So my sister has some serious problems. She is a drug addict and an alcoholic. She was doing well for several years and now she is off the wagon again. She is choosing to host parties for her children’s friends in which many teenagers get very drunk and often there is a lot of pot involved. As a mandated reporter, I have a problem with this. I also have a problem with the abusive environment in which she is raising her children. She is an alcoholic, with all the erratic behavior that entails. I believe it would be best for her children to be taken away from her.

Let me try to start the story of yesterday from the beginning.

My mom called yesterday morning just to chat and the topic of my sister eventually came up. I expressed my concern about the parties that my sister hosts and told my mother the stories that my sister has relayed about some of the parties. (A 12 year old with severe alcohol poisoning and a 14 year old girl taking on multiple guys at once and having it be photographed and then put on the internet being the stories that bother me the most.) There was to be a party last night and legally I have to report it. I just wasn’t sure how hard to push it. My mother encouraged me, nay–begged me to call the police and do anything in my power to have my sister’s children taken away. I felt rather conflicted and I didn’t decide what to do while on the phone with her. I talked to my brother about it and he thinks that anything that could cause my sister to lose her children would be for the best. A little while later my mother called back and told me she has been thinking about the situation like crazy and she has to tell me that if I decide to do this and my sister ever finds out that it was me who turned her in I cannot let on that my mother knew about it. My mother explicitly told me that she would call me a liar if I ever said she knew anything about it. I got rather hysterical and yelled, “Just like my father called me a liar?” and hung up the phone.

The rest of the day was a series of overly frantic and urgent phone calls to various friends who have knowledge of the legal system and a family friend who is a lawyer and my brother. My brother and I had some really hard and crappy phone calls. Eventually I decided to go over to my sister’s house and check the party out for myself before I decided what to do. By 7:30 they were out of beer and the people who bring the hard alcohol and pot weren’t at this party. This would not be the time to call the police in my opinion. Very little would happen. I still have to file a report with CPS, but that can be done as a teacher and my name won’t be involved in the investigation. My sister will think it is one of my niece or nephew’s teachers.

So there was this huge, nasty, dramatic day for… not much of anything. I hate my family. I will not be spending Christmas with my mother. My brother is going to be talking with my mother today and he told me that if she does not show a rather drastic change of attitude she will no longer have access to his children either because she is perpetuating the cycle of alcoholism and abuse. It is going to be difficult to explain to my sister what is going on and why I am not going to be there, but oh well.

I don’t have a father. I don’t have a mother. My sister is an alcoholic, abusive person who cannot seem to break the cycle she is in. She is headed for another downward spiral and I cannot and will not be a part of it nor condone it. My brother is a controlling, belligerant asshole and talking with him always leaves me more frazzled and upset than I was before. As much as I don’t want to, I need to completely cut my bio-family out of my life. They are destroying themselves and they want to take me down with them. I simply do not have the strenth to be involved with them and maintain appropriate boundaries for myself.

I am tired of this whole mess. I can see no way in which I have benefitted. I feel so incredibly alone and it hurts.