What in the world did I do wrong?
Maybe, nothing.
Think of moms with four or five children. And one or two seem determined to follow a different path. And the poor mom is still a mess over that one or two, but has her other children. So, she can understand the betrayal was the child's.
She can respond appropriately.
She loves the troubled child with her mother's love, but protects the other children, and the family unit, from the troubled child.
Our troubled children
were the family unit.
Just like in Tapestry, our hands came up empty.
And our families of origin celebrate that, the weird little ducks.
Maybe this was part of the problem: our sons felt they were everything to us. And their lives alone paled. They resent the way they were loved. Because it ended. That love that would not let anything else touch it, had to end. And that is what our son's will not forgive us for.
I am thinking about that Copa, but I think that is not it. For my son, for certain, it has to do with drug use. Leafy or Feeling had a thread on P.E. about ice pipes. She said she hadn't known what those were. Neither did I. So, I looked them up.
My son was using those kinds of pipes all the time. He would show them to me, and want to know whether I thought they were beautiful. I thought he'd developed an interest in glass blowing and was using the glass pipe to smoke grass. I learned about glass blowing, and would tell my son about this or that place we might go to see glass blown.
He was never interested.
I thought about all that, the day Feeling or Leafy posted about ice pipes.
They are used to smoke meth, Copa.
Meth!
***
I think my son got into the habit of being angry and accusatory and demanding during the addiction years. I think (because this is what he tells me) that he feels we abandoned him to chase after his sister. And in our new understanding of abandonment, a young boy's life crashing down around his ears would constitute abandonment. But I think we could have come through this differently had drugs not happened, and I believe this is true for your son, too.
We cannot afford to be eating ourselves alive with recrimination or regret.
If there were something, we would change it but there is nothing a mother whose intentions were good could have done that a grown man, whose mother's intentions are still good, cannot have recovered from. Our sons' and daughters' lives and addictions and failings are not something we need feel shame for ~ and certainly, not shame before our families of origin. The shame we should feel is for the responses our morally criminal families of origin mounted to the tragedies happening to us, and to our children. That our children have done what they have done is nothing more than a series of terrible things that happened to people we love.
That our families of origin judge our children (and us, of course) for what those toxic families have devoutly prayed for (remember the Ring of Thorns my sister prayed around myself and my family) is testament to the moral character of the people we have protected all of their lives. And I am talking about the mothers here too, because the roles we were forced into served them very, very well, too.
Just as you protected your sister Copa by choosing the dungeon at the heart of the City, I protected mine (and my brothers, too). Pseudo mom is hated (and loved, is shamed before and is shamed), not only by the sibs,
but by the mother, too.
Which is a pretty cheap freaking shot, when you think about it.
Healthy families circle the wagons. Ours do too, but the center of the circle is where they burn us at the stake. This is done to eradicate the witness.
The witness, who is only that little girl (or that little boy) from the dungeon at the center of town and who care whether they suffer so long as we do not.
That is how our weird duck families of origin operate ~ that is how they function at all Copa, in the face of the hatred at the heart of them.
Remember my mother, giddy that she was the only one left alive to tell the story and proceeding to create a murderess of my dead grandmother. That will go into the "geneology" my mother is concocting. In it, there is very little about her family of origin.
An interesting series of omissions.
We need to stop accepting anything to do with how our families of origin see things, Copa. Those times of sadness or self accusation: That is the family of origin within.
Certainly, our children should not be carrying water for our morally deficient families of origin. Not only will our dysfunctional, hatred based families of origin not have made an exception for our children, but their vision will have informed our own. And that is exactly what happened, once the families we had created with our children became vulnerable. There will be the same evil, flowing like water and shriveling everything it touches and that is just how our FOO love it.
Stop it, Copa. Both you and I will see with our eyes clear from this point forward. In those times we feel defeated by the problems our children face, we will recognize family of origin moral turpitude and eradicate it and them and their nasty, prying little fingers from our psyches, and from the negative tapes hissing away in our heads.
Thinking in those self defeating ways will not help us, only weaken us.
We need to stay focused, and aware.
If we learn of a better way, that is what we will do. For now, this is the better way we learned. It has cost us time and attention and presence
but it is making a difference for us and for our children.
We are almost there. We will recognize the place we are going when we see our children as fine people, people who are ours and are part of us and always will be. Their problems and how we do our parts to make them strong enough to face them will simply be what happened, next.
Our children love us, Copa.
We can go very far on that knowledge.
That other, twisted stuff was family of origin stuff. Was our children sensing our weaknesses to cover their own. And though that had to do with the moral depravity that happens with extensive drug use...the weaknesses, the broken places, existed within us already. We need to be stronger than that.
It is like we have been crawling after our children and our families of origin, our ringing beggar's cup held high. We need to be instead like the eye of the hurricane. Like the quiet, certain center around which chaos revolves.
