I believe my mother loved me like this once. I want to believe this. I will try. When I was a baby. I hope so. You know I was quite premature. Almost 3 months. I like to belief that my celebrity (I was famous to a point) endowed me (to her) with a certain grandiosity that enabled her to prize me for a time. I hope so.
Something enabled me to survive. It could not have been only my father and grandmother. For me to have loved my mother so much she must have loved me (and shown me that) for at least a time.
We are the firstborn, Copa.
We were and are, loved to this day with an explosive, surprising intensity our mothers hide from themselves and maybe, were or are afraid of. I think this is so. I think they don't know what to do with us. We never broke to the degree that the mothers could overlook us and rise above us and look down and see belief in them in our eyes.
We have loved and longed for and excused, but never once accepted or believed the mother's abusive words and actions and choices whre we were concerned, or where our sibs were concerned (or our animals), were correct.
That is the difference.
We bore witness in some way I cannot define. It has something to do with knowing the things that were happening were wrong. Powerless, for sure, but witnessing and seeing and knowing. That has to do with the way we twisted ourselves into believing the truth in their eyes was what was true about us while knowing, on some level, it was not true.
That difference about us is why we can heal it, if we choose to, today.
Maybe that is true.
Maybe we are unusual in this and maybe, we are not. But it cannot have been an easy thing to love the Micheal Corleone character who must have lived, even then, in our little girl (or, little boy) hearts:
My circle is small.
Loyalty matters.
Never f*** me over.
It has something to do with how it is we respond to that, now; to how we get it right away, and to how it feels right and true to us.
Especially the last line. In it, you see all the times that the hurtful things were overlooked and the one time the hurt caused an ending. There is no threat of vengeance, there.
My circle is small.
Very nice.
And we do love our mothers, Copa. Clear and strong and in a way that is not a usual thing. There are layers to it.
A continuity.
I believe my sister loves her daughters in a way like that, but it is colored by her need to see herself and them as privileged and powerful and entitled in relation to others that are not. There is aggression here. I know I am Germany now. But there is a sense of the Aryan exclusion. An elevation as an ideal. My sister does not in her heart feel superior, I think. But she needs to feel her children are, to satisfy this unmet need. When will we ever tire of this? I am getting tired of my sister. I would rather focus on us.
I think it could be that everything for the sisters is colored by...us. By what we might look like from the outside, where we might not look as messed up as we feel or as ugly as we believe. There is aggression there, I see that now. But I think our sisters do not know us and will never be able to know us because their hearts reflect differently than our own. It's something like that, I think. Something to do with not being able to see through hatred and jealousy and hurt and their own lonely times when there was no one and we weren't there either. Or maybe, didn't see them for themselves. Something, whatever it is, that left them believing a roomful of people meant something that mattered more than a ~ well, than a small circle.
Our sisters are people, too.
There is ~ yes Copa, you are right. A kind of antagonism. That is a perfect word.
It would be best for us to acknowledge this, and to stay with it I think Copa until we are healed. There will be grief, because when we realize what is lost, we will know, in a way we do not know yet, that we have lost very much.
More than we can afford to lose, probably, maybe. I don't know because I am not there yet either.
But lost they will be, those things we pretended we believed we had, knowing full well, on some level, that we never had those things, at all.
My family was afraid of me. I was not like them. I did not play by their rules. I did not know my place. I wanted better and was not afraid to work for it. I defied them. They were afraid that I would blow their cover and expose them for the drunk and vicious people that they were, so of course they had to try to destroy me.
Hi, pasa!
:O)
I never thought about my family being afraid of me or anything about me until just recently. It seems it could be true. I think you are very right pasa, and maybe, I think you are very right for us, too.
When bad things are happening, when we are doing things we should not, we would want the witness, the clear eyed, defiant witness, destroyed.
Disparaged and discounted and discredited and destroyed.
So, that would explain very many things about how and why and about how our families of origin just seem to just keep churning away, redigesting old things and trampling wounds that should not have come into being in the first place.
You are right I think pasa. That figures very much in what is happening to all of us. It seems strange to think it. To think anyone would fear me. I have that fear of vengeance thing going on but that is only pretend and I get that and am ashamed for the need of it but good for me that I handled all of it well for the most part. But there were specific words my mother spoke, specific things my mother has done, that could be taken just that way, pasa. It's a funny thing. I can understand someone hating me, fixating on and hating me, as my sister seems to have done with that picture in her bathroom and the things she has sent me as her hold on my mother intensified.
But I never once thought of anyone being afraid of me.
Maybe, the sisters (and the mothers?) see their behaviors as bravery.
I think my family feared me because I was incorruptible. Not because I would blow their cover. But because next to me, they would appear to themselves as they were. Kind of amoral.
Could it be that they are uncomfortable seeing Jacob return from his enslavement in the dungeon at the center of the town?
We are learning our enslavement can be so easily undone. Those who enslaved Jacob were very uncomfortable with Jacob, believing he would exact vengeance. This story too is coming back and coming back for me, Copa and everyone.
