wedding bells (family, relationships)
my "family" is so fucked up.
sometime in may or june one of my sisters casually mentioned in an email to me the upcoming july wedding of another sister (a step-sister, actually, from my step-mother's brood). at the time i had heard nothing about it, and it was taking place just a month or two down the road. i thought maybe i would get a standard invitation, mailed from the u.s. to my u.s. mailbox or even to brazil, which of course would not have left me time enough to try to find the wherewithall to attend. as it turned out, there were various snafus with my getting my forwarded mail, and nothing came directly to me in brazil.
then i saw pictures of the wedding on my neice's facebook, so i knew that it had taken place. i began these recent u.s. travels with attendance at a family reunion on my mother's side, so the step-sister in reference wouldn't have been there, but i had asked my emailing sister to bring pictures of the wedding for me to see. and now i have finally received all of my mail from both locations, and i apparently was not invited after all. i have no idea what that's about. of course, the invitation could have been lost in the mail. however, in addition to no one informing me in advance about the wedding (whether or not the formal invitations had been mailed) so that as a low-income, international traveler i might have been able to make arrangements to attend, there is also the fact that no other family member mentioned it to me either before or afterwards. it seems that they really didn't want me there.
i initially told my mother that i wouldn't be able to attend the family reunion because (1) i couldn't afford to return to the u.s. again so soon after just having gone back down to brazil and because (2) it was scheduled so early in the summer that it would have left me with too long a period of time in the u.s. during which i would have to look for places to sleep, since i already have to be here in november for medical appointments and other stuff. she didn't offer me any help with regard to either problem. instead, i later had a conversation with one of my best friends - the one who lives in connecticut - who said, "you ALWAYS have a place to stay", and invited me to come and spend a month with her as she could really use my help with her kids due to her work and school commitments over the next several weeks. so i managed to get to my family reunion, which then turned out to include a surprise wedding my mother was planning to her long-time boyfriend.
thank god for my friends, and my boyfriend, and the many other people who enjoy my company, or i might truly be homeless instead of "technically" homeless. every day i am reminded anew of how blessed i am to have them, and am given new reasons to treasure them in my life.
