Every time I start tolerating and getting used to my sister, she manages to throw another wrench into the mix which brings me back to disliking her again. Since my dad isn't able to do much around the house since his hip replacement I fill in where I can, but we need three new ceiling fans hung. This is outside my expertise since it involves hooking up electricity to them which I do not mess with, ever. So I casually mentioned over dinner that if mom hasn't asked the local handyman, I would look at hiring someone from Fiverr to do it.

My sister recoils like she's been shot and goes hysterical that "no one can come into the house for at least a couple of months and that's not acceptable, [she'll] do it herself and we can't put her in danger." Um, what? I know she's freaked out about the monkeypox outbreak, but considering a) we live 2 hours from NYC where there are only two cases b) we are just hiring someone to do needed work and c) she's afraid to even get up on a ladder, let alone touch anything potentially actually dangerous like live wires, the chance of her actually doing it is zero, hiring someone else is a safe and practical choice. I said that this isn't like Covid, this is a known disease with a low transmission rate, low-ish mortality rate, and existent vaccine. She states that if she got moneypox and had facial scars she'd rather be dead.

That's what really stopped me in my tracks. I've dealt with her hypochondria for decades, but lately she's on an anti-aging kick including teeth whitening, facial peels, etc so the danger to her isn't that another virus/pandemic is possibly arriving. It's that she might be disfigured or scarred and that would be such a blow in her mind that she would rather die than live. As someone who's intermittently suicidal, I've had a lot of times and reasons why I wanted to off myself, but my physical appearance has been a negligible part of them. Scars are things you learn to live with - it's pretty much their defining characteristic - and she's never really had to truly deal with anything like that in her life.

And as always with her, it comes back to her selfishness. It's not about the fact that my dad is really too old and physically unable to do these kinds of tasks anymore, or that the house she lives in without contributing or paying rent needs some money spent to hire someone to take care of it. It's about her, and what she wants, and her need to maintain a "safe" world where no one possibly contaminated with this horrible disfiguring disease could come in contact with her is the paramount concern. Never mind the reality of the situation, her doomscrolling has reinforced her paranoia and now we're in the wrong for daring to put her in jeopardy by hiring someone unknown who could have been having orgies the weekend before with monkeypox-infected people.

So I'm done with her again for a while. I basically just stopped talking to her after that, and didn't bring up the conversation with my mom since she has always enabled my sister's inability to deal with the world. My dad just doesn't get into it any more and bringing it up with him just gives him an opportunity to place the blame on mom being an anxious mother, so whatever. 

I have no sympathy left to give to her or for her. But I will keep on my mom about hiring the local guy to do the work.