Suddenly I went from her best companion to evil, and to having abused her all her life.
I was just sitting there in the car yesterday, with nothing to do, and this popped into my head: "She's using you as a proxy because s he can't talk about HIM and she's angry at you AND him." That's what she does when she is angry and has no control over me. She gets mean. But she also has to deal with a total asshat for a boyfriend too.
Again, I have no idea if I'm right, but something triggered something and it is tied into him.
OH, well. Back to my own life
This morning, I am seeing our sisters differently.
As we have come through this, as I admitted that the awful things my sister has said or done were awful, and were intentional, I went through a kind of disbelief that the things I remembered could be motivated by dislike or even, hatred; that sense of disbelief turned into blaming, and a kind of centering rage. This morning, I am so deeply sad for our sisters. And for us; for me.
But for our sisters, too.
It could be that their wounds are so much deeper than our own.
Like always, I will leave the parts about how I got here in, in case it helps the others of us. The gist of it is this:
Each of us is the eldest. Could it be that those very senses of responsibility for our younger sibs centered and guided us and gave us a sense of destination or control in the chaotic nightmare that was the environment the witch mother created for all her children?
Could it be that, while I came out of it with "coward" and "fraud" firmly emblazoned on my psyche, my sister came through it without even that small comfort, that sort of map of responsibility we each had, of getting us all through it somehow?
That is how I came out of my childhood: I can try. I will find out. We can do this.
I have specific memories, traumatic places I can touch and relive. They have to do with times I could not protect.
What if I had not had that internal mandate, that way to be real aside from what was happening to all of us? What if all I had to guide me was a need to be seen, to be cherished, and an equally desperate need to please and to hide from, the ever changeable witch mother?
What if our sisters never learned to rely on themselves in the ways we had to because we had them to protect?
When daughter was so troubled and broken, it was that her kids needed her that brought her back.
Each of us has been so horribly affected by whatever was the matter with our moms, and by the culture of scarcity our moms created of our families.
It sickens me, to think what this may have been like for our sisters.
***
That's the kernel of what I am thinking, this morning. The rest of this post is chain of consciousness stuff.
***
I feel angry at the mess of it, but angrier still about the hopeless way we all can never get free of it.
It may be true, as D H believes, that with the death of the primary abuser, some of this can heal and heal over time. (What wound did ever heal, but by degrees, right?)
It's just such an awful lot of like, a confused, centerless kind of pain, for all of us.
This morning, I understand, I think I do, why our sisters focus on us the way they do and hate our guts at the same time. I think my sister would love me, if she could. I think she has tried harder to love me than I have ever had to try to love her.
How rotten a place would that be to live from?
Not that we are any different than any person in the world. The us they want to believe they can be is the us we were, is whatever safety or sanity we came to represent for them, in the hellish worlds witch mother was determined to create of her family.
And even witch mother surely could not have intended to act out her own woundings as she did.
Except that she is still doing it, now.
But you know...she must be responding to things so scary I have no frame of reference to even glimpse. Read again, the reality of those who cannot love, who have no empathy.
That would be a hopeless place, a worse place than any of us have been.
***
I think the sadness we feel around having lost our sisters is ~ it has a sweeter taste to it, a tinged with real sorrow place to it, than what's happened with our moms. Sisters (and brothers, too) are meant to be part of our adult lives; are meant to be our witnesses and our allies through our long lives.
We will not have that.
We have never had those good things.
Understanding the probable why behind it does not take the pain away. It takes away that sense of outraged personal resentment at having been targeted or intentionally treated unfairly.
That is what is gone for me, now.
That outraged sense of personal resentment.
What is left then, for me, is that it is all so sad. It is like we are trying to clean the Augean stables without the river. (And the river is water, and water represents things of the spirit, like love. So maybe, as we come through this....) I don't think anyone set out to create what is. We all want those good things family represents. All humans do, or family would not have come into existence in every civilization and throughout time.
I watched a video yesterday about two swans. One of them fell ill and was taken to the vet. His recovery was a long one, but the day came when he was released into the pond where his mate of ten years had been living alone. They recognized one another immediately. They went face to face, cheek to cheek, just the way I like to feel my own D H face right up next to mine.
Or like when we see our kids or grands, and it just feels so good to be right up close to them, to have our faces near theirs.
That little flash of joy, of rightness, that is not like any other feeling. Even in the middle of whatever crappy thing we were in the middle of, there is always that moment out of time feeling when we come face to face with someone we love.
It can be a friend, too.
It can be anyone or even, coming home sometimes has that feeling to it.