How sad for us that we must, if we are clear-eyed put the verb destroy us in the same sentence with our family.
It doesn't make sense, does it. Still it seems to be true. Ridiculed, allied against, gone our own ways and with no welcome upon our returns; and no quarter given and none expected.
Channeling M, we say to ourselves: "I have not left you yet."
And find there a treasure.
My sister gained her power from the beginning from groveling, lying and alliances, and then betrayal. It was never won legitimately. Really, all of her life she did this. She never had any embarrassment revealing if she was held in low stead. Because she had always a reason to justify it, through denigrating those who thought of her as such. A favorite was anti-semitism, although neither her name, her face, or her loyalty went to Jewish people, culture or faith.
In a way, this is what I was responding to when I was so focused on the way my sister's tears tore into me. But remember, we concluded that people who are really crying don't look into your eyes as their own fill with tears.
I would rather be me, alone forever, than this other way I might have been.
Which is arrogant.
I get that.
We all do what we need to, to get by.
A slippery slope.
We are walking it here, in our healing. I think we have done well; have been honest and not self-justifying. Too much.
I self justify anger.
And sometimes, even when I think I must surely be lying, it turns out I have been telling the truth the whole time.
It's just unbelievable at first, because the cost was so high and the win, so paltry a thing. But to a little girl (or boy) those things that seem paltry to us now, as adults, were death dealing, or defying, events.
We were confronting our own value and our own mortalities, with so much of it.
We have been very strong.
Maybe the sisters are as they are because all the good roles were taken.
If this is so, then we have been the fortunate ones.
I knew it would come back to compassion. I just knew it.
We must be nearly done, where the sibs are concerned.
I am inserting this hear, upon re-reading the above: I remember washing the sheets of my sister's bed.
And when my sister began working, she would throw up the first couple of days, because she was so nervous.
You were her protector, Copa. In your heart, you protect her, still.
That is why wise and wary is a healthy choice. The sisters seem to feel compelled to eradicate us by stepping into who we were for them to have validity. They have no way of knowing that however it might have looked and felt to be them, our experiences were not a starring role then, and are not who the sisters want to be, now. Here is a story. So, it was Christmas and my sister had a home and money and was going to decorate and bake and host dinners. And throughout, she would call and say: I am working so hard. No one appreciates. We did not make the cookies after all. Husband did it, alone. And on it went in that vein. When the holidays were over, it was all there to be taken down.
My sister had never done those things for herself or her family.
She was disgruntled at the amount of work and effort and thought, and found the reward not in the least satisfying. I don't know what they do, now. But in the years after that, Christmas was celebrated elsewhere. (Where the rumor was that the new husband's family did not treat Sister's daughters like part of the family. Perhaps Sister could have had the perform....)
Ha!
I delight myself with my meanness and nasty comments.
:O)
Where was I going with this.
The idea being that we are symbols of things that never were, too. The difference is that, while we love the things we protected (as did The Little Prince), our sisters were the things protected.
They do not love us.
We are pseudo-mom.
They may emulate us, but they do not love us. We are neither mother nor sister. We are artifacts of the roles all were forced to live through, in our destroyed families.
I am still having a hard time accepting that loving her is my motivation. Of course, it must be. After all, why would somebody matter so much who was not loved or hated. Or both.
Except it feels so naked to reach out from love to somebody who hates you and wishes to destroy you. And has always tried. This is a strength and purity which I may have, but have not come into. To love somebody that hates you and tries to destroy you, still
I really do think the choice is to continue sacrificing ourselves
and allowing our children to be mistreated or throwing off these old belief systems. Love is multi-colored. What feels like love to us is the paramount value: to protect. But each of us has confessed that we find very little to appreciate, in the women our sisters actually turn out to be once we stop protecting them ~ not only from the mother, but from what we know.
It's a tapestry, Copa. You and she, woven into the same tapestry of family and circumstance.
That is what I mean when I say I think we do not get to choose who we love, where family is concerned. Whether we see them (which is horrific and out of balance and cacophonous) or whether we do not see them, we are family.
We have decided, once again, to break the rules and declare our freedom from their dictates.
That does not mean, I don't think, that we will ever be free of our families of origin. They are us. We are them.
I think this might be true.
To my sister, who tried to strip me of self worth, my entire life.
I will no longer stand for your attempts to colonize my mind.
Here!
Here!
To all my sisters who have fought this fight,
and struggled to understand and know
that you were wonderful, and good and kind
and more than enough
because the jealous sisters wouldn't let you.
Here!
Here!
Now we know
Now we know better.
Okole Maluna!
clink-clink-clink-clink-clink! Cheers!
defiant leafy
Ha! Leafy, we are both showing our defiant Scottish behinds this morning. That must be because our Tall Ships are nearing Hawaii, where you are.
:O)
Here is an interesting thing I saw for Lil and Jabber, if you two are reading along. I thought of you, Jabber, when I saw it.
Cedar
and so was my Mother. But let her. I know the truth. I do not want to cower anymore.
