Last week, in writing about the fun of my oldest son’s wedding, I alluded to the fact that my oldest daughter was not present and not invited.  Yes, it is true, she was not invited.

Sometimes life feels like we are all on a chessboard of life, being spiritually urged by both sides, as shown in the clipart.  We want to move around the squares with the best of motives; we want to make the correct moves, however sometimes it is difficult to know which is correct.  I have asked myself more than once if we did the right thing in not telling our eldest daughter about the wedding as I do not wish to be purposely hurtful and yet I do believe that boundaries are necessary with her.

I always answer that question to myself the same way.  It was my son’s decision.  Had my son wanted to invite her, we would have made sure that he at least had her phone number to contact her.  The “however” is that my son’s wedding day was about him and his fiancé, not the prodigal sibling that he has not seen in 5 years.

Over the years, each of our other 4 kids have individually asked us not to talk about them or anything going on in their lives to our eldest daughter.  Simply put, they want privacy.  For my eldest son in particular, having a sibling with an outstanding warrant for arrest in one state and convictions on multiple felony counts in another state, made for some awkwardness in trying to pursue law enforcement.  The best that he could do was to state that he had no contact with her and had not seen her for X amount of years.  I will never know if my daughter’s outstanding warrant in our state prevented him from getting on a police force in our state.  It’s best I don’t know as I would not deal well with that knowledge.

Was it the right decision not to invite the older daughter?  My daughter has had a year and a half after getting out of jail to work on her relationship with us and her siblings and she has drawn a veil over her private life.

She has “pseudo” given us some information in that she gave us a living address this past spring.  It’s a 6-bedroom house in an affluent neighborhood (I googled the address) that she clearly can’t afford.  It is either another transition house (doubt it) or she is in a situation that I likely would not approve of or she is lying.  The job that she recently has gone to great pains to tell us about (some “hotspot” bar) and is supposedly working a lot of double shifts…maybe, maybe not.  Historically, the more information we get about a topic, the less likely it is to be true.

Our relationship with our older daughter is such a thin strand that it is barely there.  It’s “on her” to be open about her life and convey that she is living honestly, is law-abiding and can be safely let back into our family’s life.  Blocking us on social media really isn’t being open.  Keeping back information that I found out just before the wedding…that there is another baby… isn’t helping either.  That will be another blog.

Still, I ask myself whether her holding back the information that she had another baby the same as me not telling her that her brother had a wedding?  Again, I go back to the chessboard of life and wanting to do the right thing.  In my mind, the baby is her information and she should share it.  The wedding is my son’s information and if he wants us not to share anything about his life, my protection of his privacy is a higher importance than her “right” to know about the wedding.

For the record, I absolutely believe that it was best that my older daughter was not at the wedding and if it were my choice as to the invitation, I would have made the same choice in not inviting her.  Overall, the drama that this older daughter would have brought to the wedding would have taken away from the sheer joy of rejoicing at the start of my son and his new bride’s life together.

Life is complicated.