My mind is cluttered with all the history and histrionics of a brother and sister who hold grudges against me and I don’t understand why. I’ve spent my life trying to be kind and helpful to all the people in my life, but for some reason they have chosen to see me as the enemy. I wonder if that goes back to how our mother raised us. Pitting one against the other by saying “do you know what your sister/brother said about you?” And it was always something negative.

My brother once told me it was my fault that he moved back to Florida at the age of 15 to finish out high school at Palmetto. Since I was 17 at the time, I don’t understand how it could have been my fault. I made no decisions for him. All I remember is how unhappy he was in Tenafly, NJ and one day he got in the car we were supposed to be sharing and drove back to Florida. What I do remember is my father asking me for money to help support Aaron in Florida and I gave whatever I could afford under the circumstances, since I was already helping to pay the rent and food costs for my mother, father and sister at a grand salary of $85 a week.

I’m sitting here crying my eyes out and feeling terribly sad. It’s been a long time since I’ve cried. I take lots of medicine to stop that from happening and for 2 days it hasn’t worked. So instead of calling the doctor, I’m going to try and write everything down that has been playing over and over in my mind like a broken record.

This is what Aaron wrote me:

“I Thank you both for concern. Noah , Julian and I are fine. Know I have been taking care of all as Terra left family 1.5 years ago and I have been taking care of all . Noah has a few more months of high school and Julian another year of college. I will not respond to what happen as doing all for my family. We are fine and just had Sunday dinner together . Hope all is well with all ! Business and all mine just trying to move ahead. Sure everyone wants to know detail as way it has always been with Kirsch family . Being single dad has been challenge but figuring it out . No questions and no help needed ! Best Aaron”

His assumption that I wanted to know the details of his life because “it has always been with Kirsch family” hit me in a bad way. I have not, nor have I asked anything about his personal life since he stopped talking to me in 2006. He chose not to discuss his reasons for not talking to me and I chose to not let it effect my life as I had other things happening.

His response to me was “So a dig you still have to do as reason I have been silent.” What the fuck is he talking about? He makes a “dig” about me wanting to know details and then criticizes me for questioning why he thinks that.

Aaron, you and I are from 2 different worlds. I am not the ogre you have created in your mind. My friends think I am kind, thoughtful, considerate, gentle, funny, truthful (sometimes too truthful) and I’m not talking about 1 or 2 friends, I’m talking about many. Janette agrees with you on some levels–so you are the only 2 people in my world who think bad of me. Thank God I am loved by other’s because if I only had the word of the two of you I might have killed myself. That’s not being dramatic–it’s the truth.

I have packed as far as I can until I’m ready to drive away. I don’t leave for another 2 weeks and am tired of this waiting. I have felt I am in stasis since Aug. 9 when I told my sister I was leaving earlier than expected. The longest month of my life I think.

I am scared of what the future holds. I have never felt like this before. Kind of like a trapeze artist without a net. Not sure of what I’m going to do, though I have a plan.

I’m going to be 60 years old in October and just can’t believe that lack of security at my age. Nothing is what I thought it would be. My only family left is Aunt Erna and Uncle Bernie and they are both pretty old and won’t be on this earth much longer. Even though I have a living sister and brother—they both have abandoned me. I have done nothing to either one of them, yet they both harbor hatred toward me and I can’t figure out why. Should I even try when dealing with crazy? Why can’t I hate them? It would be so much easier.

I have to figure out a way to live my life loving me. I’ve never done that before. But after reading all the self-help articles and books, it is the only answer. Can a 60-year-old do that?

I need to stop crying.

Living here is as hard as living with MZ. Don’t know what’s going to happen from moment to moment. More like what is Janette going say moment to moment. One minute she “acts” nice and the next she is mean.

When I first arrived in Las Vegas I could see she had no patience. If she showed me where the mall was and I didn’t remember it after one time there she belittled me. She wanted to know what was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I remember anything.

Before I got here she told me about all the things we were going to do when I got here. So I got here and she didn’t want to do anything with me due to my limitations. At first I couldn’t do a lot of physical things because I weighed 330 lbs. and my knees hurt all the time. So we decided to wait until I had the D/S surgery and start to lose weight.

