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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 659369" data-attributes="member: 17461">Until I read what I'd written here?  I did not know they treated me badly.  They did bad things.  I didn't want to face it probably, that they were poops masquerading as humans.  :O)  Or that they were sphincters.  I took responsibility for whatever it was, like I always do.  Perhaps I'd been showing off when I'd invited them to Padre Island ~ remember when I posted that?  I didn't see what they were doing so much as I tried to see where I'd done something to hurt them and so, they did what they did.But that was never true.I don't really know why I did that, SWOT.  It has to do with that mothering thing, maybe.The difference now...it isn't so much that I love them as it is that I love myself.  Why should I have to harbor that rotten teeth feeling in the heart of me because my sister hates and ridicules and stalks me?  Once I am sure that she is who she is, why should I let that change anything about who I am?  I cannot help it that I am hated by a sister, or loved and hated both by a mother.  Or maybe, that I am altogether hated by my own mother, though I don't think that is true.Whatever they feel has nothing to do with me.I can choose love every time.  That is my right, and everyone's right.  Just because they name the game hatred does not mean I need to name it hatred in any of its guises.  Going through the stories here with you two taught me about how I was thinking about my sister.  In a way, she was still that little girl to me.  One of the things I learned is that my sister seems to define herself through being better than me, or having more than me.Somehow, she defines herself through me in that way.I don't know why.  Whatever the truth there for her, about which of us has more or better is not my truth and was never my question.  I don't see those kinds of feelings in the relationships my friends have with their sibs.  Why should I allow her (either my mother or my sister) determination to see me any way she wants to change anything about me?  I no longer believe in her.  In either of them.  I realize now that there was never a time when either my sister or my mother was acceptable as who she was.  However we welcomed, my sister ruined it in the same way my mother has always ruined things.  With my sister, it was hogging the attention and changing the dynamic through her children.  The time that might have been was changed into something dull, into some boring thing that involved children and so how could we stand up and say: STOP THAT.  I was always believing she didn't mean it.  I was always believing she meant to be kinder.  I was always believing we could do this, but we cannot because that is not her intention.  She does not feel kinder toward me.  She despises and hates me.  I cannot change that.That is why there could be that feeling of celebration at what happened to my children.  That is why there were so many nasty comments about the things D H and I do have.  That is why my sister had or has that picture of the two of us in her bathroom.  There is an unhealthy fixation, there.But that has nothing to do with me, either.I haven't tried to hurt her.  Not in my thoughts, and not in my actions.  But she has always tried to shame me.  Even when we were little, even when we were adolescents, even when we were young women and moms, she ridiculed and actively hated me.I know that, now.Before, I was holding a space, a heartspace, for her.  That is what I meant when I posted that I believed in her.  As it is with my own mother (and in my thinking recently, my mother is once again my own mother ~ nothing to do with my sister, or with fantasies of women cooking together and laughing together and raising children together.My mother is my own.  Nothing to do with my sister.That is a difference that has happened, this morning.Without that connection to my mother, my sister loses an inestimable amount of power.  She loses the power of hope; it will never be the way I hoped it would be, between us.So there is nothing there, then.I am free.What goes on between my mother and myself has nothing to do with her.  I may have been harboring the belief that my mother would not behave as she has since my father's death were it not for my sister.That is not true.The way my mother feels about me has nothing to do with my sister.My mother hates me all on her own steam.But that has nothing to do with me, either.***Part of it ~ probably the biggest part SWOT, is that I do not want that core of hatred, that sense of cavities and rottenness associated with them, to be in me, anymore.  I don't want to deny or punish or sicken or darken myself through any kind of hatred for them.  I know who they are, now.  It is not safe to believe in them, so now I don't.  But I still believe in me.It is possible to love them in the ways I have always loved them; it is possible to cherish good hope in those memories and to let the living person go on.  I see that in the way you think about your own sister.You are full, filled with all you need.  In the tone of your posts, I see you loving her and letting go.  What is past cannot be undone.  The future will be different only in the sense that there is no open door in my heart for my sister.  I will hold a door for my mother.  That would be a fine thing.  But like the Frenchman in the castle that Lil and Jabber posted for us here, "We already got one.  Oh yes, it's very nice."That was the thing I meant when I posted about the suffering of the Mary.  How do we do that.  How do we know our situations and accept them without resentment or hope.I loved them by choice for all this time when they were being so unbelievably, cuttingly, insanely sociopathic-seeming.  The strangest things were said and done, SWOT and Copa.  Just as they have been in your families of origin, too.  I don't want to be afraid of them or avoid them or run away from them or tell myself not to think about them.  I don't want to worry about when I lose my mother.  I was thinking about it this morning.  That woman I post about here, that woman who is my mother, is my mother.  The grown woman who is my sister has nothing to offer, nothing to give, no joy to add.  Interacting with her on any level is not going to change my mother.  I kept thinking we were fighting our ways through to something, some very real thing, we all wanted.  But it turns out I am the only one who wanted that.  Each of the other people involved in my fantasy of family wants something that looks very different than what I want.And that's okay.They can do that.Our sisters hone in on our relationships to our own mothers.  They insert themselves there.  They talk like they have taken possession of the mothers, it seems like.  This is what my sister was doing when my father was hospitalized, when my parents and I weren't speaking, when my mother wanted to marry that man.  But our mothers are not idiots.  Like it always is with our families of origin, our mothers know what they are doing.   In reality, the sisters are separate beings altogether.  There is a circle here that I am not through yet.  It has to do with shame at the way my own mother sees me.  And at the way my own sister sees me.  It has to do with jealousy or bewilderment over the perceived desertion of me in favor of my sister.  It has something to do with that tire rimming machine my mother disappeared to teach my brother she was the one who got to say whether his grandchildren mattered or not.  As noted, I am not through the circle of it, yet.  But it's like none of those things are real for me, anymore.  How my mom thinks of me would be the same whether my sister were involved or not.  How my sister sees me would be the same whether my mother were involved or not.  How either of them sees my brother's grands ~ same thing.  How my mother sees my sister....  Well, I haven't talked to my mom for a long time.  I do not know how she sees my sister.  Even if they have worked everything out and cook together in the kitchen all the time, that has nothing to do with the relationship between my mother and me, or between my sister and me.This is an important piece of what has changed for me.  I will try to describe it more succinctly once I have it more completely.Anyway, once I could see how true all that was, both my mother and my sister diminished in size and importance and color. Now, in my vision, there is only me and my mother.My sister is separate from that.I love it.I love turning my sister into just a person, in my heart.I don't want to hate anyone.  I am not willing to make an exception for her, or for my mother.They can feel about me any way they want to.  That does not change me.  It means that I will cook with other women, and my life is filled with good, strong women, with women who love to laugh and think and be where they are without all kinds of betrayals and boobie traps.This is better.So, that's why I love them, SWOT.  I don't want to hate them, at all.  I am fine; I have everything I need and more and I always did.  I wanted them, but they are not the "them" I wanted.  It is a better, clearer thing to be without them, to stop hoping, which gives them power over me.  That was the thing I was afraid of, when I worried about them calling or coming to my door.  It was as though my sister determined my relationship to my mother, somehow.  What an awful feeling.  I am sad for myself that I saw it that way.  It is an easier thing simply to admit my mom doesn't like me very much.  My sister seems not to like me at all.But those things have nothing to do with me.It's a good place to be, SWOT and Copa.Cedar</blockquote>

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