Like a flash of unadulterated joy, right out of time, before we start fighting about whatever it is, or realize the carpet flooded somehow during the winter and the guest bedroom is covered in the strangest, most colorful growths of fuzzy green and white...fungus of some sort. (That actually happened to me this year.)
Do our moms and sisters not have that?
The research pieces we have been reading describe internal realities without that little ping of joy or love or whatever that feeling is. That would explain grandiosity. Grandiosity is a kind of taking control. Grandiosity would fill the void fear creates, when the world seems like a chaotic, senseless thing because that little ping of joy does not happen. Really, that little ping of joy is what directs and motivates our lives, if you think about it.
What if they are too afraid to have it?
Daughter and her ex D H left us this morning. And I am just so happy they were here. There is lots of brightness around, because they were here.
Gratitude is a big piece of that, but that face to face joy feeling is there, too.
We had not seen ex D H for something like eight years. It felt so right for him to be here with us again.
Whatever. I am going off into flights of fancy not related to what we are trying to pin down, here.
For Heaven's sake.
***
If theirs (our sisters and maybe, our mothers, though I think the realities our moms are coming from are different, exponentially more hateful and more frightening places)...could it be that our sisters live in scary worlds, worlds where envy that never changes to pleasure for the other guy reigns and grows and cannot be addressed or escaped or turned around somehow and turns into jealousy?
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), I hate it when I am jealous.
It's a horrible, terrible, helpless feeling.
Jealous is a terrible, terrible feeling.
That little prayer I found:
Pray for their peace and therein, find our own ~ that works very well for jealous feelings, too.
What if we were trapped in worlds where we literally could not feel pleasure for the good things that happen to others? Where we could not say: Well then, I had best get busy on creating something wonderful for myself, too. I see now that it really can be done. So I can do it, too. What if, because we could never have that little ping of joy, we could never feel safe enough, better enough? Sort of a lonely pinnacle of existence with nothing left to do but keep chasing a chimera-like external validation, something to fill that terrible emptiness where we are never, ever safe?
I do have the sense that my sister is always "on". She is forever really, really tired, but seems never to be able to rest. I have posted about the dinners we have had, or the times we have come together, and her determined disruption of everything that mattered about those times by parading and re-parading her children, by having them perform patriotic songs.
That is the feel of my sister: Look at me.
Or her giving to me to keep safe, her first oil painting.
Or when D H and I came to visit her in her new home with her new husband. I have posted before about the strangeness of that visit. My sister sent me a framed, 8 x 10 picture taken of the four of us. I thought that was very nice except that strangely enough, sister's house in the background takes well over half the photo. It's a fine house. I have always believed the house was just sort of accidentally in there, because the picture of the four of us is actually very nice. The thing is, my sister set the frame and took the picture with a timer. So, she had to know the house was in there, right? As we have come through this though, after receiving the plaque about the house having fallen on the sister and the way everything has escalated since my father's death, I have come to believe that the thing my sister sent the picture for was that her house is in it.
Why would that matter?
Why have that picture of she and I in her bathroom?
Back to the performing nieces.
Sister even brought little flags for the kids to wave.
Why would a person ~ what would be met, what need would be met, for a mother to do that? What were her children acquiring for her in her insistence, not only that they perform and perform, but in her knowledge that it would be inappropriate for anyone to declare enough is enough, kids. Go play with the other cousins. This is your time to do that.
The limelight, of course...but what I am wondering is why? Why did my sister need to do that? Given that she brought the flags and rehearsed the kids, these actions were taken with intention.
What...why?
The same kinds of performance-geared behaviors are happening with sister's grand. She is a beautiful little kid, too. But at the end of the day? All I can remember feeling is a kind of dislike for the kids. Like man, I hope they haven't learned any new songs.
I know. I sound awful. But here is the difference: In D H family, the kids are just there with everyone, mostly with one another but there with everyone just doing nothing in particular. For my kids, those times when everyone was together (like in that litter of puppies feeling I describe in D H family) are some of the best memories of their lives.
I like those kids. And they grow up, and they visit, and it's cool. One time, I said something about how much one of them had changed ~ that the physical changes from little boy to adolescent to man seemed to have happened so fast. And his reply? Was that he felt that way too, about us.
Ew.
Because it is undeniably true that we are changing rapidly too. Just in the other direction.
***
Back to having children trained to parade around and around like that, disrupting everything. Don't get me wrong, here. My sister's kids are cute kids. But the only times of cuteness and kidness that happened were when my sister was not making them freaking perform.
Like, she would put herself between the cuteness all little kids just are, and every other child or adult at the gathering.
But why? What does she get out of doing that?
I swear, it got to be a kind of a blessing if sister and her kids were not at something important, like Christmas.
