<p>Some people don’t take to being flaked on very well for a variety of reasons. At the very least, it can call someone’s ability to keep commitments/promises and reliability into question. </p>
<p>Even in the creative arts/music world where this is an occupational hazard, the folks who have a reputation or starting to develop a reputation for such behavior are judged negatively by peers. Especially those who have been burned firsthand or had friends who had been burned by said flake. </p>
<p>"People’s lives and plans change, cobrat. That is life sometimes.</p>
<p>Some people don’t take to being flaked on very well for a variety of reasons. At the very least, it can call someone’s ability to keep commitments/promises and reliability into question."</p>
<p>Well, then they need to learn the difference between “plans change sometimes because that’s life” and “unreliable flake,” then, don’t they? </p>
<p>Really. There isn’t always some neat package to tie these things up in. There isn’t always clear and perfect blame to assign. “Life’s a B.” We all expect others to put up with us and sometimes we have to put up with them. </p>
<p>They live streamed D2’s grad and D1 watched from half way around the world. </p>
<p>Everyone has a different relationship with siblings, that’s for sure. I don’t want to make light of Tatin’s distress.</p>
<p>And anyone who wants to know about my brother and the goats and my college graduation can PM me. I am not going to hijack Tatin’s thread for an ancient oldmom family story! (I graduated from college in 1971.)</p>
<p>Another MD here. Graduated almost 30 years ago from med school. I don’t even remember when I first acquired a white coat. If we had a ceremony, it was so minor that I have no memory of it. Sorry OP but I think it sounds like a silly ceremony and I would not attend a relatives even if it was in same town. Feels like the wrong end of medical school to mark and celebrate.</p>
<p>And BTW, I haven’t owned or worn a white coat in 20+ years despite working full time in office and hospitals. I acquired a new part time job (a non-clinical one at that) and they had a new white coat hanging up for me. So, after about 6 months of seeing it on the wall, I tried it on today. Too big. Took it off and don’t plan to wear it again. The outer trappings are not what makes me a doctor.</p>
<p>The fact that this reunion appears to only consist of the OP, Dad, sister and daughter (part of the time?) would be pretty relevant to me. If my sister ditched our get together at the last moment after saying she’d be there, leaving me spending four days with mostly my Dad…I would be aggravated. Love my Dad, but man can he talk and four days would be REALLY tough. I would be pissed off, and ask her how she could possibly do that to me. No beating around the bush. Especially with no particular reason except that it’s tiring and inconvenient to fly that much. She said she’d go, that’s what I’d planned for, and was really looking forward to seeing her. After my complaining, I am most certain that she would either change her mind or give me profuse apologies (and better excuses).</p>
<p>To some, there is no difference. Especially after one has made a prior commitment to attend and changed one’s mind at the last moment without citing something serious and understandable such as work emergency or illness. This is only worsened if this is done to close friends and moreso…close relatives…even those outside the immediate family. </p>
<p>Look, we don’t know the extent of the commitment, whether she had her tickets, had offered to plan a dinner, made other plans with the D, whether she mentioned the school reunion dates were being finalized, simply said, “sure,” or any other thing.<br>
And it’s not the freaking last minute.
This thread is just veering. I sure hope we don’t get opinions on what constitutes “last minute” to a few. “Oh, I always buy my tickets three months in advance, sixty days is last minute” - ? Or, “Well, in my family…” </p>
<p>In the beginning, nearly every poster said she over-reacted. Now some (maybe some of the same? I don’t know) are saying to lay it deep on the sister. And all sorts of speculating. Tatin chose to send an enthusiastic note about the plans. Obviously, she wants her sister there, as it stands today. I don’t see how it helps to roil this up. Sorry.</p>
<p>The thread title “feeling snubbed” am I right?
Says it all.
Feelings aren’t right or wrong- they just are.