I was supposed to be getting my health back. That was the priority, or so I thought. Once I got approval for surgery she went full speed ahead with organizing her life to be there for me in Los Angeles where I had the surgery.

I had the D/S Switch surgery on Nov. 8. I was released 3 days later and we hung out in a hotel until the surgeon released me back to Vegas. Janette made me feel obligated to walk with her to every restaurant as she didn’t want to eat alone. She really didn’t care that I just had surgery and perhaps I wasn’t ready for long walks. She took me to restaurants that didn’t have food for someone who just had D/S surgery—though she had the same surgery the year before. I ate sashimi 4 days after surgery—I don’t think the surgeon would have approved. But as I’ve done all my life, I didn’t want to upset my sister.

I’ve never understood why it didn’t matter if she upset me. I never saw her as narcissistic until now.

I’m feeling so frustrated today and just want to cry the day away. I thought my biggest decision in life is what color I’m going to paint the room I am living in. Now I’m facing where am I going to live? How am I going to live? Can I live on my fixed income?

So dad packed us all up into a station wagon and set off for the west. Aaron was 4, I was 6 and Janette was 9. Out of boredom Janette started teaching me from her 3rd grade books and that’s when I think I started to develop intellectually. We sang on the trip, played auto car games, got restless and argued, not too much though. We were raised with the affirmation “chiildren should be seen and not heard”.

I specifically remember a long stopover in Phoenix, AZ. We stayed in a motel and I have no idea what my dad did during this time. I remember my parents telling us we had to be nice to a man in one of the motel rooms because he was an old school comedian. I also remember a lot of car trouble. We got stuck in the hot desert and this very nice man stopped to help us. It turned out he was a preacher who had our same last name. We thought that was funny because we were Jewish.

I may have been born Jewish, but up to that time I had no idea what that meant. I did know what crimes Hitler committed against humanity. I did know that we ate especially well on Jewish holidays. But going to temple was not in my parents, nor did they think their children needed to go. At least until it was time to get my brother Bar Mitzvahed.

We finally got to California and rented an apartment in Toluca Lake. My mother enrolled us in school and after being tested, they couldn’t decide if I belonged in kindergarten or 1st grade. So they compromised and I spent 1/2 the day in each grade. That was strange. It was hard to make friends splitting my time like that. But my sister and brother were my best friends and the 3 of us shared one bedroom.

Talking about money seemed to pop up every day now. My father had difficulty finding a job and ended up delivering vending machines, which didn’t pay well. We children never asked for anything because an argument from our parents would always be the end result. We were seen and tried not to be heard.

The apartment complex had a pool and I learned how to swim. “A natural born fish” my mother would say. We spent a lot of time in that pool. There were no video games. There were only a handful of television channels. Another big outing was all of us kids and some of our friends would get into the back of my dad’s pickup truck and he’d take us to a local ice cream parlor shouting “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!”

I don’t think we lasted 9 months in California. I do remember packing up boxes all day and sneaking out at night to pack up the U-Haul. The one thing that struck me as really odd, my father didn’t pack one box or lift one box out to the car. I remember the four of us (including mother) would mumble under our breaths how lazy he was. We were “sneaking” out because the rent had not been paid.

That’s when I started to realize that my parents had children to make their life easier.

I was just a kid, but I had to take on the responsibilities of an adult. From a very early age, my parents felt it was their children’s responsibility to protect them.

I have an older sister, Janette and a younger brother, Aaron. I am the “proverbial” middle child. Often overlooked or forgotten or just plain taken for granted that I will be there.

I hate to look back on my life and say I was a psychologically abused child. I guess because I’m a 59-year-old adult it sounds like I’m looking for excuses for living quite a strange life. I use the word strange because I can’t think of another word that fits into a nice box. Who’s life has been “normal”? I’ve heard stories about my friends lives that made my straight hair curl.