And eventually, chaos will subside.
Change is certain.
The sister's children will have been raised to bask in the mother's favor at your humiliation, Copa. Or your grief or your pain or your presence, come home from the storm to
once again and forever more, protect the mother.
The sisters lie, Copa.
Refuse to be humiliated. Our families of origin cannot be trusted. None of this ~ not from condemning your son because you tripped going after him to the sister's children performing on cue to cut you with a thousand invisible knives that leave you bleeding but not sure why ~ none of it should ever have happened to you
or to your son.
They poison our very vision, Copa.
They are deadly.
We are the fox, carrying the scorpion across the river for no other reason than that they asked us to do so.
Stop carrying them, Copa.
I am falling through layer after layer of denial regarding my family of origin. That my nieces and nephews will have been brought up believing in the awe/patronization circle is just a fact.
Roar.
It is better to know.
Toxic, all of it. We have no families Copa, other than those we create for ourselves.
We need to get them out of our heads, Copa.
It was not the money. It would be accepting that I was how she defined me.
And this must be why I am outraged when M treats me badly. I scream to say, no more. I will never again submit.
I will never believe myself to be that cheapened thing I was sold for, again. The corrupted, cheapened win ~ not for them, and not for anyone else. Soon, the screaming will be over. Silence will fall, and your vision will be crystal clear.
You will see M.
He will see you.
The blinders both required drop away, or they do not.
That I was sold for so cheap a win is the heart of the offense I feel today. How cheap was the win. How stupid, the thing won at such cost to myself. And they still insist on it, in exactly the way that one of us had posted about the naked, knobby kneed Emperor's insistence that he remains clothed in beauty.
What kind of people are these people?
The kind who would beat their children in the first place.
The kind who are very okay with that dungeon in the center of town.
***
It is a genetic imperative for us to love the mother. That is the thing we are detangling, every fact loosening the weave just enough to tease out yet another true thing. Our families of origin were and are ugly, toxic things. The depth and breadth of it is breathtaking. (Says allergy prone, asthmatic Cedar.)
Now I am questioning why I even emailed her.
Because Copa
she no longer matters. You do. For now, for this minute, you are curious without the blinders of fear and position and all that crap buzzing around in the sister's aura.
In time, as you come to believe yourself and listen and hear and cherish and free yourself from that hypnotic enslavement, you will lose interest in her altogether. She never was who you believed her to be, Copa. Everything fine in her was only a reflection of you ~ and you gave that to her too and lived in the dark so she could have the light.
Fuek Yen! Roar the Chinese waitress Fueccky Yen and the chickens he rode in on!
It's like D H says. It doesn't matter whether we do say it or whether we don't. What matters is that we know. They are on their freaking own. You have lived all of your life without a sister and most of your life without even the idea of one.
You are fine, Copa.
Here is a secret: You have zero fear of living alone. You have created your life a million times. That fear is a chimera. It has to do with FOO and where you think they think you should be thinking from.
Purchase your freedom, Copa. We both were sold so cheap, and for so cheap a reward, that we can easily, so easily, purchase our freedom. The trick then is remembering that, by our will, we are no longer enslaved.
Not to them, and not to anyone.
On that day, we will have reclaimed ourselves.
We are moving quickly, now.
Wind.
I do not have the confidence you do, Cedar, that I risked this. I hope so. Maybe someday I will go back and read the threads.
I think what you will find there Copa is not that you haven't the confidence, but that you had so little mercy for Copa.
That is the emotional tone of your family of origin, Copa.
Horrifying, to think about that little girl and her bravery and her pain.
I was well held and well in check. So I was never afraid of what I would become that would make him leave me.
Yes Copa, I think this is exactly right for myself and my D H, too.
Change is ongoing.
I like it very much.
Yes. I think my work helped me along, too. I loved a lot in my work. And was loved back.
That happens to me, too. Not at first, but over time. I can never quite figure it out.
Maybe that is how it feels not to be hated.
I think that for me it was I could love my son...and he thrived...and loved me back. I think they call that a virtuous circle. It was safe to love him. I was safe. I made him OK. And then it didn't work anymore.
A virtuous circle.
I love that.
Not bad, for two little girls who grew up in dungeons at the center of town.
:O)
This was what my mother always said. She said my sister always felt inferior, that I had more (of everything except money and meanness, too), was stronger and had the better life.
Which is so weird because I was always vulnerable and Cinderella, and marginalized.
My mother said something like that, once. It had to do with my mother saying how funny was the jealousy between my sister and myself over my mother. And my mother said other words similar to those your mother used to describe your sister.
And I never could figure that one out. But even I was not born yesterday, so I took it with a grain of radioactive salt.
This is me, keeping my feet out of the bull****.
:O)
Cedar
