I’ve amassed a ginormous team for the Seattle Walk MS event. I think I’ll have about 28 people on my team walking the Burke-Gilman trail with me on Sunday. AND, we’ve raised over $5,000, so we qualified for a tent on Team Row! Whoooo!
We’re going to decorate it with silly things like sparkly stickers of unicorns and ponies.
So I’ll have my bestest friends, a few friends of friends and my parents walking with me. Who’s missing? Hmmm… my sister. Right. She’s been wishy-washy about the Walk since I first asked her a couple of months ago. She thought you had to pay $50 to qualify to walk– “It’s expensive to walk now!” she told me. I cleared that misconception up with her a few weeks later and she said she would talk to her husband about registering online. And then nothing.
We haven’t participated in the Walk since 2000, the year she was diagnosed with MS. Our family, including my sister, has been pretty inactive around the MS cause for the last 8 years. But now this is my Walk and my friends and parents know why it’s important. I hope to do it again next year, but this year is really one where I want as many of the people I love to walk with me.
My sister told me yesterday, via Facebook IM, “… Say, I don’t know if I’ll be in Seattle for the walk, I might do it here in Marysville. But I do have a doctor’s appointment down there on April 30, so maybe we could get together….”
I don’t know how long her message had been sitting there, waiting for me to see it. When I saw it, I was floored. Appalled. Hurt. And royally pissed off. So I said nothing. What do you say to a chickenshit, passive-aggressive message like that? She didn’t even bother to call me to tell me this. An e-mail would have been better than a fucking IM over stupid Facebook. And the worst part? She didn’t offer ANY explanation of why she “won’t be in Seattle.”
My sister and her husband live about 45 minutes north of Seattle. It’s not that hard to get here. And for something like this, for her own sister (who has the same disease she does!), you’d think she’d make an effort. At least offer a decent excuse.
Our relationship is complicated, true. But in recent years, we’ve gotten along a lot better and regardless of how she treats my parents (shitty), she seems to want to be my friend now and usually makes an attempt to show me some sort of sisterly affection. This could have been our Walk.
So this was a shock. But, while I’m pissed at her, I’m over it at the same time. I have better things to do. Like party it up with about 30 awesome people (some of whom I’ve never even met!) on Sunday in our rad Team Row tent, which will be tricked-out like a 6th grade girl’s Pee-Chee circa 1985.
