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<blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 646723" data-attributes="member: 17461"><p>Here is an interesting thing that came immediately to mind. Immediately.</p><p></p><p>"<em>F you, mom!"</em></p><p></p><p>And I am 63 years old.</p><p></p><p>Validation.</p><p></p><p>Woo hoo! Thanks, guys!!!!</p><p></p><p><img src="/community/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/2012/upssmiley.gif" class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":upssmiley:" title="upssmiley :upssmiley:" data-shortname=":upssmiley:" /></p><p></p><p>This is all of you in the Conduct Disorders Emergency Medical Van, delivering the messages that can change how we see ourselves.</p><p></p><p>:O)</p><p></p><p>The person jumping around is me.</p><p></p><p>That is how freedom feels.</p><p></p><p>Like, crazy, and with heat coming out the top of the head.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>So, here is another little piece of the mother story. There was a five year span when my parents and I did not speak. husband and I don't know to this day what that was about, except that my sister was involved, somehow. husband said something about not having seen my parents for awhile, and let's have them for dinner.</p><p></p><p>(I left that sentence structured as it came out. :O)</p><p></p><p>Anyway, my mother refused and said, "I told you I was going to do this."</p><p></p><p>?</p><p></p><p>So, that was pretty shaming.</p><p></p><p>Especially in front of husband.</p><p></p><p>And when I said, essentially, "What?", she handed the phone to my father. Who said: "Is there anyone else here you would like to talk to."</p><p></p><p>And I said, "No."</p><p></p><p>And we did not speak for five years.</p><p></p><p>husband' take on that one, now that all this has come out, is that my father was afraid of my mother, too. (I had not told husband so much about the way I grew up, at that time. Until the horrible question of what I might have done to the kids came up, I didn't talk about it much at all. As I am healing now, in this time, I am seeing things as so meanly, stupidly abusive that I simply saw as normal, before. It is like you, MWM, when you talk about your first marriage. You have nothing to compare it to. Your cup can be shattered into a thousand pieces, and you watch the liquid in it flow out and call the empty good because at least you have a cup.) </p><p></p><p>And my sister played "Oh, I must get you all back together...."</p><p></p><p>And in that time, my father had a heart bypass.</p><p></p><p>And it was my sister who, against my mother's wishes, called and told me.</p><p></p><p>And so, on the day of the surgery, I called the hospital and learned my father had lived through it.</p><p></p><p>And the next day, my mother called to tell me my father had had a heart bypass and that he was fine. And, meanly enough, I said I already knew. That I had learned of the upcoming surgery and called the hospital.</p><p></p><p>And my mother left instructions that I was not to be given further information.</p><p></p><p>That is why, this time, I am not talking to my sister until I talk to my mother or Hell freezes over, whichever comes first. I am on my own, here.</p><p></p><p>And sometimes, alone is best.</p><p></p><p>"We are a strong, tight knit family who have come through some very hard times."</p><p></p><p>That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.</p><p></p><p>But here is a secret: I am only strong enough now to do this, to see things this way, because of all of you, of all of us, of what we do, here.</p><p></p><p>:O)</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>I posted something for Albatross this morning about that old television series, Dragnet.</p><p></p><p>Looks like I need it too, and hooray for me and here it is. (<em>F you, mom.)</em></p><p></p><p>I didn't die.</p><p></p><p>[MEDIA=youtube]AMIZGrgWOO4[/MEDIA]</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>We were in the horrible thick of it with the kids, and were so vulnerable to everything at that time. Just raw, open and bleeding and vulnerable. We hadn't yet put our marriage back together around the crashing down of everything that mattered. <em>And there are people who will use your weakness, wherever that weakness came from they will fasten onto it; people who will attack or set themselves above you or betray you in your time of vulnerability because they can. </em></p><p><em></em></p><p> <em></em>That is true.</p><p></p><p>We have some stuff, husband and I. Houses and things. (Only two houses.) We have more stuff than my parents or my sister, in fact. Though my sister did get married again and now, she has stuff too. Maybe more than me. She also has my mother, as I have posted about here in other threads.</p><p></p><p>husband thinks jealousy played into everything that happens, there.</p><p></p><p>We had just bought the second house the year this happened. So, we had two houses, but both of them were empty, sad places because we did not have the kids, right? The second house was better though, because it did not have those same horrible memories of the times when things were falling apart.</p><p></p><p>We sold that first house, the one we had built and raised our children in.</p><p></p><p>Lil, if you are reading along, you mentioned selling the house where you raised your child. I recommend it, very much. </p><p></p><p>Build another.</p><p></p><p>Anyway, that is why I am always saying there are people, even and maybe, especially, family, who will do you in however they can do it. Or maybe for them it has to do with recovering self image when it seemed that I had everything I needed and there were things they still needed?