I got a text last night from my mom.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Getting texts from one’s mother isn’t that rare these days. In fact, it’s rather common for most people. Not me though. My mother doesn’t talk to me. In fact the first time she contacted me in over a year was when I was on vacation: to try and get my sister’s info because of an issue with car insurance. Not to talk to me, not to see how I was doing. Nope.

So in what must be a rash of wyrd based communications, I got a text from my mom last night telling me: Fyi, your aunt D is dead.

Now, I can think of a lot of ways to tell someone their aunt is dead. Fyi isn’t exactly at the top of the list of openers. Admitedly, I’d barely known my aunt, could count the number of times we interacted on maybe two hand. Maybe. Despite the fact that we’ve literally lived in the same city for the last eight years or so, maybe an hour or so away for the rest of it. She was a bit of a selfish bitch, and in a family known for its selfish bitches, she was a queen. Still, though, I could think of better ways to pass that news.

And apparently it wasn’t from a lack of feeling on my mother’s part. No, the woman called my sister this morning to whine and cry about how I hadn’t acknowledged her text last night (not that it seemed to be asking for an acknowledgement). Of course, with how I misread social cues (and the apparently self centered conversation my sister had with said smother) it could have been that I was supposed to text or call back and let her vent.

Now, this might drop me solidly into the “uncaring bastard” category of life, but I’ve done that enough. And it’s a literal minefield. One tiny misstep and you get railed at for hours, days, weeks (and on occasion even months). While on some level I am sorry that my aunt is dead, I didn’t know the woman. I have no attachments to her. And even if I did, they are so tainted by the potential ptsd, emotional poisoning/scaring, etc that resulted from my mother that even if I wanted to reach out and connect, to morn and to comfort the rest of the family (who I don’t know at all) I don’t think I could.

So yeah…that happened.