My Hell in Paradise – Part IV (The Attack)

All the little insults my sister had for me came to a head, and here’s the set-up.  We all know that it’s an industry-wide policy in hotels that you are no longer a guest after 11:00 am on your last day.  In resorts this means you may still be there after 11:00 if you don’t have to leave for the airport until later, but all you do is lose your all-inclusive wristband.  You can still use the resort normally and only have to now put any food or drinks you’d like to your credit card.

I repeat, this is industry-wide.

But not for my sister.  It turns out that my sister had asked the concierge to set up a meeting with the head resort manager as she didn’t find this agreeable with her.  She wasn’t leaving for the airport until 4:00 pm on her last day and she wanted to have her all-inclusive wristband during that time.  It didn’t matter that this was unusual and that they didn’t have other options for her.  I was in the office with her and my dad as a tag-along while the manager is trying to work something out.  Why?  Because my sister is one of those fake people with a smile pasted on their face but has an aggressive, strident manner that says simply that she will get what she wants, OR ELSE.

The manager was on the phone for a bit while we were in the office so I chatted a bit about nothing in particular I can remember.  I have the kind of voice that people are always asking me to speak up.  But while I’m talking my sister tells me to, “Be quiet, he’s on the phone” in a hard bitchy tone.  I know how to talk when someone’s on the phone, she just didn’t want to talk to me.  This was the final insult.  I quietly left the room.

A little later I saw them in the very large resort reception area.  It was the central area to several different things and entrances, like a sports bar, a desert shop, the elevators, etc., so there were tons of guests throughout it.  I, for one of the first times in my life, felt I needed to set a boundary and although I was inexperienced and afraid, I approached her.  I knew she could be volatile so I figured I’d set this boundary while in public where she’d have to just hear it instead of in our room where she’d might go off on me.  She said hi and about to say what they were up to, like nothing had even happened.  I told her quietly that I would like it if she would never tell me to be quiet again, obviously not willing to pretend what just happened didn’t happen.

SHE FLIPPED OUT.  Right there in front of about 100 people or more, she began screaming at me.  She came right at me to get in my face but, due to my mother screaming and physically attacking me at a drop of a hat as a child and teenager, I wasn’t afraid.  I got steely, held my ground, looked right into her eyes with what must have been my suddenly hard eyes (I don’t like being attacked), and asked her directly if she was crazy.  She suddenly went quiet with an awareness of where she was and began to stomp away down a side corridor that led to our section of the resort.  My dad was standing right there and saw it all.

I decided to go down the same corridor as my instincts told me she was going to go back to the hotel room and tell our mother a lie of what occurred in order to string me up.  I thought it best that I make sure I was there to hear what she was going to say.  My dad followed behind me.

Along the way she slowed down a bit, which I didn’t want her to do. We still had quite a way until we were at our particular building at the far end of the resort.  She turned to me again and in a rage said something to me that I can’t remember now, but I responded still holding my ground, but continuing to walk as I wasn’t agreeing to a physical confrontation, which it seemed she wanted me to do.  I could tell she was seeing red by the look of her face and eyes and she went at me with her hands like claws, only momentarily grabbing my arm before getting a hold of herself.  She then side body-checked me and I turned to our father, who I’d knew would be on his daughter’s side (I’m his adoptee) and said something along the lines of “See, you saw that” to make sure that when he sided with my sister that he’d do it with a bad conscience.  My sister responded that it was because she just didn’t have room to walk.  It was a lame defense as we all saw what she did and that there was plenty of room, she was the one who approached and crowded me and then bashed her body into mine out of frustration.

Here’s the crazy-making thing for me that tries to destroy my mind and soul, and it’s been this way since I was a child.  Everyone else can see the injustice to me, can see that something wasn’t my fault but the fault of another, but EVERY SINGLE TIME the family policy is that it’s my fault.  It’s like they have to have a shattered mind to continually see something plainly but always call it something else.

My sister bullied and pecked at me all along the way, then when I didn’t have to behave like a guest as I did in her condo, I finally made the necessary stand for myself.  She raged at me verbally but I didn’t back down.  So she went for the physical attack but saw I didn’t flinch and basically reminded her and dad that he was a witness.  Now what can she do?  She was out of tools of intimidation.

She raged off ahead of us again.  I wonder what was going through her head as she hoofed off, though I wonder if she was thinking she could kill me.  I have reason to believe this is a good possibility, which I’ll explain in another post.  She’s what I call a ‘deather’.  And it’s not that I thought she’d actually do it, but I do think it was a sudden fantasy in her head at this point.  Anyway, whatever was going through her mind, God did something to snap her out of it.  I know it was a God-thing, I was very worried about what was going to happen to me now when this next thing happened and I right away knew it was Him.

It had just rained a little and it was slippery and she slipped, right ahead of me and in front of other guests.  The guests, two young women being normal, went to help her up asking if she was okay.  She got up mostly herself and wouldn’t even look at them, taking off again in what I suspect was total mortification.  I would think that if there’s anything a narcissist wouldn’t like is something like that happening anywhere, let alone under these sort of circumstances.

