So my aunt has been in town for the last several days, and she suggested that we meet up for lunch with Chris today. That lunch ended up never happening because she insisted on bringing her friend, who we will call Marie, with her. My aunt is constantly inviting random Jehovah’s Witness friends to pretty much every single family gathering we’ve had since before I can even remember.

I’ve never liked Marie. She’s a free loader, a gossip, and judgmental to the point where I highly question how “Christian” she really is. She’s a fellow Jehovah’s Witness, which is how she and my aunt met. To me personally, she’s said disparaging things about my brother (yeah, you really do not want to go there with me), made sweeping statements about my husband just because of his Indian ethnicity, and has made generalizations of what it’s like to be the wife of an Indian man and that I should “be aware” of those things. So, the last thing I want is to meet up with my aunt and have her insipid JW sidekick join me for a free lunch.

The worst part is that even though she’s fully aware that I dislike Marie, she still brings her to meals with me unannounced. So I don’t even get to decide whether I see her before I actually see her. This time, she actually told me via text that Marie would be coming, to which I said, “can you please come by yourself?” She then responded that Marie needed her help and that she could not leave her alone. Let me get this straight: she can’t be left alone because she’s supposedly unwell, but she can travel with you to a restaurant in the East Village to meet me?

There’s enough dysfunction in my family as is. I don’t need someone who is not family from the JW world to be brought in to annoy me and eat with me. When I told her I didn’t want to go if she would bring Marie, she simply responded that she’d see me the next time I’d be in San Francisco. I guess that’s the way it’s going to be, then.