I have wanted to try some good scotch. Think I'll do that soon and say a toast to dear old dad from afar...FU, Pops!
It takes courage to name the issues and call the time. Good job!
What would happen, next? If your father knew and heard you? I keep my "F you, mom." in my saddlebag. But needlepoint would require intention, and I mean it. I mean the "F you, mom."
Remember that in this time, in this place, you are not alone. There are witnesses surrounding you now, women who will see what he does and hear what he says and challenge him for you when you cannot.
What did you need him to do, and what did he do, instead?
I never cried over anything he ever said to me. I cried a river over how he treated and still treats, after almost 55 years of marriage, my mother. I still see both of them regularly and try to get along with him while I am there because of my mother.
I don't cry, either. Only once in a while and I don't like it.
Misogyny permeates the air. To me it seems that there are men who hold all the prevailing belief systems, but love and are fascinated by all things female. They are delighted with us and they love to follow us around and they smile at how everything just is. And then, there are those men without joy in their hearts, and they hate and disparage and resent that thing that runs between men and women and are defeated by it and fight that by dominating and hating and keeping the focus on them.
Wherever they fit along that continuum, we need our fathers to be compassionate and true.
What he deserved was some 7-11 whore who spent all his money and then left with everything she didn't spend.
You can buy whores at 7-11?!?
America.
What a place!
:O)
***
"What he deserved was some 7-11 whore who spent all his money...."
I think I have come to the point that if I outlive him and he dies, I will mourn the father I never had.
Is your father actively abusive in his words and in his speech to you today, Belle?
The trench is dug out to fix the hydrant, we're putting in aditional hydrants down the line so might as well replace the faulty glued joint (I remember earlier this year being unsure of how well I got the pipe and coupler mated securely) with a T coupler.
Oh those T couplers.
:O)
I actually do know what a T coupler is. How extraordinary that you are doing this kind of work.
And right now we have an American Guinea Hog boar, an AGH sow, and two Kune Kune sows. Three AGHxKune kune boarlings, about two months away from their "Kill or Keep?" date, and two AGH boarlings about a week old. The little one I was bottle feeding was their sister. She died last night; turns out her case of "splay-leg" was a more serious connective tissue disorder and there was no way she'd live to maturity.
I have only visited farms for a long enough time to understand how intense the connection is between the farmer and everything he or she does. Every single thing matters; each decision, as its ramifications spin out and out, a life and death matter.
It's like living your work.
My grandfather had a bicycle looking thing with a wheel on the top that he used to sharpen instruments, and an old, old truck we would bring milk to the cheese factory in every day.
I was there once when the pigs were killed. It was horrible, awful, and I've never forgotten it. Do you know the writer Michael Pollan? He is a botanist and has the sweetest take on what it is to be human in a world of plants and animals and food chains.
I think it must take alot of courage to be a farmer.
I think I could never do it.
But I do remember going to get the cows in the afternoon and the way the barn smelled and so many wonderful things about being on that farm.
There was a wood burning stove in the kitchen.
I have friends today who raise pedigreed sheep. The farmer is the woman. The man was my karate instructor. It seems strange to see him at a disadvantage. It is the woman who is the farmer, and she loves it.
Welcome, nerfherder.
:O)
Maybe we can rename ourselves for this thread. Pick a name that defines us. I like Serenity, but that's so hard to type.
I am Cedar so much here that my real name (Barbara) feels less real. My mother drawled my real name, screamed my real name, so there is contempt attached to it for me.
I just thought I would mention that about our names, about what the names we identified through when we lived with our abusers carry for us, today.
There is so much less shame associated with my real name since having completed the exercise having to do with writing twelve times who we really are.
Which is true.
That is who we really are.
Starstuff.
But I also, in the front of my mind, wanted to believe I was showing her that I loved her and hoping t hat she loved me back.
I think those who abuse, particularly those who abuse children, leave their senses. I mean, it seems they are overwhelmed with something when they do that. Glass eyes, no emotion, cannot reach out of whatever trap they are in.
I think they cannot separate love from self contempt. I believe my mom did/does love me as a separate person (which is where the pride comes from) but hates me because I am hers. (Which is there the feeling of whore comes in. I think she is amazed at me but she hates me.
The taste of that dynamic is in here.
I think my mom would have done better if she could have. But once she didn't do better, once she began to abuse, there was no protection for us from the way my mom hates herself.
That is what I think I see with my mother, in my interactions with my mother.
As an adult, I felt badly for her. But in this time, when I need to be strong and when my intent is to be whole and not weakened by old trauma, I am having a look at the most traumatic incidents. I do see that kalidescope moving, turning, around issues of self contempt and hatred and disappointment and identifying your own children as abusable because they are yours and you hurt them, so they must be abusable, dispensable humans because you have hurt them.
A trap, for my mother.
But not where I need to live my life from, or to be weakened by, anymore.
