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Family of Origin
Is there a time we can and should say good-bye to our past?
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<blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 664254" data-attributes="member: 17461"><p>No, but it might be time to determine what it was you needed from this uncle instead of what you got. And it might be time to see what he did through your own eyes, Serenity, and to see the faces and hear the words you needed, instead of the words that bad, nasty man said. <em>And that, simply by virtue of having been a little girl, you deserved.</em></p><p></p><p>What kind of person does that to a little kid.</p><p></p><p>Do you think he thought he was being funny?</p><p></p><p>Daughter tells this story of the grandmother of daughter's first child. The grandmother was a Native American. As a young girl, she had been torn away from her family of origin and taught that all things about her Native heritage were filthy and wrong. She was punished for speaking a word of her native language. </p><p></p><p>She never saw her parents, again.</p><p></p><p>When she reached eighteen, she was tossed out of the orphanage with nothing and no one. She had been taught the features of her race, the features of her own face, were ugly, were animal-like.</p><p></p><p>And that is the truth she saw reflected in the society around her.</p><p></p><p>Out of the wreckage of the family this grandmother had gone on to create in her young womanhood, there were no "success" stories. There was alcoholism and joblessness and a strange kind of misogyny in which both male and female hated their children because they bore the features they themselves had been taught to hate, had been taught were visible markers of the shame that they existed, at all.</p><p></p><p>Anyway, the old rental where the grandmother lived was the one safe haven for the mixed race, illegitimate grandchildren the woman's own children grew up and gave birth to and could not care for from the depths of their own addictions and self hatred.</p><p></p><p>One of this woman's grandchildren was the male who fathered my daughter's first child.</p><p></p><p>My daughter lived there for a time, off and on, with the male and with my first grandchild. This is one of the things my daughter saw the grandmother tell one of her own grandchildren. The grandchild was a girl, just coming into adolescence. Like adolescent girls (and boys) everywhere, the granddaughter spent time every morning at the mirror trying to make herself acceptable, trying to find beauty in her own reflection before she would go to school, where her Native blood precluded beauty or even, acceptance. The grandmother said: "What are you looking in that mirror for! You're a dirty Indian and you'd better get used to it. Get away from that mirror!"</p><p></p><p>Or words to that effect.</p><p></p><p>The point of my telling this story here is your own Jewish heritage, Serenity. </p><p></p><p>Could this kind of self-hatred be what fueled your Family of Origin's treatment of all of the children in your family?</p><p></p><p>Our families of origin were such hurtful things, weren't they.</p><p></p><p>And none of those things that have happened to our ancestors had anything to do with us, with who we were when we came into the world, but we were destroyed by them, nonetheless.</p><p></p><p>Here is another story.</p><p></p><p>I had a black friend. He said: "I wake up in the morning. I stretch, I come awake, I begin planning my day. I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I am horrified, shocked and surprised, as though I have forgotten, in the night, that my face is black.</p><p></p><p>I am.</p><p></p><p>Black.</p><p></p><p>And he would hate himself for that black face that was his face.</p><p></p><p>And then, he would go out into the world.</p><p></p><p>Angry, and hating himself.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Maybe he too was scarred in these ways. We cannot give love from a heart that is empty. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Here's the thing: Aloneness is a vulnerable place to be. So, we are working to understand the nature of our relationships and to reject, not the relationship so much as the nature of it. It is not that we would not like to, love to, have family to celebrate. It is that we deserve better than what we are getting. </p><p></p><p>Once we get that?</p><p></p><p>We can provide what we need for ourselves.</p><p></p><p>We always have. This aspect of things is no different.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Maybe what you need to mourn even now is that your mother's weakness, her refusal to heal her own brokenness meant you would never have a mother, but only a woman reveling in hurting her own children the way she had herself been hurt.</p><p></p><p>What is there to honor in that?</p><p></p><p>Have there been mother figures in your life, Serenity?</p><p></p><p>Maybe that is what we need to find. Appropriate imagery of The Mother.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>In the lair of the Witch Mother, estrangement is a tool often employed. What in the world was the matter with these people.