These are not your kids. Sounds like they aren't even your sisters. They are just some sort of "friends".
They may or may not have anyone else. That is not your problem.
Your first responsibility is to look after yourself. Do whatever you have to do to maintain your own health and sanity
Just as happened with my mother, I have been learning that my sister is nothing like the person I believed her to be. That is the key that allowed me to change my responses without feeling guilty, or without feeling that I had abrogated a responsibility that felt sacred. At the heart of it was that I did not want, ever, to be the person who hurt someone else as I had been hurt and hurt and hurt.
There are predators out there. Some of them are our sisters. Some of them are our friends. Some are our mates. They fasten onto us and, unless they are persons of integrity themselves, use us to justify condemning us with their own twisted hurts from their own pasts. I think they do this so they don't have to look at themselves, but I am not so sure about that part.
Maybe they just enjoy hurting others.
It's the strangest thing.
But it is a true thing.
Perhaps this is what your friends are doing. As we choose healthier responses, those kinds of predators in our lives go ballistic trying to justify why you are supposed to serve their needs. This is what I think I know about that: Predators go about their lives justifying themselves through condemning other people for the things the predator routinely does. If they can dump that onto you somehow, they will. That is why they seek us out. To feel they have dumped their own twistedness legitimately. We are always running around forgiving and understanding and the predator just gets more and more out of whack. It gets to be a legitimate dumping for them when the victim they have targeted and groomed believes he or she is responsible for the happiness of the predator
which is exactly what our abusers taught us was true for us to begin with.
That is why we stay.
That feels right to us.
That is why we believe we are responsible. Because of them. It isn't that we are so foolish, or so egotistic as to believe we matter more than anyone else. It is that our abusers taught us we deserved the way they were hurting us. they even taught us that if hurting us made them happy...then that was okay; that it was okay to hurt us, that it was okay for us to work like dogs, that it was okay for us not to plan or cherish our lives for the wonder that it is to be alive, but only for the service we could give to them.
Oh, those dirty, dirty rats.
When the predator who has fastened onto us this time is very skilled, is very subtle, we will take responsibility for their "pain", for their suddenly discovered sense of betrayal ~ pretty much, for anything at all without even knowing we have done so. Most predators are pretty slimy and inefficient and without the barest beginnings of finesse but even so, we never see that though until we begin to heal.
That we are the way we are has nothing to do with those currently taking advantage of the ways we were hurt when we were little. They are not all powerful persons who hold us in thrall. They are come into our lives to teach us to stand up. Whatever sense of power or legitimacy we see in them has nothing to do with them. It has to do with our attempts to heal our woundedness through re-enacting the situations we survived as little kids.
But we are grown ups, now.
We never have to listen to them, or to anyone like them, ever again.
They have nothing to teach us.
Just another predator; as they act out their predation, we realize we always knew they would do this. If we broaden our scopes, we will see these patterns in other aspects of their lives.
Just another predator.
The healing that needs to happen is within us, and is readily accessible.
All we need to do is change our minds about the things we were taught about ourselves, and about the purpose of our lives, and about whatever value we could have in the hellishness that was our only reality when we were little girls (or little boys) and were repeatedly betrayed and victimized by our own mothers and fathers.
Abuse does not happen in a vacuum.
There were good things taught us too, in our FOO. Our job now, if and when we decide to heal, is to eradicate the validity in the lies they taught us about ourselves. This has nothing to do with them personally, any more than the abuse dealt us at their hands had anything in the world to do with us, personally. They would have abused any child they had. They did abuse every child they had. The roles in dysfunctional families are so similar it makes me sick.
But it is not so simple a matter, to step out of them.
What they taught us was that we were slaves to their happiness. That is the lesson, that is the thing we learned at their hands, have believed all our lives, and that we need to unlearn. Our stories are long and complex. Unraveling where and how we learned to take responsibility for the other guy's dysfunction so he or she could go blithely through their lives will be different for each of us.
But the basic truth is the same one.
We are responsible for soothing others. We are responsible for believing in them when they cannot believe in themselves. We are responsible when they hurt us; we are responsible when they hate us. These things feel like sacred responsibilities to us.
None of that is true.
They lied to us because they lie to themselves.
Oh, man. It looks like I am knowing everything again this morning.
I think I know this, though.
Cedar
I keep looking for that place where I will turn out to have been wrong ~ where I will turn out to be the jealous, grasping one.
I keep not finding it.
I experience jealousy, of course. They say jealousy teaches us what we want for ourselves, next. I experience shame, and fear, and those terrible feelings of less than or weakness or deep sadness at the futility of it all. But then I think that is all okay. That is human, to feel those things.
I get to not be perfect. I get to lean in, as Brene Brown writes.
I remind myself of something else Brene says: That we humans are hard wired for challenge from the moment of conception. Everything is hard wired for challenge, here where we all are competing for space and light and food and water and love.
So, we are in good company, there.
The more I review the past from this new position, the more unbelievable the whole thing seems...but the more seamlessly the formerly disparate pieces fit together.
As my feelings for my sister changed, I was afraid not to take her calls, too. I didn't want to take them because I was becoming angry with her, but I continued to keep picking up for her because I felt foolish; it felt deeply wrong not to believe in her. I wondered what kind of person I was, wondered who would think such things about her own sister, her own mother, and etc. The more I review everything though, the more I see how ragingly dysfunctional every bit of it was.
So...if nothing was as I believed it to be, if there was never the slimmest chance that we could all come together as a family where everyone sat at the same table instead of ostracizing the typically ostracized one and creating drama or throwing children into the center of a family gathering with repetitious activities even my sister, for heaven's sake, had to know were boring and blah, blah, blah....
Ooops.
Lost my chain of thought, there.
roar
What I meant to say boils down to this: They lie. For whatever reason (and a person who would beat a child over time and as a matter of course, and who would change her preferred method of abuse as the children matured, and a father who would allow it ~ that person would have to lie, would have to be a liar to themselves and everyone else, about who they were and who you were and who I was. Oh, those dirty rats!!!)
Ahem.
I meant, "Oh, those dysfunctional bastards."
:O)
Cedar