On the other hand, I do believe we are all trying to heal. If it had been possible, if there had been someone strong there with her to help her and heal her and protect us, these things that happened with my mother would not have happened. Because they did happen though, all of us lost. Somehow, this is a description of the power dynamic Copa posts about.
Or it could be that my mom was just a mentally ill opportunist. She does behave in those same ways to the degree she is able with every person in her life.
Or it could be that each of us is stronger than we know and that our abusers were shamed in front of us because we saw them for who and what they were, and that they hate us for that ability to see them, to see to the heart of them, to this day.
It would be a strange and awful thing to abuse a child who refuses to cry.
Don't get me wrong.
There were plenty of times when I did cry.
I'm just saying I hate to cry, even to this day.
The sheer hate she had for me was clear from the grave.
Hatred.
Why is it hatred in our FOO instead of love? They say the two emotions are opposite sides of the same essential thing.
I feel hatred rolling off everything to do with my FOO, too. I could hate them back as easily as that ~ and would and could (maybe) fit right in, then. (You know, I think that might be really true....) My sister is always saying how she loves everybody to their faces
but just look what she's been doing the whole time right under our noses!
Hating.
So, here is the circle in that for me and it sounds like for you too, SWOT: Then why keep contact with us? Why keep calling, like my sister does, defiantly, when I have decided I am done? (Okay. For my sister, now that we are seeing her in this new light, that is part of the identity of person working to pull the family together but only with my sister as king.) For my mom...surely she knew what she was doing. Remember my posting about the baptism, and my mother's refusal to tell me, having been raised Catholic herself, how a Baptismal event was meant to feel and then, telling me she wondered why I was asking her instead of asking my own mother.
And then, realizing she was my mother.
She thought that was pretty funny, too.
Never, ever, a good idea to be vulnerable to anyone in my FOO. That is the essential pattern, there. Vulnerability is seen like that.
So, the dynamic there was a sneaky, laughter-filled kind of hatred at my ignorance, and at my mother's knowledge in that instance, which she refused to share and then, made sure to excuse herself for and leave me out in the even colder, more alone place than the one I had initially come in from to ask the question in the first place.
What a strange, strange thing.
Did you not say SWOT that you look like your mom?
I look like my mom, too. No one knew that though until she lost an incredible amount of weight. My mom would always say things like: I thought I had a large frame. But now that we can see them, my bones are like yours." I have my father's eyes.
My brother looks like my father.
I am thinking about the hatred in kicking a child.
I have seen my mother kick our dog, too. I posted about that. The summary of the healing that happened in Family of Origins Group Therapy involved realizing that it was as wrong for my mother to kick me as it was for her to kick that dog. I always knew it was wrong for her to kick the dog, or to do so many of the bad things she did to my sibs. Heartbreaking to remember some of it even now.
Here again, the thing we are working to clear is our (my own)...is what we learned about ourselves through interacting with mothers or fathers ~ or anyone, really ~ who hates us.
Prometheus, the Fire that is love that Pierre Tielhard blah, blah describes, the liver being torn out and growing back, daily.
I don't know what to make of all of it, either.
I let my mother have her jaw back and removed the Bozo nose.
She is, after all, my mother. And for my own sake, I do not want her shamed. Shaming them in our imaginations is not the point. The point is to recognize that the things that were done to us were invalid.
These things should never have happened. Not to us, and not to anyone else, either.
That is why we have to be wise and wary through our healing. It isn't about turning ourselves into them.
It is about claiming or reclaiming, the legitimacy of self, for ourselves.
Remember that time I posted about the lady in Group Therapy who was nailed into shame because her abuser had taken a Polaroid of her after he beat and shamed her? And each of us could see so clearly that the shame was the adult who beat a child and then, took a picture to seal her humiliation in shame.
She could not see that.
She was so afraid of that picture showing up and exposing the "truth" about who she was, about who she'd been hurt into believing was all she was.
She was an incredibly accomplished woman.
But her internal truth was that picture.
Those are the kinds of beliefs we are clearing, here on this thread.
Cedar
In Group Therapy, the therapist told us that there are predators everywhere ~ that it isn't that we draw them so much as it is that we don't recognize the harm in them because it feels familiar to us and so, we don't turn away from them. We may believe (and probably, we do believe), that we have put all the badness behind us and everyone else has, too. That is why we (I) am horrified to learn the some of us continue to choose to hurt others, having held that intent all along.
Anyway. That concept our therapist gave us was something very worth while for all of us here to remember, too: We are not foolish in having been targeted by predators. Predators target everyone.
We just don't believe them, when they tell us they are f***ed up people.
We need to learn, as Maya Angelou teaches us, to believe people the first time, when they tell us who they are.
F U, to anyone who thinks Barbies, Thumbalena dolls and the old Chatty Cathys were too ugly to play with!!!!
