Wherein I vent about my niece. in The Big, Blue House, year one.

The favorite niece posted an image on Facebook of her breakfast that she’d made, saying that she made breakfast, but that she’s not interested in anything any more, and that all she can do is push it around her plate.

And I feel sorry for her, and yet I don’t. When we got this house, with its six potential bedrooms, the expectation was that she and her middle son would come and stay here, to get a foothold in Ohio, and hopefully have a better time than they’ve been having in Oklahoma.

There’s a bathroom and two possible bedrooms in the basement, and a bathroom and two bedrooms on the second floor, and a potential bedroom/”office” with an attached bathroom on the first floor. I thought she could have the second floor, or the basement, or one room in each.

But when it came right down to it, she doesn’t want the vaccine. She believes the conspiracies. (And Don and I are in high risk categories, despite the vaccine.) And not long after she told me that, she was asking for advice on dealing with the ghost of her then boyfriend’s dead ex-wife, whom she believed was possessing her and causing her “temper”.

Yeah. And that’s the most compassionate member of my immediate family. I want to help her, she whose now gone through FOUR “soul mate”s in eight years. All she posts on Facebook are dozens and dozens of memes about romance, what women want, what men want, what “true love” is, and so on. It’s as if she’s struggling to understand how life works.

Her father, my half brother, is bipolar with delusional thoughts. She’s obviously inherited it. And that’s simply far above my pay grade. I want to throw her a rope so badly, but I tried, and she wouldn’t take it.