She’s somewhat estranged from my parents but not from me. She flies in to visit my family (me/wife/daughters) several times per year.
Her and my parents can coexist together for a short time, but if they are together for several days it’s only a matter of time before one of them can’t resist bringing up their well-established extreme differences in politics and then it gets explosive because none of them will give an inch.
I’m somewhat caught in the middle of it, but admittedly empathize more with my parents than with my sister when those arguments occur, because I believe my sister’s political opinions are absurd. She takes it way further than just mainstream political differences and goes to 100 with extreme feminism, men are bad, white people are oppressors, corporations are oppressors, America is a racist country, pro-Palestine, so on and so forth.
The difference between me and all of them is that I value having strong relationships with family more than I care about a political difference of opinion….no matter how extreme.
So all of this is a long way of saying, I actually do think highly of my sister overall. She’s very smart, talented, successful in her career….but frankly she entered UNC as a normal person and exited as a brainwashed liberal. Not just the Joe Biden type, but the Bernie Sanders/admitted socialist type.
Ask yourself this though, to bring this post back to the thread topic a little bit. Why exactly would my sister be so adamantly against Taylor Swift having children? Isn’t that just as strange as the rest of the family hoping (secretly, not like bugging her about it) that my sister eventually moderates on some of her positions, settles down, and has a happy family?
The answer is, she idolizes Swift to the point that Swift is all-consuming to her. In the same way religion is to some folks or that sports is to me. So she’s always put Swift up on this pedestal as someone who says “F the patriarchy, I’m focusing on my career, I’ll break up with tons of guys and write songs about them, I’m never getting married and never having kids. Oh and by the way, vote Democrat.” And now she’s watched Taylor fall for Travis Kelce, get engaged, and there’s starting to be chinks in the armor of this persona that my sister wants Swift to maintain.
