a very belated lightbulb

So, back in...I dunno, like 2008 or something, my stepbrother sineater friended me on LJ. I was pretty uncomfortable with this; we've had a history of unpleasantness between us, starting with the night my friend X and I threw his soon-to-be wife a "Bachelorette Party" which went horribly awry. bla bla, old old news.

Anyway...he friended me and I was thinking he was expecting me to friend him back, and I was uncomfortable with that, knowing his wife's tendency to treat everything he owns as hers, including, presumably, email and LJ accounts.

Being human and nosy, I went ahead and cut and pasted some of the recent entries for later reading, and then I messaged him with "hey, thanks for friending me, but we've had a hard time with this sort of thing in the past, as far as you and yours reading something I write and deciding I'm a horrible person, etc." and he replied with "it was a mis-click," and unfriended me.

Also around that time I guess is when he posted the public thing about me "stalking and harassing" him and his wife.

Anyway, my cel phone recently died a horrible death and one of the files I'd had saved there was some of those entries. I re-read them, particularly the 'spin' Sineater put on one of our more recent interactions: My mom was in town and Thax and I drove her to the park where his HFS group met, so mom could visit with him and the horses. I stood around and said nothing to no one, his wife babbled at me for a bit [even after I turned my back on her to indicate that I was not interacting with her], and then we left. So, that became, in his interpretation, me using mom and Thax to "stalk and harass"...he said it was a nice visit with mom, and called Thax my "unwitting accomplice"

I guess I'd probably read that before. But reading it again today, something just clicked in my head and I realized Sineater isn't a very nice person. and really, he never has been. When our parents were dating, he spent a good amount of time trying to get into my pants. When we became stepsiblings, he turned his attentions to any female friend I brought into the house. He frustrated and upset our parents by sneaking out of the house to visit various girlfriends over the course of his high school career, and also found interesting ways to disobey house rules re: visitors, phone calls after 10, etc etc. He has pretty much always been a sneaky, disrespectful, lying little weasel. And as soon as he got a chance, he moved out of the family home and back to Austin where he lived with his [obese & abusive, gee sound familiar?] ex stepmom for the last part of his HS, and apparently she treated him like a roommate & he was allowed to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, which was more to his liking than having a family and chores and curfews and rules.

His choice of life-partner was exactly that, his choice. Another spit in the face of his family, who he has never respected or cared about. Maybe it was even a conscious decision to pick someone he knew would fight with and alienate all of us. I don't know.

I won't go so far as to say that he deserves the way she treats him and talks about him, because NO ONE deserves to be hit and yelled at and talked bad about all the time, but it's his choice and that's that.

So...while I love him, because you do always love your family no matter how fucked up they are...I realized today that I really don't LIKE him at all.

If he calls in need of food, or money, or a place to stay, or a place to bury a body, of course I'll be there for him, because that's what family does. But I realized today that I no longer wish to have any sort of emotional intimacy with him, or share my life or my happiness with him. The fact that we don't have that no longer hurts me.

It's very freeing.