn’t possibly know.  You place all the blame on him for being a troubled teenager.  You claim that he was treated equally as you were, but how can you know for sure?  Have you ever talked to him about it?  Have you ever listened to how he feels on the matter?  When I say listen I mean really listen, without judgment, bias, or attempt to justify how anyone else acted in the situation.  Have you ever really taken the time to find out how it feels to be who he is, why he did the things he’s done, or what drives him in life?  Perhaps if you did you would have a deeper understanding of what he’s going through right now, not just write him off as being ill-tempered, controlled by the woman in his life, and disrespectful.

You don’t know what it’s like to have never known your father.  You can write him off easily enough saying his biological father was just the "sperm donor father" and that your father was his real father, but perhaps that’s not how he feels.  Just because a person calls someone "dad" does not make them his father.  Before your father came into the picture, he had another half-brother with a different father.  Then your dad comes along.  There’s this touching story I was told about him walking up to your dad and asking "Are you my Daddy?" and from then on that’s how it was.  In truth, to a kid that age it probably had nothing to do with his like of your father.  It probably had more to do with everyone else having a mother and a father.  What kid wouldn’t question where his own was?  However, it was never his true father.  He would live his life knowing that he was only the step-son.  When you came along he had a whole new emotion to contend with.  Now he had to compete for attention with the real daughter.  He also had to grow up watching you have special moments with your real father while he had to know every day that he would never meet his real father.

Maybe it would have been different if his real father were still alive and out there somewhere.  If he had been a deadbeat dad or run out by your mother, some day he could find that father.  He could reconnect and maybe they could build a relationship.  Your brother doesn’t have that luxury.  Your mother has told him that his father died before he was even born.  Your mother married someone else after the death and before your brother’s birth, so he doesn’t even have your father’s last name.  Instead he has the name of someone else your mother married, someone who didn’t really want him either in the end.  I can’t even imagine what it must have felt like as a young child to have a mother jump from relationship to relationship as she did.  I can’t imagine what it would feel like to grow up knowing you never had a chance to meet your own father, that your father never knew you were born, what your name was, or even got a chance to hold you.  In a day and age where step-kids and divorce are common, it’s not hard to meet someone who can understand the step-dad thing, but having a parent that died before you were born?  That’s not exactly something you hear every day.

Can you have any idea what it must feel like to grow up with a parent that isn’t your own flesh and blood?  I know you couldn’t possibly.  I’ve had many friends with step-parents or who were adopted.  Almost every single one of them has had at least moments where they’ve resented their step-parent.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard my own daughter scream, "You can’t tell me what to do!  You’re not my Daddy!"  That’s normal for a step-kid.  As much as my son thinks of your brother as his dad, he’ll always know that your brother isn’t.  There will be a day when that will be a challenge for him and I only hope your brother and I can help him through it.  It’s going to be hard for both my kids to be raised by someone who isn’t their dad, especially when they’ve got a half-sibling that is being raised by it’s own flesh and blood.  Who can blame them?  It’s not easy for a kid to understand, but hopefully when they’re older they’ll understand.

I’ve listened to countless stories of Oz’s youth.  He used to get jealous of the time you spent with your dad.  He talks about times where you and your father went off to the bedroom, played on the bed for a while, then took a nap together.  He was always jealous about that.  H

e’s talked about listening to you laugh together all the time, and how you were always so perfect.  Maybe you did make your fair share of mistakes and were punished equally, but to a kid, that’s not what he was seeing.  He was seeing the man who was responsible for raising him having more fun with his own daughter than he had ever had with his step-son.  In many ways it felt like you were the favorite, and I can see a lot of that favoritism shine through today, not just through your brother’s perspective, but from observances of my own.  He felt like he was never good enough and you would always be better.  Whether that was true or not doesn’t matter.  How he felt matters.  No one taking the time to make sure he felt like he was an equal is what matters.  The fact that no one saw this wound he had starting to fester into something that would cause problems later in his life is what matters.  I think in that aspect, you’re writing the whole thing off as being simple and easy to justify.  When it comes to the inner workings of the mind, nothing is that easy to explain.