But my life began Oct. 13, 1954 and my first memory was Sept. 5, 1956—the day my brother was born. My father took my sister and I for a walk to the hospital where we looked up into one of the windows and saw my mother waving at us. I do have another early memory, but I have no idea how old I was. I was lying in my crib and I could see a cloud mobile above me. But the strongest memory I have is watching my mother leave the room through the door. That’s it. No trauma, no excitement.

All the excitement began when I could formulate thoughts and feelings. When I was 6 years old my father decided to move his family from Closter, New Jersey to Los Angeles, CA. I loved living in Closter—especially winter time. My last Closter memory was at Christmas when my dad played Santa Claus (he was one of the largest men in town). He stood on a fire truck ladder and I was allowed to stand close by on a stage and hand him wrapped gifts so he could give them to all the kids lined up for the annual community event.

My sister invited me to come live with her and her husband in January 2013. I accepted after receiving my SS disability in February 2013, so I would not be a financial burden to them. I was renting a room in a lovely home with a good friend. But things were getting complicated and I was not comfortable in that living situation.

I moved to Las Vegas in August 2013. It was quite an accomplishment as my health was not so good. At my sisters encouragement, I went to see the surgeon she want to in Los Angeles. He was going to remove my 2009 failed lap band and replace it with the Duodenal Switch surgery. My weight was killing me. At 330 lbs. I could hardly walk or move, so I decided that this was the best option for me.

On Nov. 8, 2013 I had the D/S surgery and 2 weeks later developed complications from that surgery. The mesh that was holding up my hernia had to be removed because the lap band had become entwined with it. Nothing was holding up the hernia as I have no stomach muscles and things must have shifted internally. After much guess work on the part of the doctors locally, they decided to reopen me up and put everything back in place. The big problem was that the local surgeon refused to call the Los Angeles surgeon (because of big ego) and she could not figure out what was wrong inside me. She did put a drain inside my stomach. Ultimately it was the hernia pressing into my bowels turning everything inside into an infection.

After 2 weeks on 5 or 6 antibiotics, no food, horrible doctors who would not communicate, I was released from the hospital.

Somewhere in that time frame my sister decided she didn’t like me. I can almost pinpoint the moment. I hadn’t eaten for over a week and was starving, they hadn’t given me the Wellbutrin I was supposed to be weaned off of, I was begging the local surgeon to call the LA surgeon, my adrenal glands were bleeding spontaneously because of the stress and all Janette could think of was herself.

But what she said to me this week took her hatred of me to a new level.

She told me she didn’t want me to live with her and her husband the rest of her life. It was nothing I did, she said. “I’m borderline bipolar and I know it. I have this need to just be alone. Sometimes I don’t want Michael around.”

I spent a lot of money moving here. I felt secure for the first time in a long time and she knew that. She heard me on the phone with an old friend and I told him I was quite happy in my living arrangements. I told him blood was thicker than friendship. Janette heard me say that, and thus her harsh reaction.

Yes, she is bipolar. Exactly like our mother was. There is no predictability in behavior—other than unpredictability. She said it was not personal. Well sorry Janette, telling me you can’t bear the thought of living with me any more is PERSONAL!

You may be asking what I did to set her off. I can honestly say I did nothing. 2 months ago, after spending a week with a friend from Florida here in Las Vegas, my sister freaked out when I came “home”. She said she didn’t want me to cook any more. It reminded her too much of our mother. I flipped out from that remark.

The truth is my sister is jealous of me. Jealous of everyone. She is so miserable internally that she strikes out with sharpened nails when she gets green with envy. She is particularly angry with me because I maintained a number of friendships from Florida. She has no friends. She never learned the skill nor understood the art of friendship. The funny thing is that I totally “get” her. I grew up with her, put her through nursing school, lived with her as an adult, took care of her until she got married. And even then she came back to live with me with her husband and child.

So I have always been there for her. I can’t say the same about her. I have made excuses for her my whole life. We were abused as children and that has weighed on our shoulders into adulthood.

I’m going to be 60 years old in October and I don’t know where I’m going to live. Who thought I’d end up here with having so much promise as a child.