</p><p></p><p>Seriously.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I think we can never be prepared for the depths of hatred rising off our own mothers, our own sisters. We are fortunate to be out of it, to be away from them. What is it we are missing, that we keep going back, that we keep thinking about them. Is it that same old "responsibility" to bring everyone to love and acceptance <em>and is that what my dinner imagery is about and of course it is</em>.</p><p></p><p>So this is the heart of the issue then and has nothing to do with them and everything to do with us.</p><p></p><p>With responsibility and blaming and guilt and shame.</p><p></p><p>No wonder I never see any food on my family dinner table, those jerks.</p><p></p><p>But here is the difference in the way I am seeing the table: I used to feel hopeful. Now, I demand explanation. <em>Look here you jerks. NO FOOD. What kind of dinner is that?!?</em></p><p></p><p><em>roar</em></p><p></p><p>Ahem.</p><p></p><p>Back to you, Serenity.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Every time. Remember: "That'll do, pig." was kinder than what my mother's negatives were doing, circling and circling beneath the tides of mind.</p><p></p><p>roar</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Everything bout all of it is pretty lame. What they do only matters until we get it that they never loved us. So...what were we thinking, having anything to do with them at all? Why are we thinking about them, now?</p><p></p><p><em>They never loved us.</em></p><p></p><p><em>They never even knew us. They knew only a hated reflection of self.</em></p><p></p><p>Well, F you, mom. <em> I deserved better than you.</em></p><p></p><p>That would go for sisters and the assorted brother too, of course.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Maybe, with regret for everything that might have been and was not.</p><p></p><p>As much as I rail around roaring about anger and etc, I think we will not recover ourselves fully until we can put our pasts to rest with compassion for each of the people we actually do, under all of it, love. They, our families, were meant to be sure and steady sources of love and support and strength. We are hard-wired, in our brains we are hard-wired, for that. I think that unless we can find and believe in our own love, we cannot heal. We are working, I think we are working, to understand how these terrible things could have happened to all of us instead of the rich satisfaction being part of a family can bring.</p><p></p><p><em>Something </em>happened.</p><p></p><p>Something really bad happened, over and over again, for our families to be as messed up as they are.</p><p></p><p>That is where we find compassion for all of us. First and most importantly, compassion for ourselves, and pride in ourselves too, for the amazing courage we have shown in our struggle to make sense of and survive what happened to us instead of that richness, that support and security and honor family can be and for us, was not. </p><p></p><p>Once we can do that, once we are no longer vulnerable to our trickster families of origin, then I think we come into compassion for all of us. At the end, what we will learn is that our families of origin were/are wounded ~ grievously wounded, probably.</p><p></p><p>At the end, I think we will know that we all have done the best we know. It just wasn't enough.</p><p></p><p>I don't know how I am going to fit what my mother did to me, and what she continues to do to all of us even now into that compassionate picture I've drawn.</p><p></p><p>What I do know is that will be the only healing, for me.</p><p></p><p>There has to be a reason these terrible things happened to all of us.</p><p></p><p>I will always wish that my people had loved me. I think I will always long for that. It is important though, for me to know, to accept, that they do not love me, after all.</p><p></p><p>Somehow, I need to step into a truth where I can accept that without blaming myself for it.</p><p></p><p>I don't know how to do that either. I am still appalled ~ I mean, with every weighty form of that word there could be ~ at what my mother did; at what my sister does, too.</p><p></p><p>But I think it is crucial for us to really get it that whatever it is that is fueling the dysfunctional ways our families of origin have responded to those in their lives...that toxicity is not personal to us. Whatever toxic thing is affecting all of us ~ that is the problem. Not us. We came into skewed, crazy, hurtful situations that were set into motion long before we were ever born into them.</p><p></p><p>We need to remember that,for our own sakes and for the sake of our healing.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I don't know. I only know that we seem to be bringing ourselves through it, witnessing for one another and learning from one another, here. </p><p></p><p>We are so fortunate in that.</p><p></p><p>That is like a miracle of a blessing for each of us.</p><p></p><p>You have been key to my healing, key to my having been able to see these hurtful betrayals and rejections from another and healthier place. You and Copa and me and pasa and IC and nerfherder ~ somehow, we are able to make a difference for one another.