</p><p></p><p>husband says it is that my mother was losing control of me. As the kids fell, I had become too depressed to worry about anything more she could say. And she said a great plenty. </p><p></p><p>That is why I am always saying that, no matter what it looks like or how it feels, the words we say to our children matter. </p><p></p><p>Anyway, husband' take on it is that she could no longer get to me any other way.</p><p></p><p>And I did not get that for the longest time.</p><p></p><p>But he was right, I suppose.</p><p></p><p>(Cheesh. Maybe I don't need that Dragnet clip after all! Grrr! Roar! Where is that magical little guy with the sword, come to cut through repression and depression and dis-appreciation of all flavors.</p><p></p><p>(F you, mom.)</p><p></p><p>Not even in italilcs.</p><p></p><p><img src="/community/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/emoticons/choir.gif" class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":choir:" title="choir :choir:" data-shortname=":choir:" /></p><p></p><p>Anyway, some five years after that happened, I decided to join a writing group in the little town where the second house is. And I walked in (late) and...there was my mother. In a writing group.</p><p></p><p>And I was late.</p><p></p><p>And she said something about how those who arrived late had to take a card number of a different color, and could read only after those who had arrived on time had received feedback.</p><p></p><p>So, that pretty much sucked.</p><p></p><p>I had brought something from that story I put on this thread for Albatross.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p>And here is a new thought that is probably a true thing. Had the writing been bad, it is probably true that my mother would have let me go.</p><p></p><p>But if the writing was not bad....</p><p></p><p>It is a very sad thing, to realize the bitterly cold dynamics of an abusive family.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>Anyway, at the end of it, my mother beetled over and was talking all about how I needed her, needed a mother. And there was this man from the writer's group (who would later become my karate instructor, as a matter of fact) who followed my mother and I out to her car. Like, listening in and chiming in and I still don't know how it is that he happened to feel he could do that.</p><p></p><p>But of course I do, now that I think very bad things about my own mother. She shared the terrible tragedy of this daughter that was me with them, didn't she.</p><p></p><p>And so, had a vested interest in making that true.</p><p></p><p>Or maybe I am just really mean and reaching for the worst possible interpretation.</p><p></p><p>So, I said all the appropriate things.</p><p></p><p>And that is how we came to be talking again, at all.</p><p></p><p>husband was happy, because he had really missed my father.</p><p></p><p>And we just sort of picked up from there, like nothing bad ever happened.</p><p></p><p>Pretty much the way it is for an abused child to go to school the next day.</p><p></p><p>Or an abused woman to go to work.</p><p></p><p>Never happened.</p><p></p><p>And there is nothing wrong here.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>Eventually, I stopped going to that writer's group, of course. Not right away, because that would have been too obvious. But at the core of me, that certainty that my writing was intrinsically flawed was reawakened.</p><p></p><p>I did receive some incredible feedback from that group.</p><p></p><p>But.</p><p></p><p>And it turned out that my mother had always wanted to write. She would write one or one and a half page stories about incidents in her life, and they were actually well written and even, funny.</p><p></p><p>And I was asked to read them all.</p><p></p><p>And I did.</p><p></p><p>In retrospect, there have been many opportunities to stand up.</p><p></p><p>But here's the thing. We have to have had someone who believed in the best of us before we can believe it, ourselves. Before we can believe that we are not (wait for it....) fools fated to fail. (!) I will say it again: No matter how it looks, whether we believe they are listening or not, <em>we are their mothers</em>, and it matters what we say to our children, all of their lives.</p><p></p><p>Jabber, if you are reading this, fathers matter, too.</p><p></p><p>I am telling husband that all the time.</p><p></p><p>The words you say matter. They will echo down the years and be heard by your grandchildren, and they will be heard again in generations not yet born.</p><p></p><p>That is something we can do.</p><p></p><p>However bad it gets, we can know our hearts and speak the words of healing. Even if those words are "I love you. Stand up." "I love you. You were raised better." "I love you. We are done."</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I was always stopped in my tracks by a real horror that somehow, I would be like my mother. I was so afraid of that. I never knew I was afraid of it until I had my first baby.</p><p></p><p>And then it hit.</p><p></p><p>husband often worked nights, when we had our first baby.</p><p></p><p>And you all know what would happen at our house when I was little and my father was gone in the night.</p><p></p><p>So...I would take my wide awake, crying baby down to the kitchen table and sit there with her in my arms. And I would wait for the furnace to blow up. </p><p></p><p>Or for someone to break in.</p><p></p><p>And we would wait there until the sky began to lighten.</p><p></p><p>And it wasn't until I had been in therapy for some time that I realized I was awake and protecting my baby from myself.</p><p></p><p>But here is the courage in all of that for us, Lil. We faced what we faced (however I covered mine up) and we loved ourselves and our babies enough to face it down.</p><p></p><p>I did not have those same fears with my second baby.</p><p></p><p>I had come through the fire of it, and trusted myself completely.</p><p></p><p>Oy.</p><p></p><p>I always put a heart, a friendly heart, on those posts where we have been vulnerable enough to share at a level that helps someone else (me, in this case) heal.