Bring Your Sister, Bring Your Sister If You Can't Handle It

My stepsister (who is also my cousin -- long story) told our grandmother this weekend that she thinks she and her dad are headed toward the same kind of non-relationship that my father and I have. She's only 16, so it makes me sad that she feels so hopeless about her relationship with her father (though he's been married a couple of times since he and my stepmother split up, and I doubt she and my stepbrother-cousin have cracked the top five on his priority list in a decade or more). I'm strangely flattered, yet also horrified, that she regards me as some kind of model (for good or bad) of how children should interact with their parents. I don't know if she sees me as a cautionary tale or as a folk hero to girls with daddy issues, but she obviously thinks that I might understand how she feels (certainly more than our vengeful old cobra of a grandmother).

My stepsister-cousin and I are over a decade apart in age. I remember being jealous of her before she was born because all the other cousins were boys, and I liked being the only girl. Once she was born, I thought she was a cute little doll, so I kind of came around on the issue of her existence. Even after her mother and my father legalized their unholy union, I liked her. She was still little and cute at the time. As we got older, two things happened: my father and I parted ways and she became a lying little bitch.

It may seem strange that my relationship with my father would impact my relationship with my stepsister-cousin, since he is not a necessary link between us (the biological link is through my mother), but it did. I felt like my father favored his stepchildren over his biological children and that my stepsibling-cousins benefited while my brother and I were short-changed. (Basically, my vicious succubus of a stepmother refused to get a job and commenced bleeding my father's bank account dry and, to stem the tide, he started getting even cheaper than ever before with his actual children.) I resented my stepsibling-cousins for living the high life on my father's dime while my brother and I did without. It isn't fair that I blamed the stepsibling-cousins for the behavior of their mother and my father.

However, the other issue is that the stepsister-cousin (and the stepbrother-cousin, for that matter) have been growing up to be odious little shits. I think they've gotten the worst traits of both of their parents, and they have certainly inherited the lying and the manipulation and the sneakiness from their mother. They told a lie about my mother to their father, which he believed, that contributed toward an overall degradation of their relationship. It's not even clear why they told the lie other than because they just like to tell lies and stir up trouble. That's a much better reason to hate her.

I'm wondering a little bit if I might hear from stepsister-cousin one of these days. She's obviously looking for someone to talk to about her relationship with her dad. My guess is that she's tried to address her concerns with him (in some kind of weird, 16-year-old way), and he rebuffed her. Her villainous mother clearly has not intention of intervening on her behalf, nor does her milquetoast of a brother. I'm a little surprised that she turned to my notoriously self-centered grandmother for support since my grandmother is the ninja assassin of making other people's problems all about her, and it's this evident desperation that makes me wonder if she might reach out to me next.