And Are They Done For Real Or What?

Weird and ominous text I got from my sister-in-law Christmas morning.  As I do with pretty much all my friends and family, I text them on the holidays.  My sis-in-law is someone I'm keen on reaching out to because the only person I give Christmas gifts to is my niece/her daughter.  But since they live so far away, I don't have time to buy and wrap those gifts for her.  It is so, so much easier if I buy what my niece wants on Amazon and have them shipped to their house.

What I didn't know, even though I probably should have thought about it, was that my sister-in-law intercepts the gifts and wraps them up for her daughter/my niece to open them at Christmas.  I guess she's done that every year I've sent gifts to them, and so, when I wished her a Merry Christmas, I thanked her for doing the hard work of wrapping the gifts without my niece (seemingly) knowing.

As she usually does, she sent pictures of my niece opening up the three gifts I got her.  Amazon said that they would come in two shipments and the shipment for one might come after Christmas.  I had told my sister-in-law that could happen (and that has happened before), so I wanted to confirm whether that second shipment with that third gift came in time after all.  (Yeah, it's obvious, but still.)  She never confirmed.  Instead, she said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Welp, next Christmas is going to be different ... and you can talk about it with your brother."

I've spoken about this here before: I've wondered for a long, long time whether my brother and sister-in-law were on the outs.  I've never seen them act like they, well, love each other.  And I don't know if I described this on WAF, but my sister-in-law and I had dinner out several years ago where she just fucking unloaded on him.  She never said she planned on separating from him, though, so it made me wonder if she was blowing off steam or if this is truly a rift that will not heal.

This was, I believe, before we and the whole family went to Hawai'i over the holidays a few years ago.  I thought that if they were going to split up, they would have done so before then because it wouldn't make sense to act like one big, happy family and then announce their separation.  And then I thought that maybe they all wanted an excuse to go to Hawai'i, and then they could drop this bomb after the New Year.  Well, there was no announcement at all, so I just figured they were still together, or limping along in this relationship because they can't overcome inertia.

So what should I make of that text?  There seems to be frustration behind it, so this could be another case of her blowing off steam because, say, my brother said something to her that pissed her off.  Or, this is an announcement months or maybe even years in the making; a separation might finally be in its final stages for some reason, and 2026 is the year the relationship changes -- or ends.  I don't fuckin' know.  I just texted her, "Um, OK," and she didn't respond.

This shit is just too weird, man.