But wanting to get validation for your feelings to the point that you are " right", while someone else is " wrong", throws light on the conflict.</p>
<p>I don’t know if the OP is still reading, but here’s my take on this. Yes, you wanted your sister to be there, and she doesn’t want to come. That hurts. It doesn’t matter much whether it is a kindergarten cap and gown or the med school white coat imho. You live on opposite sides of the country? This makes it hard to be close. </p>
<p>I have a SIL who never came to a single thing for my D, big or small. (Lives on other coast.) She never even had the class to rsvp. We would have to call her to get the news. After a while, we stopped calling, and only sent invites because H felt he needed to do so. It hurt him alot, but eventually he realized that the relationship was not what he wanted it to be, and it never would be so.</p>
<p>Personally, I think the white coat thing is not so big a deal.( At least not like a college graduation.) I am married to a doctor, and many of our friends are doctors too, so it is not like I am biased in any way against medicine. It hurts when your loved ones don’t want to share with you, and I totally relate to this. I have been through this myself in relation to my own D. The important thing is not whether you have been snubbed, but whether you can get on with whatever relationship you have with your S, and not carry around hurt or bad feelings. Maybe you can and maybe you can not do it without some help.</p>
<p>The four day extravaganza of tours and planned events sounds like a lot to me. Did you just run the date by her in mid May or have the whole itinerary planned and got full buy-in? </p>
<p>It sounds like you have a lot of mental backstory and history and are infusing that into this situation. I had a sister based change of plans over July 4th (she told me at 10am that a HS “frenemy” would be at our family celebration at 4pm). I replayed every sister HS slight and interaction for a couple hours then had no choice but to just let it go. We had a wonderful time - there was no agenda or backstory - their kids had just randomly become best friends at a their private school. Sister didn’t “mean” anything by it and after awfulizing it for the morning I had to just realize that the problem was in MY head and just move on.</p>
<p>I called my parents at 6:30 a.m., and to my surprise my brother was there to babysit my dad while my mom and aunt visit their ill brother a couple of hours away. My sister is going to drive them and arrived while I was on the phone with my brother. She got on the phone, and we had a pleasant conversation. I didn’t think a thing of it until I got home and looked at this thread. I had forgotten that I “should” be mad at her for ignoring ds1’s college graduation last month and not attending his celebratory dinner, not sending a card or anything. But, thankfully – and after many tears and years of hard feelings because, trust me, she really is a b*tch – I have gotten past her nonsense. I don’t let what she does or doesn’t do bother me. It’s really freeing.</p>
<p>Goat story:
My brother was a year behind me in school. When he dropped out of college in a town about an hour from my alma mater, he was living on a hippie farm and among other animals, they had goats. (Remember, this was 1971.)</p>
<p>I have a very close family on my mother’s side–they came over from Europe in 1939. There were my grandparents, my mom, her sister a few years younger, and their sister who was born in 1940 in NYC–a surprise late baby. This late baby had a husband and a baby son. In addition to my parents and my hippie brother, I also had a 15-year-old brother. I had found places for my parents, grandparents and older aunt to sleep, my young aunt and husband and baby were driving down on the day of the graduation and I found them a babysitter, and my younger brother was staying at the hippie farm with my brother and his girlfriend. This was a gigantic enterprise–a working class family and they didn’t do hotels. In the middle of all the arranging the week before, my older brother called me and said, “you know, the goat just had kids and they are so cute! We want to bring them, so the whole family can see them, this is the only time they can see them!” I thought about it, and left a message on his new-fangled answering machine (or maybe I left a message with one of his hippie housemates?) to say that I was sorry but it was so complicated already, so I had to say no to the baby goats.</p>
<p>On the morning of the graduation, my younger brother showed up (hitchhiked from my brother’s place) and when everyone asked about older brother and GF, he said, “I don’t know anything!” My father called older brother who said they weren’t coming because I said they couldn’t bring the goats. My father must have told him that he’d never talk to him or give him another penny if they didn’t come to the graduation.</p>
<p>During the ceremony, I saw them in the crowd, and afterward I walked up to them and thanked them for coming. But they wouldn’t talk to me. They turned around and walked out. And at the dinner at the fancy restaurant that I had arranged, all everyone talked about were the goats and my brother.</p>
<p>Old mom…I received a goat as a wedding present, first marriage…from a college friend. It was transported from Michigan to New Hampshire in a van…and my mom was a passenger. </p>