Your father has many practices and policies that worry me, things I would find unacceptable and even neglectful of a parent were I to witness them myself.  While you may have no problems with these practices, you were raised with them.  It’s easier to be brainwashed into thinking behaviors are acceptable when you live with them every day, but once an outsider walks in, their reality isn’t so easy to distort.  Your father is not the perfect paragon of mankind you paint him out to be.  He is a very flawed man and I don’t even have to take the time to truly know him to see that for myself.

In discipline, your father was rigid and strict.  I never hear about your brother being punished by your mother.  I only hear punishments being doled out by your father.  Just think, for a moment, how you would feel watching your mother sit back and let some man that isn’t even your real father punish you for the wrongs you’ve done.  I can’t imagine you would be terribly happy about that situation.  Then let’s look at the punishment, total lack of freedom.  Your brother had to sit on the couch, not moving, all day long.  What does that truly teach a child?  You claim your family’s only rules were against lying, stealing, and failing classes, but as a parent and having enough brains in my head to know better, I can be certain that there were more rules than that.  Even if those were the only rules, being forced to sit, quietly on the couch all day while everyone enjoyed life around me wouldn’t teach me not to do whatever got me in trouble.  It would just teach me not to get caught next time.  If you’re just going to be punished for admitting it when you do something wrong, why not attempt to lie about it.  If you lie, there’s a chance you won’t get caught and can get away with it.  If you tell the truth, you’ll be punished either way.  Spend enough time in solitary confinement and you’re going to start looking for ways to get things you aren’t allowed to have or to have fun anyways.  Where else would his stealing and skipping school start?  Wouldn’t you consider stealing if you were never allowed to have the things you wanted, yet everyone else could?  Wouldn’t you consider skipping school so you could have some fun if you knew you’d be coming home to confinement on the couch anyways?  Can you honestly say it was the same punishments that worked on you or was it watching your brother’s failures?  Isn’t that what the "scared straight" program is about?

In reality, children aren’t just bad for no reason.  No one is bad for no reason.  You may totally discredit the fact that I study psychology, or claim that it’s that study that has me controlling him, but in the end, I think if your family had a little more knowledge about the science you might all be better off for it.  Heaven knows your mother would have been less likely to get in so many failed relationships or destroyed her own son’s credit for her own gain.  Your father wouldn’t likely be dating women young enough to be his own children.  Somehow I think your brother wouldn’t have been such a problem child if someone had applied a little psychology to his case.  Bad behavior, no matter what the age of the person, is always in reaction to something that is happening or has happened in the past and how they handle it.  For example, perhaps your brother was acting up to get more attention from your father, feeling kind of replaced when you were born and became competition.  Maybe it was just the usual baby jealousy issue compounded by the fact that this man wasn’t his real father.  Maybe he was reacting to the fact that he would never know his father, yet you were special and got to have your father.  I can only assume that’s where the other half-brother was raised, by his own father.  Perhaps that just hurt too much, especially with the way your mother seems to have been.  Maybe he wished he could be like his siblings and could live with his own father.  These are just the possibilities that relate to being a step-son with a father who’s deceased.  This isn’t even touching the rest of the possible reasons for the start of the misbehaving pattern.  Children never just wake up one day and decide to be bad.  There’s always a reason.