Everyone's eyes always had to be on sister's kids. And they were forever performing things.
And nothing was ever just let to happen as it would.
Real. Nothing felt real. It felt like, "Oh, no. Not the flag songs, again!"
There would be nothing to remember about having seen the kids except that feeling that you hoped they would be done, soon. I mean, one performance would have been okay. But this stuff went on and on. Or, a performance all the little kids took part in, like when the cousins play dress up or something.
But this thing with my sister and the way her kids were taught to perform ~ I don't know. It just felt wrong then and it still does.
Here is another story. So, Baklava grand and I went to my mother's to visit my sister, her husband, sister's daughter and grand. And Baklava grand would have been like, seventeen or eighteen. So we were all just talking the way you do in families and here comes my sister with her grand. Whatever the performance was, it had to do with the grand learning sign language and the inevitable patriotic performance, this time having to do with the grand holding her hand over her heart and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. It was remarkable. I am not saying that it wasn't. The grand would have been like, two and a half. But the conversation was changed to how sister had taught grand to do those things. And how often the strangest things would happen as the grand would stand, say, on a golf course happening to put her hand over her heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance when golfers just happened to be happening by.
Or, at restaurants.
And then, when even sister was pretty much out of things to say about that, she threw the grand onto the husband and started tickling the grand.
And that is how the rest of that visit went.
At one point, sister was chasing the baby around hollering about how we needed to watch how she could catch the ball.
No visit.
It was the strangest thing. But that is always how it is. That is the flavor of my sister.
But...why?
Why does she need to do that?
Needless to say, all I know about the grand is that she is a cute little thing and that's all.
Usually, we get to know that so and so is a cute little thing and remember when they did this or that.
With my sister's kids, everybody just gets so darn tired.
***
That's a terrible thing.
Are our moms and sisters looking through eyes that literally cannot see the things we take so for granted? Are their worlds joyless places, places without forgiveness or mercy? I sound foolish here in one way, I know that. But what else could explain what they do? In a world of blacks and whites, the only things that matter would be things that, ultimately, don't matter, at all. Stuff. Accumulations of things with brand names: Rolex watches, say. Pictures representing happiness or satisfaction so we can see them and know we are happy, because we certainly do look it. More and more stuff, so we can know we are wealthy to counter the feeling of abject poverty within.
Maybe. I seem to know everything this morning, again.
But there is something here, I just know it. Like always being on a really hard journey and never, ever being able to rest along the way.
I think they do love us.
To the degree they are able, they love us very much. I am thinking about the picture of the two of us that my sister kept in her bathroom. It may not be necessary for her to keep it there, anymore. I have been dethroned. But the horrible thing is that, if the picture of she and I has been replaced...another picture, another person, will have taken my place.
She should have Maya in there, or my newest mom, Dr. Ben Carson. Now, that would be a very nice face to see every morning.
I should put him in my bathroom.
Such a nice face.
Here's the thing: Had the picture been one of my sister beautifully dressed or dusted with sand on some beautiful beach, that would be one thing. Why would she have a picture of she and I in that place no one would see it but her? It should have been a beach picture of my sister, alone. Some beautiful memory, some sweetness, some moment in her own life, captured and relived every time she got dressed or fixed her hair or put on her makeup.
But it was a picture of she and I.
Maybe they love us so much that they hate us for it. Maybe, they hate us because we aren't their moms.
Why would my sister have hurt my child?
That stalking feeling; that obsession feeling. We felt it as hate. In fact, the things we see from our sisters may be a desperate attempt to learn how we see because they cannot see for themselves. The more they cannot find content, the more desperately they try to figure out how to do a life and cannot find rest, the more harshly they condemn themselves and then, maybe, they focus those feelings onto us.
Onto pseudo mom, who was never enough; who never could protect them, but was all they had.
***
Each of us has noted that she went on to create her full, rich life without paying too much attention to the clanging wrongnesses in our families of origin. Each of us has noted that it is not safe to be vulnerable to our families of origin. It is as though the challenges that came to us in our lives, as challenge comes for all of us ~ it's almost as though there is a sense of personal betrayal for them, for our moms and our sisters, in that. Could it be that, in the families we all grew up in, we have always appeared to them as the mark they had to meet or exceed just to be enough? Maybe
because of that core of rebellion we all seem to have had? Even to the mother, that may have been a form of safe harbor.
Like a rule that never changes, or like a witness, like someone watching who is not totally broken and will remember. So, the inappropriate behaviors are curbed. Not through anything we did. Not through any special thing about us, but only because, in a chaotic world where nothing was safe, we were the older sisters. Scared half to death ourselves, we may have represented something like safety or sanity or comfort when the abusive witch mother howled threats that were all, essentially, the terrible threat of abandonment.
