Family Issues

Don’t worry, I get along with my parents and family and everything and it’s not like the problem is abuse-level or anything. It’s just this one issue that presents a small conflict between my parents and my brother and I.

How do you block someone out from your life? Specifically, a family member(or 4-ish) that only talks to you when they need you, make fun of you, your beliefs, and are just generally annoying to be around? And the only person who believes you is your twin brother?

My cousin’s family, who I’m pretty sure I’ve written over here about before, is the family above. Although I could have hundreds and hundreds of posts on why I dislike them, I’ll just say the main stuff.

1. They only try contacting my family whenever their Church needs more members. And they live like 10 minutes away. :/ (My family’s also Christian, we’re just a different… denomination? Branch?)
2. They get offended over the smallest crap, or if we don’t show up to one of their unimportant events, but they didn’t even know that my brother and I graduated and WE POSTED IT ON FACEBOOK. They throw parties for other people over anything, and do you want to know what they told us(My brother and I) when we said we graduated(Middle school, but still.)? ‘It’s your fault you didn’t tell us!’ Keep in mind that A) We invited their Dad/our Uncle, so we assumed that he’d spread the word(They all live in the same house) and B)They yelled at us for their mistake, and they threw their cousin a party for graduating middle school, too.
3. They force us(SS and I) to go to their Church’s ‘youth group’. I put quotes around it, because they just read a few verses from the Bible, talk about it for 10 minutes, then go on and on about their lives. When we go there, they either A) Ignore us, B) Try forcing us to think like them(They’re all Conservative, SS and I are Liberal, so they usually tie in ‘And that’s why gay rights/abortion/Obama is bad’.), C) Manipulate us. I’m not sure if manipulate is the right word or not, but they play with our schedules(‘Okay, YG today! NVM! It’s cancelled! Okay! An hour later! NVM! Be ready in 3 minutes! OK, 6 Flags tomorrow! NVM! It’s raining!’ and so on), and D) Mock us. Older Cousin is an educated hair-cutter person(Stylist? Barber? Beautician? Cosmetologist?), so she thinks she has the right to call us out for anything relating to appearances. ‘Your hair is gross/Get a haircut/*Sniff* I can smell your hair from here!/Who did your haircut? What? No, I did not do something that bad…. oh, yeah, that.’(The gross hair comment was said after using hair gel, which dried up and… yeah). The comments get worse, from implying we’re overweight(Okay, so I could lose a few pounds, but 1/2 of their ‘clique’ is more overweight than we are), to telling us to get new clothes(They weren’t old, warn out or anything. It was just a slightly ridiculous winter coat) , or to shave(This comment was last year, so don’t worry. I shave. :P ), or to use acne products, tweeze our eyebrows(Isn’t telling thirteen year old boys this a little ridiculous?) and so on. And when we tell our parents? They just either shrug it off, agree with them, or don’t believe us. :/
4. They use my brother and I for free baby sitting, for their 11 year old daughter(Who happens to be the only tolerable one in their family) and their Church’s kids, like 4 or something 7 years olds.
5. The daughters/my cousins have done a LOT of stupid stuff. I’ll start the list off with somewhat dangerous driving, spending, time management, prank people into thinking that they’re going into the military/doing some Christian missionary program, and so on. And they also wear revealing clothes. Which isn’t that bad, but they call out others(Like SS and I) for ‘not being Christian enough’ just because we don’t go to their Church, but act like their, um, promiscuous clothing and behavior is perfectly acceptable. And they always curse, use offense terms like gay and retarded as in stupid, and cursing every 2 seconds, IN A CHURCH, but if I say crap or something which isn’t even that bad, they go like ‘Did you just say that? Watch your mouth :/’ and everything.
6. My Grandmother, who is also their Grandmother, treats them like the perfect ones. She still loves us, and since she lives with our family, she sees us more, but if I get a B on ANYTHING, or give the slightest amount of attitude, she just goes all ‘Your cousins are perfect compared to you. Blah blah blah’ and everything. When I point out anything mentioned on this list, she denies it.
7. My Parents and Grandmother don’t believe us. We’ve been trying to tell them we don’t want to see them other than holidays and stuff since November 2008, but they always go like ‘They’re great, you’re just trying to get out of one other social function so you could go online more’, and everything. If I tell them a story about them, they always view them as the heroes and make me look like I did the mistake, or it’s my fault they criticized me, or whatever. It’s so annoying. And once, the cousins confronted my parents about feeling like SS and I are ignoring them, and instead of defending us, my parents just say ‘Well, they’re shy. You should try speaking to them more.’ and made everything WORSE. If they had a problem with us, then why couldn’t they just tell US, the source of the ‘problem’? Only one other person believes us: My 2nd cousin who doesn’t even live in the US.

It’s just annoying dealing with them, and I really want to see them less, like just at holidays, and just phase them out of my life. I mean, if they don’t want to deal with me, then why should I deal with them?

So, any tips? For the youth group, I just plan on saying school stuff, like tests, projects, AP stuff, and so on. But I can’t use those excuses forever, and that doesn’t get rid of all my problems with them. Being sarcastic, snarky, and boring around them doesn’t help that much, because they just think that we’re ‘Growing apart from the Church and being affected by the negativity of the world’ or something like that.

And I apologize if there are any typos or if there are words that appear to be out of place. While I was typing this, Window Live Writer would randomly move the blinking-mouse cursor thing into another paragraph and I’d be typing sentences into other paragraphs, and while I believe I fixed 99% of those, I probably missed a couple or something, so yeah.