Why do I bring this up?  Maybe someone could have stopped this pattern of misbehavior before it got as bad as it did.  I sincerely doubt he just woke up in high school and decided to do everything in his power to get in trouble.  People just don’t work that way.  It’s illogical.  It’s possible that somewhere along the line he was going to get in trouble for something anyways, so why care?  Eventually the punishments probably extended so far out that there was no point in worrying about it.  He couldn’t be punished more than he already was and your parents were just going to come up with something he did wrong anyways, so why did it matter?  I’m not saying he would have been right on this, but from his perspective, he probably believed that it was your parents being unfair that made him do the things he did to get in trouble.  I know this because that’s how I was.  That’s how my friends were.  That’s how a lot of problem kids are.  It’s not about the punishment anymore.  You just do whatever the hell you want to do because being punished just doesn’t matter anymore.  If you’re going to have to suffer anyways, you might as well do something fun to actually deserve it.

Then there’s your father’s policy about being open and honest whenever kids have questions.  For the most part, I think that’s a good policy.  If a child is old enough to ask, they’re old enough to know the answers to their questions.  That’s why my daughter has never thought the stork brings babies, because she asked where babies come from when we found out we were having her brother, so I told her. 

I didn’t tell her about sex.  I pretty much said that when a boy and a girl get together, they can put a baby in the girl’s belly.  That baby has to grow up in there and then explained childbirth.  This time around she wants to know all the gory details, like how you squeeze that big baby through the tiny pelvic bone and how the baby develops.  However, I’m still not ready to have the sex talk with her.  She’s only six!  Yes, I do believe that my children deserve answers to their questions.  I don’t believe in lying to them.  However, a certain amount of descression is required when answering a child.  There are just things I think she’s not really old enough to handle.

There are countless people I’ve known who have learned about things like sex and drugs from a very young age.  Their parents were open, honest, and detailed.  They thought they were doing their children a service by not hiding anything.  Instead, these same children decided to go try it out themselves.  I’ve heard of kids as young as six having sex because someone told them about it and they wanted to see what it was like.  I knew an eight year old that was injecting some kind of drug or another because someone told them how it worked, what it did, and how people did it.  I’m not saying every kid who learns the full story when they’re old enough to ask is going to get hooked on drugs or turn into a twelve year old prostitute (yes, I’ve met one), but it’s my responsibility to be sure that doesn’t happen.  For that matter, its the same for any subject.  I wouldn’t be telling my daughter the physics behind a black hole.  I’d explain it to her in a way she would be more likely to understand at her age.  However, I know from your brother that your father was likely giving out details to the both of you about sex at an age that I wouldn’t be so comfortable with were it my own kids.  My children are my responsibility, and just because your father feels his way is right does not mean my children should be getting those answers from him, especially knowing I wouldn’t approve.

Your father isn’t flawless in other ways either, especially with his taste in women.  I know you’ve said that people marry someone young enough to be their own child in this country all the time and that society doesn’t have a problem with it.  You say I have no right to judge.  Do you know why people marry someone twice their age?  It’s generally not because they’re happy.  It’s generally not because they’re in love.  Usually it’s for money.  They marry someone who is older and wealthy in hopes that they’ll be set for the rest of their lives.  I should know!  Not only have I known people who have done it, but I had the opportunity to do it myself and turned it down for love.  Many young women who date men as old as your father are trying to make up for the absence of a father figure in their own life.  Many of them are looking to cast someone as their molesters or abusers from their own childhoods.  Most women who date men who are that much older than them aren’t mentally healthy, so to say it’s okay for your father to date them is akin to saying that it’s okay for them to behave like that instead of looking to heal from their own past.  He is only encouraging these girls to follow an unhealthy path in life instead of encouraging them to heal, grow, and find true happiness.  It’s also not healthy for a man to date a woman so much younger than he is.  For many of them it’s a way to recapture their youth.  It’s a status symbol, a way to prove that they’re still on top of their game.  It wins them macho points in their circles of friends.  Instead of looking to find real happiness, he’s looking for the feel good bonus of still having it enough to nail some hot young number.  He doesn’t care if she loves him.  He doesn’t care if she gives a damn about his wants and goals in life.  The only care he has is what kind of sexual pleasure he gets out of them, and when they get to clingy, he casts them off.  It’s not a healthy behavior either, not something I think you should support or encourage.

