(Yes, I know I never write here any more. But I need a place to write these thoughts down.)

E and I just dropped my little sister off at the airport after a 6 day visit. It was pleasant and I always enjoy seeing E with my family. But the visit, for various reasons, very much emphasized the distance, both literally and figuratively, between me and my family.

My sister and I couldn't possibly have more different relationships with my parents. First of all, our dad is technically my step-dad, even though I think of him as my father both because my biological father was MIA from early on and because he's been in the picture since I was 3. Also, my mom got pregnant with me when she was 16, and I was born a month after she turned 17. Teens don't really make the best parents. She had to grow up fast, and ended up marrying my step-father who is 10 years older than she is, and then my sister was born was she was 24. Needless to say, she was SO much better at being a mom to my sister than she was to me, and I was not unaware of the differences.

I really think she was a pretty lousy mom to me. I won't get into much detail, but there was a lot of yelling and threatening and more than enough hitting. She often reminded me that I made her life hard (yep, it was all my fault she didn't get to go to college), and I realized early in high school that she was envious of any success that I had. It went so far that she tried to sabotage my acceptance to my college of choice.

It took years. YEARS. for me to get over all of that. And by YEARS, I mean years of therapy. Years of hating myself. Years of never feeling like anything I did was worthwhile. And then finally coming to terms with the fact that really none of it matters any more. That I am the one with power over my feelings and my actions and my deeds. Yes, a lot of that stuff affected the way my early adult life would be, but I've been on my own long enough, have made enough of my own decisions (good and bad), and have put enough distance and time between us that she can not have any power over me. And finally coming to that realization was completely life changing. I've been pretty satisfied and content with my life ever since.

That realization also allowed me to see that she was also a different person and allowed me to have a relationship with her. A good relationship. I like being around her, even. I have not forgotten nor forgiven the misery of my childhood, but I've moved on, and that has allowed me to recognize what a good grandmother she is to my son. And that contributes to my feeling of having a satisfactory life.

My sister had a very different mother from the one I had. She did not feel controlled or hated or unwanted. She felt nothing but loved and respected. So while I sought out every bit of independence I could and moved away as soon as possible, my sister lived with our parents through college and after. She now lives in a house with her fiance less than 10 minutes away. Her fiance is best friends with my parents' neighbors and they see each other ALL THE TIME. My sister is happy with this situation, and I am happy living 2000 miles away.

The physical distance has allowed the emotional distance I established long ago to remain intact. I made the choice to create those distances and it has never bothered me. Until now. My sister talked a lot about her and her fiance's friends' son who is 3 months older than E. This kid spends a lot of time around my parents, and my parents rave on and on about how great this kid is. I think that's nice, and I know the distance from their own grandson has been hard on them, so I'm glad they are around a similarly aged kid that they like. But as I listened to all these stories about this kid, I realized they have a closer relationship with him than they do with E. And that made me realize just how much closer emotionally they will be to my sister's kids than they will be to E, no matter how many video chats we do or how often we talk to them on the phone. It's just a fact. It bothers me because I worry about how E will feel in the future when we go to visit his grandparents and HE sees the differences in the relationships his cousins have with his grandparents.

Maybe I'm more concerned about this because it brings up the horrible way I felt all those years witnessing the differences between my and my sister's relationship with our parents. Maybe E won't notice at all, or won't care at all. Maybe as long as we give him all the love that we have to give him, he will just roll with the situation and not worry about it.

But right now J and I are in the process of making some changes to our wills, and we've been meaning to revisit the guardianship issue. We currently have assigned very good friends who have a child close to E's age, and who were very touched when we asked them for permission to name them as E's guardians. But since I've seen how great my parents are with E, and since realizing they will most likely NOT treat him the way I was treated growing up, J and I came to the conclusion that they would be the people in our lives who would love him the most, and ultimately that is what is most important when it comes to someone raising our kid if we were to both die. It even trumps the fact that E would grow up in a podunk Texas town.

But now I'm feeling conflicted about making the change. If the unthinkable were to happen and E had to move in with his grandparents, would he grow up feeling "less than" his cousins in the same way I always felt "less than" my sister? Am I just putting my own issues into this equation?

The fact is, no one will raise E the way J and I strive to raise him. No one else will share our exact same philosophy on discipline, or encourage him to take the same kind of classes we will, or dress him the way we do, or do anything the same as we will. Really, though, none of that stuff matters. What does matter, and what I can't stop thinking about, is that no one will love him the same. And I just can't accept that, and it is paralyzing me from being able to make a rational decision.