Writing it down does help, but I think we have had to fight so hard for our kids that we have changed, at some deep level. We have had to learn to let go, to survive the horrible pain of what has happened to our children. Next to that? Compared to what we have already survived? Compared to the things we have already learned to accept, and to the patterns we have had to change? Our families begin to look like the pale imitations, begin to look and feel like the counterfeit, bogus bozos they are.
Ha!
Where did that come from?!?
:O)
It is true, though. You all know what the past two years, and especially this past year, have been like for me. In my family of origin...difficult child daughter's homelessness, addiction, diagnosis, the beating and its horrifying consequences...my grandchildren vulnerable and exposed to all of it, the family broken up ~ these things were all just grist for the mill.
Though we were all supposedly speaking at the time (we aren't, now ~ my choice, made just recently) no one called me. No one came to me, no one helped me to be strong, or to understand how to face it.
My brother did, a little bit.
My sister's take is that difficult child daughter has a demon on board.
My mother...slyly eliciting details, condemning difficult child daughter, rejecting her, anticipating even worse.
Of all the things I am most angry about where my family of origin is concerned, thinking about their behavior during this horrible time for me makes me want to scream and scream and scream.
Ahem.
Thank heaven this site is anonymous.
Here is a thing I have only touched on here, regarding my sister. Given the way we grew up, she and I had made a pact. We would try very hard to create an inclusion. We would not continue the exclusion that was the lynchpin in how our family of origin functioned. For all these years, until now, until this very morning, when I too am looking at my relationship to my sister, I have honored that pact to the best of my ability.
I have allowed the craziest things, in the name of that pact I made with my sister.
And it is only now, when I am better, different, healing, stronger...that I am finally allowing myself to see the hatred she harbors for me. Recovering suggested that jealousy was at the heart of it. If that is true, then I can understand how it would turn into what it is. I can even forgive it. We all were so deeply hurt, so damaged, in our childhoods. But when hurting you is another person's intention even in the now, even today, when the bond between you is the vehicle of betrayal...we have to acknowledge that. We have to see it and stand up.
We have no right to allow someone ~ it doesn't matter who they are ~ to use their connection to us to destroy us. Our lives are precious, beautiful, time limited miracles. There will come a time when this incredible blessing of being here at all, of being alive, will be over, for us.
It is wrong to allow another person to cheapen that gift. It is wrong to accept anything less than the healthiest, most compassionate, sincerely honest people to have any smallest input into our lives, into our dreams of our families and our futures.
Anyway. Back when my children were little and my life was so really perfect, my sister and her uber religious cohorts prayed a "ring of thorns" around me and my family, to "bring me to the Lord". My sister told me this after difficult child daughter began acting out. At the time when she told me, it was a little scary? But I did not really believe it, did not see the hatred in it, until now. I did not see the hatred in so much of what my sister (or my mother) have done, in how they have behaved, until now.
And I could cry, for the pain and the horror and the hopelessness of it, and for my own innocence in believing that I could change that, that we could choose to love ourselves out of what had happened to all of us.
I am not saying I am like, this perfectly loving or lovable person. But I am saying I try.
That's what I do.
I try.
I hold a good intention, and I try.
I am having a bad day, around these issues. But at the same time? There is a triumph to it. To seeing it, I mean. And to not only accept it and let go, but to "reveling in my abandon". That's from an old Tom Petty song about living like a refugee.
I've been hearing another old Tom Petty song this morning, too. That one about "Don't come around here no more...."
I feel so sorry for the things they have done to me, for the way I kept forgiving it, kept not seeing the hatred in it.
But it is just like I posted somewhere else: If I can stand up to my children, if I can change what I see when I see my own children, I can stand to see this.
I become so angry, though, as I am letting myself reinterpret the past. And beneath the anger? There is hurt, at the betrayal; at the stupid, pointless hurt of it all.
I feel pretty ashamed of these feelings. I feel a different kind of shame, a kind of betrayal of the family feeling, in posting it, here. Like I am "telling", right? But the healing is in the seeing and then, in the telling.
Plus?
Oh, halleluiah, this site is anonymous.
I appreciate being able to process these really terrible feelings here, with all of you.
And even though I know this processing is healthy, even though I know that I will heal from it through the processing...it still really hurts me.
I feel a little foolish, at how much it hurts.
Part of me is throwing out that I have done the same kinds of things to them. But I think I have caught myself. I think that, whenever I became aware of it, I tried to do the right thing, instead. It is the determined, over time hatred that so shocks and hurts me, this morning. I feel like I am wallowing in self pity, in a kind of stupid righteousness or ~ I don't know. Something like weakness.
And all I know to do or say is: Bring it on.
Cedar