</p><p></p><p>Thank you, Lil.</p><p></p><p>*******</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Thank you, 2much. The more I read all of our stories and the more I uncover and recategorize and repeat my own...I don't know. I guess I see courage where before, I saw cowardice. I see tenacity and determination where before I saw only the losses, only the failure which seemed to be mine but for which my children were suffering.</p><p></p><p>It is strangely true that if we can find that safe place where we can risk exposing the times we were targeted and fell and lost and laid around half dead for a time (or for a really long time)...we can re~understand who we are.</p><p></p><p>So, what an unbelievable thing that is.</p><p></p><p>Thank you for letting me be ugly.</p><p></p><p>That is a very hard thing.</p><p></p><p>But...F YOU, MOM!</p><p></p><p>:O)</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I will take that with me.</p><p></p><p>And it will be there, strong and steady and just right, when I need it.</p><p></p><p>Thank you, 2much.</p><p></p><p>Cedar</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Scent of Cedar *, post: 646723, member: 17461"] Here is an interesting thing that came immediately to mind. Immediately. "[I]F you, mom!"[/I] And I am 63 years old. Validation. Woo hoo! Thanks, guys!!!! :upssmiley: This is all of you in the Conduct Disorders Emergency Medical Van, delivering the messages that can change how we see ourselves. :O) The person jumping around is me. That is how freedom feels. Like, crazy, and with heat coming out the top of the head. *** So, here is another little piece of the mother story. There was a five year span when my parents and I did not speak. husband and I don't know to this day what that was about, except that my sister was involved, somehow. husband said something about not having seen my parents for awhile, and let's have them for dinner. (I left that sentence structured as it came out. :O) Anyway, my mother refused and said, "I told you I was going to do this." ? So, that was pretty shaming. Especially in front of husband. And when I said, essentially, "What?", she handed the phone to my father. Who said: "Is there anyone else here you would like to talk to." And I said, "No." And we did not speak for five years. husband' take on that one, now that all this has come out, is that my father was afraid of my mother, too. (I had not told husband so much about the way I grew up, at that time. Until the horrible question of what I might have done to the kids came up, I didn't talk about it much at all. As I am healing now, in this time, I am seeing things as so meanly, stupidly abusive that I simply saw as normal, before. It is like you, MWM, when you talk about your first marriage. You have nothing to compare it to. Your cup can be shattered into a thousand pieces, and you watch the liquid in it flow out and call the empty good because at least you have a cup.) And my sister played "Oh, I must get you all back together...." And in that time, my father had a heart bypass. And it was my sister who, against my mother's wishes, called and told me. And so, on the day of the surgery, I called the hospital and learned my father had lived through it. And the next day, my mother called to tell me my father had had a heart bypass and that he was fine. And, meanly enough, I said I already knew. That I had learned of the upcoming surgery and called the hospital. And my mother left instructions that I was not to be given further information. That is why, this time, I am not talking to my sister until I talk to my mother or Hell freezes over, whichever comes first. I am on my own, here. And sometimes, alone is best. "We are a strong, tight knit family who have come through some very hard times." That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it. But here is a secret: I am only strong enough now to do this, to see things this way, because of all of you, of all of us, of what we do, here. :O) *** I posted something for Albatross this morning about that old television series, Dragnet. Looks like I need it too, and hooray for me and here it is. ([I]F you, mom.)[/I] I didn't die. [MEDIA=youtube]AMIZGrgWOO4[/MEDIA] *** We were in the horrible thick of it with the kids, and were so vulnerable to everything at that time. Just raw, open and bleeding and vulnerable. We hadn't yet put our marriage back together around the crashing down of everything that mattered. [I]And there are people who will use your weakness, wherever that weakness came from they will fasten onto it; people who will attack or set themselves above you or betray you in your time of vulnerability because they can. [/I]That is true. We have some stuff, husband and I. Houses and things. (Only two houses.) We have more stuff than my parents or my sister, in fact. Though my sister did get married again and now, she has stuff too. Maybe more than me. She also has my mother, as I have posted about here in other threads. husband thinks jealousy played into everything that happens, there. We had just bought the second house the year this happened. So, we had two houses, but both of them were empty, sad places because we did not have the kids, right? The second house was better though, because it did not have those same horrible memories of the times when things were falling apart. We sold that first house, the one we had built and raised our children in. Lil, if you are reading along, you mentioned selling the house where you raised your child. I recommend it, very much. Build another. Anyway, that is why I am always saying there are people, even and maybe, especially, family, who will do you in however they can do it. Or maybe for them it has to do with recovering self image when it seemed that I had everything I needed and there were things they still needed? husband says it is that my mother was losing