Should Families Be Forever Together?

                      how my mother imagines our family at gatherings

what our family is actually more like

     Unless something changes in the next seven hours or less, my family is going to Europe without me. I have a relapse of an illness I had a few years ago. It's very likely not contagious, but no one is taking any chances. The plans to go were made months ago, and they family and extended pseudo-family will go ahead with their plans.  There could be a change of plans that allows me to go, but at this point it's not looking that way.  I'm considering purchasing my own ticket and showing up anyway. I doubt that the family who is hosting us will throw me out in the street if I show up. I may have been one of the ones who was scheduled to be at a hotel anyway. I can afford a hotel room on my own. I'm not sure what exactly would be the point of traveling all the way to Austria at my own expense to spend the holidays by myself in a hotel room, but I may do it anyway. I'll be sure that it's a very nice hotel room. As long as I have enough medication to make me comfortable, it probably doesn't matter where I am.

     My cell phone is malfunctioning, or maybe it isn't. A person I used to text blocked me during a conference call and now I can't text the person at all. Maybe there are others I can no longer text as well and just haven't discovered it. I really don't know. It seems a small problem, and it is, but the timing could have been better. Being isolated right now does not make anything better.

     I may invite a friend to come along with me. I can afford to spring for the cost or an extra person. . Or maybe I should go somewhere totally different. Maybe I should go to Ireland or Catalonia. Or Iceland. Or The Ukraine. I need to make up my mind because there is not a great deal of time left. feel free to crime in with any suggestions, though responses are down these days, whether due to the occasional presence of a particular person or due to general boredom with me.

     My mother is being incredibly holier-than-thou about the whole matter. She says I brought the illness on myself. She says she said from the very beginning the med school was a bad idea for me because I am not sufficiently physically strong to withstand the demands medical school places upon a person's body. 

     I believe that even if what she says is 100% true, which I'm not conceding that it is, it wouldn't kill her to show the slightest degree of compassion about the situation. I'm fine with her taking the rest of the family off the continent to celebrate a holiday that is supposed to be all about family without 1/4 of the nuclear family, but would it kill her or any of the others to say that she or any of the others will miss me while they're off having fun without me? I think it wouldn't. She obviously thinks it would. So do the rest of them, apparently. 

     But it's OK, really, because my parents will have their favorite child with them.

 

This picture is obviously not me - it just represented how I felt at the particular moment I posted the blog - but it begs the question as to what sort of a sadistic person would photograph a child when she looked like this.