Family reunion

The holidays are all about family drama.

After much cajoling and grandmotherly intervention, my dad and the stepmonster (hereinafter SM) finally allowed my sister to come to visit me in SD and attend the family reunion (of relatives from my mother's side) last Saturday. This despite a sneaky last-minute coup staged by SM at the last minute to prevent my sister from attending, taken straight out of "Cinderella."

For weeks, she had smiled and said to my sister, "Of course you can go, IF you finish your chores and IF you complete all homework assignments." My sister worked her butt off to finish every chore and complete all assignments. BTW my sister's chores consist of cleaning, sweeping and mopping every inch of the entire house each week, doing all family laundry, all heavy lifting and all the dishes every day, as SM doesn't lift a precious finger to work.

Then, the afternoon of the day before the reunion, SM called each of my sister's six teachers directly, asking for a progress report of any assignments she had EVER missed. Since my sis had missed seven assignments EVER, SM staunchly refused to let her go, arguing that it would cause her to flout authority and become a bad student.

And I spent the afternoon crying my eyes out 100 miles away, shouting at the top of my lungs over the phone to my dad, as he parroted SM's whispered arguments.

Like any desperate person, I immediately called his mother. Grandma heard my sniffles and commandeered an army consisting of herself, my dad's brother and sister, and one of my mom's sisters, who spent the evening yelling at SM, eventually securing my sister's safe passage to San Diego.

I suspect we will have to go through this whenever she comes to visit me.

But, the family reunion was lots of fun, full of lobster, Peking duck, abalone, and drunken distant relatives crooning Chinese songs over a soundsystem turned so loud you had to shout to the person sitting next to you. A total of six relatives crammed into apartment to spend the night, including two little cousins, and now I've been finding strange things everywhere. There was a miniature hourglass on my desk, a collection of legos at the foot of the bed, and all the tissue boxes have had their contents removed, scrunched into tiny balls, and put back into the box.

It was a great weekend, even better because we had won a small victory against the forces of evil.

Stay tuned for the account, to be posted in approximately 30 years, of SM's sufferings at the slummy sweatshop disguised as an old folks home I shut her up in.