This Is It For You And I

My ex-girlfriend has a tumultuous relationship with her father and step-father. They each bailed at some point and now only occasionally make appearances in her life. Rarely do those appearances go fine and dandy. They're both jackasses who don't care how their "only when I feel like it" parenthood tactics affect their daughter. One text or conversation can make her feel awful and bring up all of those past feelings about them. On more than one occasion I asked her why she even responds to the occasional contact, why she lets them breeze in and out of her life when it mostly brings her pain. Sometimes she explained it to me, other times she didn't want to talk about it. What I didn't realize until tonight is that I should learn to take my own advice (god knows I never take anyone else's). My entire life I've had an unhealthy relationship with my soon-to-be married cousin, who we'll call DMC. He's almost exactly a month older than me and we have butted heads from the day we could walk. But after almost 32 years of disagreements and hurt feelings, I'm considering doing something I never thought I would - cutting him out of my life. I wouldn't be the first person in my bloodline to call it quits with a bully, my mom hasn't spoken to her older brother in over a decade. Maybe I need to take a cue from her.
My uncle PS (or Prodigal Son) is equal parts son of a bitch and charmer. He's been married five teams, cheated on all of those wives and maintains spotty contact with his three grown daughters. My mom raised his oldest child for the first five years of the kid's life, until she and her mother moved away. He didn't even try to find her until his third wife tracked her down for him. She was grown and engaged by then but welcomed him into her life. Eventually she discovered what the rest of us have always known - PS is a bastard when he wants to be. Don't agree with his politics? You're cut off. Don't want to share part of your financial windfall? Cut off. It was the latter that caused the falling out between he and my mother. After we went to college, she moved halfway across the state to care for her grandparents. A few years later she lost her job and grandma had passed away. With grandpa on his way to a retirement home, she was going to be left alone in a city 5 hours away from all other family members. None of us was comfortable with that but, curiously, it was PS who took the most interest in getting her to move back down the mountain. He was on his fifth marriage by then and he and his wife convinced mom to fix up her house, sell it and move not to her hometown, but about an hour outside of it. Supposedly, he wanted back in the family fold and thought it was a good idea for her to live halfway between everyone else and him. The house sold in a week and the owners wanted to take possession within two weeks so everything about the move was haphazard and unplanned. He was supposed to drive the living van, with mom and his wife following in their cars. My mother HATES driving through the mountains and she hates driving in snow. Because PS didn't show up with the truck until three in the afternoon, we didn't finish loading until almost six (the siblings and I all made the journey to help). Rather than get a couple of hotel rooms and wait til the next morning to leave, PS commanded that we shouldn't waste "our" money and should leave that night. It wouldn't be so bad, he claimed. We all should have known better since it was October, but we started the trek anyway. Over the next six hours we endured every type of weather and road conditions known to man; rain, hail, snow, blowing snow, sleet, solid ice. It was a nightmare. We got to his ranch, which was in the middle of nowhere (literally), and because he only had one spare bedroom, all of us but mom slept in the unfinished basement on one large air mattress and one cot. Oh and we all wore our coats because there weren't enough blankets and there was no heat. To make matters worse, mom had no home to move into. She'd had to get out so quickly that she couldn't make the trip down to look at houses and PS was too lazy to do it for her. My sister went and checked out some places but couldn't find anything. For the next two weeks we lived out of a hotel while we tried to find her a house. She ended up settling (and I do mean settling) on one that she wasn't crazy about, but she was so tired of living out of a suitcase. PS was pretty MIA for most of those two weeks. After she signed the papers for the house he resurfaced to inquire about the price and how much she had left in the bank. He flat out asked if he could have what was in the bank, which was close to $20,000. She said no and he insinuated that he'd done so much at the house and for the move that she owed him at least something. She still refused, she was out of a job and had just moved to a new city and needed money to live off of until things were up and running. He silently fumed, or so we thought. Her stuff was being stored in his garage and when we went to retrieve it, with help from other family members because he was done the minute she refused to spot him all of her savings, there were very deep and deliberate gashes in her bedroom and living room furniture. Almost as if he'd taken a screwdriver to everything and dragged it across the surface, deep enough to be sure it would be costly to repair it. We got her stuff, moved her in and she has spoken to him only once since then, and that was last year at their grandfather's funeral. He does not call her, she does not call him, and everyone is actually happier for it. Everything he did was just a ploy to get cash out of his sister. He's such a selfish bastard.
