For my sister to have presented herself as a concerned aunt to my daughter for the sole purpose of weaseling every horrible detail of what was happening to her...I believe that is the kind of obsession, of obsessive stalking, you are wondering about, Serenity. It is a question of intent. It's a question of trading on the assumption of love and of trust to celebrate something tragic.
It's unbelievably hurtful; evil personified, from its inception.
Immediately after contacting daughter on Facebook and encouraging her to believe her aunt was supporting her, was loving her and believing in her, my sister private messaged me on Facebook, wanting details on what was happening to daughter. I sent back: What is it you want to know? Or something like that. And just as quick as a blink, sister sent back that she already knew.
And nothing more.
Nothing.
And my sister never responded again, to daughter's posts to her.
So, that was obsessive stalking whose point was to celebrate the horror of what was happening to all of us and to be certain I would know that she, and my own mother, knew what was happening to daughter, and that there was nothing supportive coming from them.
It was shaming, when that happened. I can't really say why, but I felt ashamed.
Again, a time of pain and shock and shame and vulnerability for me was used by my own mother, by my own sister, to isolate; to ostracize and even, to condemn.
What a piece of work those two are.
But oh, how much it would have meant to me and to daughter and to all of us, to have been able to trust them, or to have been able to trust anyone, in my family of origin. We needed consolation; it would have meant everything to have heard that they loved us, that they wanted us, that everything was going to be okay somehow; that we would come through this together, and that they believed in us.
It would have been such a comfort, to all of us.
Instead, we went through it, not only alone, but with that smack of condemnation come of having been ostracized.
This happened, remember, just after daughter's beating. Literally, daughter was incapable of exercising judgment regarding what she was posting.
I was not made aware of what sister had done ~ that she had milked daughter for more information than the already inappropriate things daughter was posting publicly, until daughter told me, some months into her recovery, how it hurt her that her aunt had turned away from her once she learned the details of daughter's situation.
Daughter was crying. She was certain her aunt's disgust was a valid thing, and that everyone felt that way about daughter for what she had done.
I could cry for all of us, when I think about it now.
How much harder, how much lonelier it was for all of us, to come through those months and months of daughter's recovery without their support. Not even without their support. If they'd left us alone, they would have been immaterial; extraneous sadness that they weren't there for us, maybe, but nothing more.
They could not even do that; they could not even grant us that small mercy of leaving us alone to heal as we would.
They condemned my daughter and made certain she would know how they saw her; that she would know she had been rejected for how they saw who she was.
I am still in that trauma place over what they did.
When I come through it....
I read a book once. It was a Frank Herbert. (In case you are still with us, nerfherder, and reading along.) And when something unforgivable happened and a loss, a terrible loss, had been incurred, the message sent was "You will pay."
Nothing more.
I know. I don't think that's very nice of me, either, to think like that. I am coming out of the shock of it, now. It's an unbelievable thing, that they did that.
Not that my sister hurried to me to tell me ~ I don't know what she was telling me when she messaged me as she did. Nothing good, I know that much.
But that isn't the core of the hurt I feel. The core of the hurt is the hopelessness, is the hurt in my daughter's voice when she told me what my sister had done; I had assumed my sister read what daughter was posting on Facebook. I had never once suspected my sister would have cheated daughter as she did; that my sister would have taken advantage of her own niece for information and then, would cut off communication to my daughter.
That on top of everything else daughter was going through, she had been made to feel shamed, had been made to feel weakened and contemptible.
Her aunt's rejection.
My own sister used something so tragic as what was happening to daughter to teach daughter that she does not matter, did not matter, could never matter.
I am glad daughter told me.
People who take such actions are shockingly evil.
I agree with you, Serenity.
Obsession.
Sick stuff. Evil. Pure evil, in the hurt they inflict.
Cedar