You’ve talked about how incredibly respectful he is of women, yet I haven’t seen any evidence of it.  The day I met him he was telling your brother about ditching the last girl because she was getting to clingy.  He talks about women in terms of how sexy they are and what sexual favors they’ll grant.  He gives them worth based on youth, breast size, and weight.  This isn’t something I think is terribly respectful, do you?  He’s not looking at the person.  He’s looking at the sex symbol.  I don’t care what you say about how respectful he is, he uses women for sex and tosses them aside when he’s done.  He’s in it for pleasure and satisfaction.  It’s got nothing to do with respect.  Hell, you want to hear what I think about the whole respect thing?  Do you know what he told your brother to say to me when he found out I was a belly dancer?  He said, "Tell her to sit on it and wiggle."  Then he laughed it off as though saying things like that were appropriate.  I’m sorry, but more of what comes out of that man’s mouth could get him arrested for sexual harassment charges than I think you’re willing to admit.  So what if you justify it as "guy talk"?  That makes it any better?  Is that somehow supposed to make me feel better about the kinds of comments he’s made?  I’ll be honest, I don’t want him to so much as see a picture of me until my child weans.  If it’s anything like the last time, I don’t want to hear the comments about the 32G bra size I had if it was anything like the last time.  I don’t want to hear about the baby fat making me curvier and therefore more sexy.  It’s one of the reasons your brother has brought so few women home!  He doesn’t want your father hitting on them!  Shouldn’t that tell you something?

What about the drugs?  I don’t know if he’s ever done more than drink and smoke pot, nor do I care.  However, it does bother me that he smokes pot in front of the children he was responsible for.  Your brother has told me about him smoking pot for quite some time, at the least.  I’ve even seen him smoke in a house where his own under-age daughter was present and in the room.  Do you realize he could get arrested for that?  You could be removed from the house for the short time until you’re eighteen.  It’s one thing to smoke pot, which is illegal enough, but to expose a minor is a major offense.  He was flat out pressuring me to smoke with him as well.  Regardless of whether or not I’ve ever smoked pot, I declined once and that should have been enough.  Constant pushing to smoke or drink so I would loosen up was completely uncomfortable and unappreciated.  I was very tempted to tell your brother that the whole thing made me very uncomfortable and I wanted to go home, but I didn’t.  I was trying to get to know your family and didn’t w

ant to screw things up by leaving because the whole thing made me uncomfortable.

I think it’s time you woke up and took a good, hard look at your father.  He’s not nearly so flawless as you paint him out to be.  He’s not the good guy in all of this and I am certainly not the bad guy.  I’m sure if he took the time to live the beliefs of the druid tradition, as he claims to follow, he wouldn’t be the kind of man he is now.  He would be living in a way where he would treat all living beings with respect, not be crass, self-serving, and disrespectful.  He’s not looking to live in harmony with the world around him.  He’s looking for an excuse to remain a rebellious teenage boy trapped in the body of a middle aged man.

That’s where we come to your judgment of me.  You talk about researching the "Dianaism" I follow, yet you seem to know nothing about it.  For starters, it’s "Dianic Wicca" or "the Dianic Tradition".  Further, you tell me that my beliefs are so hypocritical because I don’t practice what my religion preaches.  How would you truly know that?  You can’t even give me one reason why I don’t follow the edicts of the Dianic Tradition.  It seems like a stab in the dark just to try and anger me, to goad me into a fight.