I immediately thought, “Thank you, God”as I directly felt He was behind it.

She had been humbled and, although she was still immensely angry, she lost the haughty edge off of it that was fueling her with a sense of power.  You could tell the difference when we got to our room.  She almost had to regroup before she came at me for the attack in front of my parents, who let it happen.

She said we have to talk and I said, okay, but you have to speak quietly and we’ll move to another room to do it (away from our parents so they wouldn’t be dragged into it).  She said, no, here, so I said, okay, I’ll just have to let Mom and Dad know how you’ve been treating me all along.  Then I heard my mother lightly snort behind me, as if she was letting me know she wouldn’t care what my sister did to me.

I mentioned that she had been unwelcoming to me since day one at her condo and that having me leave to my parent’s guest room the last night was the final insult.  She said it was because she couldn’t trust me because she got up in the middle of the night to find that I had left water running in the bathroom sink, and who knows what could have happened if she hadn’t seen it.  This is the lie that she had told my parents.  I didn’t know what she was talking about, I know how to turn off faucets for crying out loud, what was she on about?  I searched my mind and said the only thing I could think of was that I did get up to use the washroom one more time after reading to wind down and then turn in to sleep one night.  I already had my earplugs in (yes, I  sleep with those, it helps!).  Since if I’m unfamiliar with her faucet knobs perhaps I hadn’t turned them completely all the way off and my earplugs covered the slight hissing sound a tiny stream of water would make out of the faucet.  This is far from the impression she seemed to give my parents that I had left water running full force, like I had dementia or something.

She didn’t deny it.  She was caught with me giving the more reasonable story than the one she told my parents.  I live in a house, I reminded them, and I manage it just fine with more rooms and a yard and responsibilities than a small condo.  Did she really think she could get my parents to believe that I’m so incapable of normal things and they believe it when they obviously know differently about me?  I think it was more an issue of them being okay with her saying crap about me than it was about it being plausible or not.  I now believe she made this up to get me out of her condo because she was angry that I questioned her story about her charity to the guy who wanted to walk with her.

While she hollering at the top of her lungs at me (the whole hotel section would have heard her) and I’m defending myself, my parents were sitting on the couch with my mom with a soft twisted smile on her face.

They later joined in the attack, saying that I always see things wrong, that I’ve always take things the wrong way.  No, they were wrong things, and I took them the right way.

So now my mind is just on salvaging mode because I still had another day with them.  She said I was in a bad mood, ruining their vacation, when it was my little four day vacation that was ruined.  I told them I was in a bad mood now because I warned everyone that because of my CFS I would be exhausted and would need more sleep and recoup time than everyone else.  I said I was barely given that and that the more they pecked at me the more I couldn’t handle it and had to keep them at bay.  I then went into how severe CFS can get for a person and that it’s a serious illness, which I’m sure went in one ear and out the other.  But to pull the “I have an illness” card was all I had because nothing else I said would matter to them.  It’s not that they cared, it’s that they would know that it would look bad if I mentioned that and they still went after me.  I was in survival mode and had to spend another day trapped with these three who were all on the same side hating on me.

My sisters response in the lobby and as we were making our way back to our room is exactly what my mother was like to me since my earliest memories at three-years-old, only my mother would actually physically attack me.  I’m sure she did it before I was three, of course, but my memories only began then.  I fear she did this to me when I was immobile in a crib as an infant, which would account for the feeling that I will be killed or annihilated.  Of course, the same feeling could have come even if she started when I could crawl or walk.  It just seems even more terrible to do to a trapped infant who still has no sense of separation from the mother, so I hope that didn’t happen.  She was a teacher before getting married so she was very much into the appearances of things, never attacking me in a way that bruises would show beyond clothing.  It wasn’t organized physical attacks anyway, they were blind rages.  They usually comprised of me in a fetal position as she pummeled her fists all over me while screaming out her rage.

So you can see why my mother didn’t care that my sister was treating me the exact same way she did.  It’s what I was there for, it’s just what one does with me when I have the audacity to speak up.

This is how I spent my last full day:  I mentioned that my sister wanted to keep her wristband (all-inclusive) on her last day.  How they accommodated that for her was that we could all go without a day ahead of time to not have wristbands and then go back to them again up to the time they left.  Guess which day they decided to go without wristbands?  My last day.  Of course.  I was bitter about this as I wasn’t even there just for most of the day, it was for a full day as I left at 4:00 am the next day.  So, there was some inconvenience for me, which would have been okay, except that my inconvenience was for my sister’s and parent’s benefit.  Why wouldn’t they just drop it and do it the way everyone else in the world does it if they could see it was going to be a problem for one of us?  Or just wait until I left and then go a day without the wristbands, being that they were there for another ten days?  Rhetorical questions, of course.

I left for the airport on my own and one of my younger sisters picked me up at the airport.  That is another story for another day.

I think any reader will understand that I will never willingly speak to my older sister again.  It’s not required of me.  She has so gutted me out through a lifetime of her bullying that there isn’t any space in my life or psyche to tolerate one more minute of her voice or attitude.

It has taken me six months to be able to write about this.  It’s made me realize what damage they did to me there.