My mom has been noticeably happier since cutting PS out of her life. She doesn't have to worry about the next hissy fit he throws, or his next out of the blue marriage. And now I think I know how she felt back then when she made the decision to cut him loose. PS represents both sides of the family quite well in that we can all be fairly charming, but are not nice folk to deal with when we're crossed. We're not all as extreme as him, of course, and the rest of us love without conditions. Except for DMC. He has always been on me about something and I'm never sure why. He tormented me as a kid, to the point where one day I got fed up and pushed him out of the treehouse in our backyard. He fell about six feet and hit the dirt below. He didn't break or bruise anything, but I still got grounded. And I felt so fucking liberated once I stood up to him. But it was to be the last time. In the fifteen years since that incident I have learned to let shit roll off of my back and told myself that he is how he is and there's nothing I can do about it. But what is it I always say, kids? That people can only treat you as badly, or as awesomely, as you let them. And I've let him treat me entirely too cruel. The thing that drives me fucking crazy about DMC is that he's so damn judgmental. My friends and I joke about me being a manwhore, but I've not done the volume that a lot of other dudes I know have. Yet DMC thinks I've fucked half the women on the planet and that I should be ashamed for having done so. That was his go to gripe in our 20's. If it wasn't how I ran my personal life, then it was how slowly he thought my recovery from the accident was going. I'm sure he thinks I have no idea that he referred to me at least once (and I'm sure several times) as being "too retarded to get over" my "accident shit". Because PTSD and depression are such easily hurdles to overcome and a brain injury makes you a retard. I remember going on a bender for the ages after overhearing that comment. Afterward I pretended I hadn't heard it, and I really wish I hadn't. In our 30's, he has moved on to making quips about how my personal life remains "a mess" because I can't "share a sandwich, forget about sharing your life with someone for longer than it takes to eat lunch". He would often remark about how I was just going to fuck up my relationship with someone I was in love with and told her not to "get too comfortable". But that pales in comparison to what happened tonight. His wedding is Sunday (moved from tomorrow due to a delay in the bride's family getting here) and he has yet to write his vows. Shocker! He can't write for shit and I don't believe he actually feels any human emotion other than superiority, so I wasn't surprised when he asked me to help him write them. The problem with that is he wanted me to write them FOR him. I have no problem creating things for the people I love, I create for a living, but it's wrong to ask someone else to write your vows for you. If you can't articulate how you feel about the woman you love, I can't help ya. I'm not even getting hitched and I could tell you ten things I love about my girlfriend off the top of my head. He can't think of one the night before he's wifing this chick! I refused to do his homework for him and he got pissy. He threw a fucking fit and finished it with, "It's not like you'll ever need to write vows of your own anyway, you can't keep a fucking thing together". Fuck that. I'm sick of being his whipping boy. He's just unbelievably cruel and he goes for the jugular every time, no matter how minor the dig at him is. He knows my insecurities and vulnerabilities and he exploits them whenever he feels like it. Unfortunately, I'm a sensitive dude so shit like that hurts and it eats at me for the longest time. I already have self-destructive and self-loathing tendencies, I never feel like I'm good enough, and one comment just fucking DESTROYS me. And I let it happen. I let it get to this point. So who's the fucking idiot in this scenario? I don't even understand how you say something like that to someone who is basically a little brother to you. I have a little brother, and a cousin who I consider a little brother, and I could not imagine saying anything so awful that it would hit them in their core. That it would bring up every terrible thing they think about themselves and make them wanna cut themselves just because they can't stand the skin they're in. They can't stand feeling like they may actually be as retarder and inept as you tell them they are. I don't get that. As of now, I am left with this: I will always love him because he is family and I love unconditionally. But these next few days will be the last we spend together if he doesn't legitimately apologize for EVERYTHING he's said. I doubt he will. So this is it. I'm done.