Travel Journal - The Prelude

 

I went to visit my brother in Malaysian Borneo a few weeks ago.

 

I was SO looking to it, but I was also really anxious about it. My brother and I can best be described as chalk and cheese.....raised within a dysfunctional family, with a mixture of shared experiences, as well as some very different ones.....and we have very different characters as a result of that.

My brother is very hard and controlling, like my dad was.

And I am soft.

 

It took me more than a month to break the news to the MIL about visiting my brother, and I did it in baby steps, in the hopes it would soften the blow. It didn't really, and her reaction was quite explosive, worse than either Trevor or I had anticipated.

 

And as if that wasn't enough to put additional strain on me, I had a constant stream of jibes and comments from her in the weeks running up to the trip.

 

Two nights before I left she hissed at me in the kitchen that I must never to do this to her again as long as she is alive.

That was the cherry on the cake for me.....I could have cancelled the trip there and then because I was just so sick and tired of it all. And (for the first time in a very long time) I stood up to her and had words with her, letting her know I was at the point of cancelling my trip because of the constant comments I'd been getting.

She came to me later in the evening (on seeing she'd brought me to tears), and gave me a false 'I didn't mean it like that' comment and hug.

I disagreed and said she had meant what she'd said earlier, which she had, there was no doubting that one.

 

We didn't speak for the next two days, until I said goodbye the morning I left for the airport.

 

Added to that was that Trev had fallen ill the Monday before I left (on the Saturday), and had been signed off work for a couple of weeks pending further investigations.

 

 

So it was with a VERY heavy heart that I left for my holiday.