It doesn’t seem to matter who it is in my family, but everyone does something that truly, deeply drives me crazy. It reminds me of that Leo Tolstoy quote that you always see when it comes to families that was the first line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Dysfunction stems from a unique mix of human flaws, generational patterns, and unhealed wounds.

My aunt, my dad’s older brother’s wife, is currently in town, and she asked if we could get together while she was in New York. Of course I said yes, and several weeks ago, I asked her to come over for dinner this Sunday. She confirmed, and that was that. Well, that was not over, because out of nowhere today, she asks if instead of dinner at my place this Sunday that I go down to Manhattan Chinatown to meet her for dim sum with Chris and Kaia. I told her that wouldn’t be possible because of Kaia’s pre-scheduled extra-curricular activities. She then texts to see if Saturday dim sum would work; I replied back and said we already made plans.

I was getting more and more irritated with each response given we had already confirmed dinner at my place weeks in advance, and suddenly, she just wanted to change it. I know why she wants to change it: my aunt has this really frustrating habit of constantly inviting her random Jehovah’s Witnesses friends to almost all of our family dinners. It doesn’t matter if it’s just her son and family and me or all of the cousins and my parents, but she feels this urgent need to invite at least one to FOUR non-family people to any family meal. They are not part of our family, and they are people I will see once and completely forget about. Why does she constantly do this all the time? Even when I have explicitly asked her in the past when meeting for lunch in New York if it could just be us, lo and behold, she shows up with her New Jersey based friend I cannot stand called M, or one or two other random people I will have nothing to talk about with. M is a terrible person; she is a free loader. She makes sweeping, racist generalizations about groups of people she knows little to nothing about. And perhaps worst of all, M once explicitly said that “something was not right in the head” with Ed just years before he died. I truly wanted to punch her face in. And even after I confronted my aunt about how inappropriate and hurtful those comments were, she brushed me off, saying that M didn’t mean it that way and that I shouldn’t take it too seriously. My aunt has a true penchant for always ignoring serious issues and living a seemingly shallow life with no deep conversations ever possible. I told her I didn’t want M coming to any of our meals again. But of course, she ignored me and invited her anyway once against my wishes. We barely talked at that meal; I was PISSED. Part of the reason I wanted her to come over for dinner is to thwart any possibility of some random person showing up at my house because of her incessant “outside” invites.

So lo and behold, my aunt finally agrees over text to come for dinner at 5pm this Sunday. But the story’s not over because she has to text back: “Can I bring M with me, she wants to see Kaia.”

It’s like she’s deaf or suffering from amnesia that I strongly dislike this person. I simply responded back, “No, she is not invited. I have told you that I dislike her.” And I left it at that.

In the end, if she chooses not to come because of this, I truly don’t care. I’ve tried to be amenable and the “middle man” in too many of my family situations, and this is not a battle that I really feel strongly about. The level of delusion here is just beyond ridiculous. I do not want disrespectful, ignorant people in my house, and I am entitled to invite only who I want to my own house.