control of me. As the kids fell, I had become too depressed to worry about anything more she could say. And she said a great plenty. That is why I am always saying that, no matter what it looks like or how it feels, the words we say to our children matter. Anyway, husband' take on it is that she could no longer get to me any other way. And I did not get that for the longest time. But he was right, I suppose. (Cheesh. Maybe I don't need that Dragnet clip after all! Grrr! Roar! Where is that magical little guy with the sword, come to cut through repression and depression and dis-appreciation of all flavors. (F you, mom.) Not even in italilcs. :choir: Anyway, some five years after that happened, I decided to join a writing group in the little town where the second house is. And I walked in (late) and...there was my mother. In a writing group. And I was late. And she said something about how those who arrived late had to take a card number of a different color, and could read only after those who had arrived on time had received feedback. So, that pretty much sucked. I had brought something from that story I put on this thread for Albatross. *** And here is a new thought that is probably a true thing. Had the writing been bad, it is probably true that my mother would have let me go. But if the writing was not bad.... It is a very sad thing, to realize the bitterly cold dynamics of an abusive family. *** Anyway, at the end of it, my mother beetled over and was talking all about how I needed her, needed a mother. And there was this man from the writer's group (who would later become my karate instructor, as a matter of fact) who followed my mother and I out to her car. Like, listening in and chiming in and I still don't know how it is that he happened to feel he could do that. But of course I do, now that I think very bad things about my own mother. She shared the terrible tragedy of this daughter that was me with them, didn't she. And so, had a vested interest in making that true. Or maybe I am just really mean and reaching for the worst possible interpretation. So, I said all the appropriate things. And that is how we came to be talking again, at all. husband was happy, because he had really missed my father. And we just sort of picked up from there, like nothing bad ever happened. Pretty much the way it is for an abused child to go to school the next day. Or an abused woman to go to work. Never happened. And there is nothing wrong here. *** Eventually, I stopped going to that writer's group, of course. Not right away, because that would have been too obvious. But at the core of me, that certainty that my writing was intrinsically flawed was reawakened. I did receive some incredible feedback from that group. But. And it turned out that my mother had always wanted to write. She would write one or one and a half page stories about incidents in her life, and they were actually well written and even, funny. And I was asked to read them all. And I did. In retrospect, there have been many opportunities to stand up. But here's the thing. We have to have had someone who believed in the best of us before we can believe it, ourselves. Before we can believe that we are not (wait for it....) fools fated to fail. (!) I will say it again: No matter how it looks, whether we believe they are listening or not, [I]we are their mothers[/I], and it matters what we say to our children, all of their lives. Jabber, if you are reading this, fathers matter, too. I am telling husband that all the time. The words you say matter. They will echo down the years and be heard by your grandchildren, and they will be heard again in generations not yet born. That is something we can do. However bad it gets, we can know our hearts and speak the words of healing. Even if those words are "I love you. Stand up." "I love you. You were raised better." "I love you. We are done." *** I was always stopped in my tracks by a real horror that somehow, I would be like my mother. I was so afraid of that. I never knew I was afraid of it until I had my first baby. And then it hit. husband often worked nights, when we had our first baby. And you all know what would happen at our house when I was little and my father was gone in the night. So...I would take my wide awake, crying baby down to the kitchen table and sit there with her in my arms. And I would wait for the furnace to blow up. Or for someone to break in. And we would wait there until the sky began to lighten. And it wasn't until I had been in therapy for some time that I realized I was awake and protecting my baby from myself. But here is the courage in all of that for us, Lil. We faced what we faced (however I covered mine up) and we loved ourselves and our babies enough to face it down. I did not have those same fears with my second baby. I had come through the fire of it, and trusted myself completely. Oy. I always put a heart, a friendly heart, on those posts where we have been vulnerable enough to share at a level that helps someone else (me, in this case) heal. Thank you, Lil. ******* Thank you, 2much. The more I read all of our stories and the more I uncover and recategorize and repeat my own...I don't know. I guess I see courage where before, I saw cowardice. I see tenacity and determination where before I saw only the losses, only the failure which seemed to be mine but for which my children were suffering. It is strangely true that if we can find that safe place where we can risk exposing the times we were targeted and fell and lost and laid around half dead for a time (or for a really long time)...we can re~understand who we are. So, what an unbelievable thing that is. Thank you for letting me be ugly. That is a very hard thing. But...F YOU, MOM! :O) *** I will take that with me. And it will be there, strong and steady and just right, when I need it. Thank you, 2much. Cedar [/QUOTE]
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