</p><p></p><p>So, that is good, then. That little miracle happening for each of us...wow. Who would have believed we could do this thing we are doing with faith and strength and vulnerability and trust.</p><p></p><p>But we are.</p><p></p><p><img src="/community/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/emoticons/starplucker.gif" class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":starplucker:" title="starplucker :starplucker:" data-shortname=":starplucker:" /></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>What a happy thing!</p><p></p><p>Cedar</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><img src="/community/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/emoticons/hugs.gif" class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hugs:" title="hugs :hugs:" data-shortname=":hugs:" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Scent of Cedar *, post: 664254, member: 17461"] No, but it might be time to determine what it was you needed from this uncle instead of what you got. And it might be time to see what he did through your own eyes, Serenity, and to see the faces and hear the words you needed, instead of the words that bad, nasty man said. [I]And that, simply by virtue of having been a little girl, you deserved.[/I] What kind of person does that to a little kid. Do you think he thought he was being funny? Daughter tells this story of the grandmother of daughter's first child. The grandmother was a Native American. As a young girl, she had been torn away from her family of origin and taught that all things about her Native heritage were filthy and wrong. She was punished for speaking a word of her native language. She never saw her parents, again. When she reached eighteen, she was tossed out of the orphanage with nothing and no one. She had been taught the features of her race, the features of her own face, were ugly, were animal-like. And that is the truth she saw reflected in the society around her. Out of the wreckage of the family this grandmother had gone on to create in her young womanhood, there were no "success" stories. There was alcoholism and joblessness and a strange kind of misogyny in which both male and female hated their children because they bore the features they themselves had been taught to hate, had been taught were visible markers of the shame that they existed, at all. Anyway, the old rental where the grandmother lived was the one safe haven for the mixed race, illegitimate grandchildren the woman's own children grew up and gave birth to and could not care for from the depths of their own addictions and self hatred. One of this woman's grandchildren was the male who fathered my daughter's first child. My daughter lived there for a time, off and on, with the male and with my first grandchild. This is one of the things my daughter saw the grandmother tell one of her own grandchildren. The grandchild was a girl, just coming into adolescence. Like adolescent girls (and boys) everywhere, the granddaughter spent time every morning at the mirror trying to make herself acceptable, trying to find beauty in her own reflection before she would go to school, where her Native blood precluded beauty or even, acceptance. The grandmother said: "What are you looking in that mirror for! You're a dirty Indian and you'd better get used to it. Get away from that mirror!" Or words to that effect. The point of my telling this story here is your own Jewish heritage, Serenity. Could this kind of self-hatred be what fueled your Family of Origin's treatment of all of the children in your family? Our families of origin were such hurtful things, weren't they. And none of those things that have happened to our ancestors had anything to do with us, with who we were when we came into the world, but we were destroyed by them, nonetheless. Here is another story. I had a black friend. He said: "I wake up in the morning. I stretch, I come awake, I begin planning my day. I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I am horrified, shocked and surprised, as though I have forgotten, in the night, that my face is black. I am. Black. And he would hate himself for that black face that was his face. And then, he would go out into the world. Angry, and hating himself. Maybe he too was scarred in these ways. We cannot give love from a heart that is empty. Here's the thing: Aloneness is a vulnerable place to be. So, we are working to understand the nature of our relationships and to reject, not the relationship so much as the nature of it. It is not that we would not like to, love to, have family to celebrate. It is that we deserve better than what we are getting. Once we get that? We can provide what we need for ourselves. We always have. This aspect of things is no different. Maybe what you need to mourn even now is that your mother's weakness, her refusal to heal her own brokenness meant you would never have a mother, but only a woman reveling in hurting her own children the way she had herself been hurt. What is there to honor in that? Have there been mother figures in your life, Serenity? Maybe that is