Today I am waking up to think about when my sister came over to my house for Thanksgiving after I got married. I provided all of the food. It was the fourth or so holiday I had provided for my entire extended family by the time I was 25. She was going on 40 and had never provided a holiday meal for anyone.

She sat at my table eating the food I provided and loudly and obnoxiously told me about how when our aunt dies she is going to have to be the matriarch because no one in the family other than her is competent.

The staggering contempt in her words, the lack of awareness of our relative levels of competence to provide support (I paid for her children to go to college because she could not).  She asked me to buy her a house so that she could allow me to rent a room from her.

Somehow I invite this kind of behavior and I don’t understand what I do that causes people to feel that showing contempt for me is acceptable.

I’m thinking really hard about this pattern today.