Let me tell you a little about my beliefs.  Wicca of all forms follows one portion of the Wiccan Rede more than all others, "An it harm ye none, do what ye will."  To sum that up in layman’s terms, as long as you’re not hurting anyone, go for it.  The Dianic Tradition is about creating peace and harmony.  There is a huge encouragement to seek peace out in our own lives.  The idea is that women need women’s space for things only women can understand.  Men can’t give birth to a child.  Men don’t have to suffer PMS or their period.  Men can’t breastfeed their children.  Men have an entirely different brain chemistry, which has been proven by science.  Your brother and I have talked about this too.  There should be equal men’s space, but most men aren’t ready to accept that they have a need for this kind of spirituality as well.  Dianics seek to elevate women to equality with men.  They are true feminists.  They don’t tolerate disrespect from men, nor being treated like sex icons or pieces of meat.  They do not tolerate sexual harassment.  They hurt for the wounded sisters in womanhood who are psychologically damaged by men, both men like your father and much worse.  They feel women deserve far better than being used by men for sexual pleasure.  They value the strength of a mother to protect and nurture her children, and the fierceness with which she can defend her family.  The embrace the psychology behind myths that teach women valuable life lessons.  These women are often well educated, fair well studied in psychology, and often victims of abuses at the hands of men.  They stand firmly in their belief that people like rapists need to come to justice and be punished for their crimes.  All men who use, disrespect, and degrade women deserve to know what it’s like to be devalued the way their words or actions devalue the women around them.  For the most part, it’s a path of peace and harmony.  Dianics seek healing for the wrongs done by men in the past and the sick view men are allowed and even encouraged to have of women in society.  We seek to make the world a better, more peaceful, more comfortable, and safer place for all the Goddess’s children, no matter what gender they happen to be.

As much as you say I’m using psychology to control your brother, that’s untrue.  I’m trying to help him heal from the wounds of his own past.  Psychology can be used to help heal mental and emotional wounds.  I’m sorry that this is reflecting back on your father in the way that it is, but everyone gets what they deserve in the end.  Your brother’s choice to heal has created waves.  Unfortunately, your father is part of the negative cycle.  It should say something that the first thing he said after all of five minutes of tears when he told your father he was done was that he felt relieved, like a huge burden was just taken off of his shoulders.  For the first time in weeks he was genuinely happy.  I felt like a total heel.  I apologized to him for causing this rift between them at least three dozen times.  The end result was the last thing I wanted, but he was happier.  In the end it was his decision.  While I may have caused the fight, I never forced him to choose.  I never expected him to tell your father he was done and wouldn’t talk to him again unless he changed his actions, but he did.  It was what he needed at the time, not what I wanted.  I’m really proud of him.  I’d like to say I have some credit in all of this in encouraging him to heal, but in the end nothing I ever said would have mattered if he didn’t make the choice to heal himself.  All the psychological reasoning in the world would have made no difference if it wasn’t what he really wanted in the end.  Your brother is far too strong and willful to let anyone ever control him.

In the end, I realize I’m dealing with someone who is just a child.  I’m not just saying that because you’re not even eighteen.  The way you write is uneducated and it’s clear you don’t know how to spell.  I hate to say it, but I wonder if you need a dictionary to translate some of what I’ve said.  I have a hard time taking someone seriously who starts out a message with "ur rite u r the last person i want 2 talk 2 rite now", or with a run on sentence so long that I’ve got to question what it actually means.  It’s clear there’s supposed to be a break in there somewhere, but with no comma it’s very challenging to figure out where.  Depending on where that break should be, that sentence could have two very different meanings.  Your apparent lack of education isn’t the only thing that proves how childish you really are, though I do think you need to drastically improve your writing skills if you ever want to have a future beyond a burger joint.  However, it’s your attempt to goad me into a fight with half truths, uneducated responses, and blind defenses that really have no bearing on anything that prove to me how much of a child you really are.  I shouldn’t be surprised as you’re still in high school and very much still under your father’s wing.  Normally I wouldn’t even bother with someone like you, but you’re the sister of someone who is very important to me.  It pains him to know that you’re not in his life anymore, whether he’ll admit it or not.  He wants his sister back, so I’m making my every effort to do what I can to repair the relationship.  You don’t have to like me, I could care less if you do, but you should at least have the decency to respect your brother’s decisions.  You can accept him for the person he is becoming and support his journey to find the healing he needs, even if