If these things are true, I feel badly for my sister.
How confusing for a little girl, to love and hate and resent both witch mother and pseudo mom, and to never, ever feel safe.
Our sisters may well hate us, but that may be a reflection ~ and a pale one, at that ~ of what they feel for themselves and their lives. I do feel that my sister ~ I feel the triumph of power-over for her, through extermination of me. That would account for the way she seems to pursue me, on one hand, and revel in my losses, on the other.
In that place where a sister would have our backs, our sisters destroy us.
Now, why would that be?
I believed my sister's more blatant ~ everything, I guess ~ since my father's death had something to do with my mother. What if the thing it has to do with is that without my father, she feels very afraid. There is no safe harbor.
For all of us, my father represented safety.
Witch mother did not come out when he was home the way she did when he was gone.
Is that what is driving my sister?
Could it be that in superceeding us, our sisters feel they are somehow safe, in the same ways they believe we feel ourselves safe, because they thought we felt safer than they did when we all were little kids?
I do believe my sister would want things to be different than they are between us. Why else would she even think about me at all? We have all mentioned that feeling too, from our sisters. It's like we think we are going to dinner, and find ourselves across the table from that little girl in the Exorcist.
We keep getting trapped in that feeling, somehow. It's like some horrible jack-in-the-box keeps popping up. And even though you know it's coming?
And it does and it's really shocking and horrible and smacks of some kind of betrayal you can't really put a finger on?
Beneath the horror is the pain of the loss.
I think our sisters cannot change. But then, I am certain, positive, that they can.
We did.
If they cannot change, if there is some genetic something at work here, then they cannot be blamed, either.
But I am pretty scared of my sister.
I cannot feel trust.
Everything always gets all messed up when we are together.
Maybe when I am more real ~ I don't know. I don't know how she sees me, or what she would have to say about our relationship from her perspective.
I don't know. I do know she seems to have turned her family against me or some feeling like that. I do know she chose to stalk my child when she was so hurt and confused and brain injured, and that my sister dropped her and hurt her again.
Roar. A helpless one, this time.
And I don't understand all of that, except that there is a wall there now, between me and what I feel for my sister.
She should never have done what she did.
Daughter says I should not feel this way.
***
The regret I feel now that I am not enraged at mom or sister or brothers is a palpable thing. We have lost so much that is good and strengthening and kind, in our lives. Understanding the why behind it ~ I don't know. Maybe, if we can get that piece, we will not feel dirtied or resentful or really mad about the things that happen. I mean, why would the sisters be calling and calling us to talk about, pretty much, how to see a thing differently if they did not respect us enough to listen.
I posted once that my sister said she knew, but could not help, what she does.
Maybe that was true.
How awful for all of us.
So, looks like we are right back where we started.
Only the definition of our sisters' intentions is different. As seems always to be true in any abusive situation, nothing about any of it is real, and everything about all of it hurts. Before, I would say I had been a fool for lesser things, and keep trying. Now, I don't know what to say.
So maybe, that is a more honest place.
(Remember my recent understanding regarding the way I was seeing my son. That way I was seeing him was abusive. Though he has changed, I was still seeing him through my own shame at how his actions and drug use and etc affected me, and how I needed to see myself, as a "successful" mother. I didn't even know I was doing that. But I was. What a mess. I don't know how to change that, but I believe that, having seen I was doing that, I won't do that one little piece of it I am aware of, anymore. It had to do with cheering him on, like he was six, instead of really getting it that he is a man. He doesn't need or not need, me to cheer him on; to try to control him through mommy's pleasure. It had that flavor to it, that abusive thing I was doing to my son.)
Maybe, it's the same thing, with our sisters. That we are seeing them somehow through filters of toxic shame having to do with who we all were in our childhoods. Maybe, we are erecting barriers too, that we don't know anything about, in how we see them. For sure, I was not taking my sister seriously in anything she did, until she hurt my child. So, that is not how we treat someone we respect. That is how we treat someone who does not matter.
If I ever do talk to my sister again, I am going to start saying: "What do you mean. Why are you doing that."
Like that time my father was in the hospital and she was so determined suckers were what he needed.
I wish, when we were like, running through the facility to the gift shop, that instead of keeping up with her I'd said: "What are you doing? You don't have to do that. You are enough. I am enough. We can walk. We could even have coffee. There is time, for you and for us both."
I wish that is what I said.
I think she would have responded with some version of "Buzz off, Cedar."
I do.
Cedar