what we need to find. Appropriate imagery of The Mother. In the lair of the Witch Mother, estrangement is a tool often employed. What in the world was the matter with these people. Seriously. I think we can never be prepared for the depths of hatred rising off our own mothers, our own sisters. We are fortunate to be out of it, to be away from them. What is it we are missing, that we keep going back, that we keep thinking about them. Is it that same old "responsibility" to bring everyone to love and acceptance [I]and is that what my dinner imagery is about and of course it is[/I]. So this is the heart of the issue then and has nothing to do with them and everything to do with us. With responsibility and blaming and guilt and shame. No wonder I never see any food on my family dinner table, those jerks. But here is the difference in the way I am seeing the table: I used to feel hopeful. Now, I demand explanation. [I]Look here you jerks. NO FOOD. What kind of dinner is that?!?[/I] [I]roar[/I] Ahem. Back to you, Serenity. Every time. Remember: "That'll do, pig." was kinder than what my mother's negatives were doing, circling and circling beneath the tides of mind. roar Everything bout all of it is pretty lame. What they do only matters until we get it that they never loved us. So...what were we thinking, having anything to do with them at all? Why are we thinking about them, now? [I]They never loved us.[/I] [I]They never even knew us. They knew only a hated reflection of self.[/I] Well, F you, mom. [I] I deserved better than you.[/I] That would go for sisters and the assorted brother too, of course. Maybe, with regret for everything that might have been and was not. As much as I rail around roaring about anger and etc, I think we will not recover ourselves fully until we can put our pasts to rest with compassion for each of the people we actually do, under all of it, love. They, our families, were meant to be sure and steady sources of love and support and strength. We are hard-wired, in our brains we are hard-wired, for that. I think that unless we can find and believe in our own love, we cannot heal. We are working, I think we are working, to understand how these terrible things could have happened to all of us instead of the rich satisfaction being part of a family can bring. [I]Something [/I]happened. Something really bad happened, over and over again, for our families to be as messed up as they are. That is where we find compassion for all of us. First and most importantly, compassion for ourselves, and pride in ourselves too, for the amazing courage we have shown in our struggle to make sense of and survive what happened to us instead of that richness, that support and security and honor family can be and for us, was not. Once we can do that, once we are no longer vulnerable to our trickster families of origin, then I think we come into compassion for all of us. At the end, what we will learn is that our families of origin were/are wounded ~ grievously wounded, probably. At the end, I think we will know that we all have done the best we know. It just wasn't enough. I don't know how I am going to fit what my mother did to me, and what she continues to do to all of us even now into that compassionate picture I've drawn. What I do know is that will be the only healing, for me. There has to be a reason these terrible things happened to all of us. I will always wish that my people had loved me. I think I will always long for that. It is important though, for me to know, to accept, that they do not love me, after all. Somehow, I need to step into a truth where I can accept that without blaming myself for it. I don't know how to do that either. I am still appalled ~ I mean, with every weighty form of that word there could be ~ at what my mother did; at what my sister does, too. But I think it is crucial for us to really get it that whatever it is that is fueling the dysfunctional ways our families of origin have responded to those in their lives...that toxicity is not personal to us. Whatever toxic thing is affecting all of us ~ that is the problem. Not us. We came into skewed, crazy, hurtful situations that were set into motion long before we were ever born into them. We need to remember that,for our own sakes and for the sake of our healing. I don't know. I only know that we seem to be bringing ourselves through it, witnessing for one another and learning from one another, here. We are so fortunate in that. That is like a miracle of a blessing for each of us. You have been key to my healing, key to my having been able to see these hurtful betrayals and rejections from another and healthier place. You and Copa and me and pasa and IC and nerfherder ~ somehow, we are able to make a difference for one another. So, that is good, then. That little miracle happening for each of us...wow. Who would have believed we could do this thing we are doing with faith and strength and vulnerability and trust. But we are. :starplucker: :choir: What a happy thing! Cedar :hugs: [/QUOTE]
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Is there a time we can and should say good-bye to our past?
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