Dear Motts,

The most painful aspect of my broken relationship with my sister is that she began teaching her daughter to disrespect me when the girl was only a pre-teen. I saw her warm, beautiful, pure love-filled heart turned into a cool & distant & disinterested one over time. There was nothing I could do about it. She had no siblings or close cousins to tell her otherwise; they lived in another city, 3 hours away, so it was really very easy for my sister to turn her head and fill her with all kinds of nonsense (which I had watched her do in other circumstances for most of my life). I knew what was happening, and I was powerless to do a THING about it. My Dad was gone; there was no one else to pull her aside and ask her why the huge change in attitude?

By the last time I saw my niece in person, the revulsion the now-teenaged girl felt for me was clear. I had become the "bad joke" of an aunt, one whose opinions and feelings were alternately ignored, sniffed-at, or reviled in the open. The girl was mirroring her mother in every way. To say it broke my heart is a very mild way of saying what it did to me. But I knew, even then, that I had to maintain a kind of detached and non-reactive disposition to this. Having endured years of my sister's sinister torture had trained me up well. I saved my meltdown for the long drive home, and the next week following. That beautiful girl was twisted into someone I will probably never again recognize. (But then, that child's existence had been used a weapon to control several other people's emotional lives over the last 30 years. Too long to go into, here....)

Now, I know from Fb posts and silence over the last 11 years or so, that my sister also managed to turn my niece into a hater and a bigot. I was stunned to find abhorrent and vulgar racist memes posted by my niece, around the time of the second Obama re-lection. I was aghast. I always knew my sister was unread, uninformed, uninterested, shallow, and small-minded, but I never could have believe she was capable of molding my niece into an extreme hater. When I gently questioned the girl about it, she blocked me and has been ghosting me ever since, following a tactic of her mother's. Don't explain yourself, and for God's sake, don't EVER apologize---it makes you look "weak". Since then, I have been unable, in spite of occasional hugs and short messages I send to her, to revive anything like the incredible bond I had with her as a young child. I do believe it is one of my sister's greatest and vilest examples of narcisssistic "pulling the rug out from under someone", that's ever been attempted.

I feel the pain of it everyday. I COMPLETELY understand your unwillingness to forgive your sister.