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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 659410" data-attributes="member: 17461">I found it happening through posting here.  I was determined to not be afraid, and to not be weak, and to stand up.  Whatever all that means, that is what I decided I wanted.  I have seen that standing up and requiring my children to believe in themselves instead of in me was so helpful for them.  It left me with no one to be for a little while.  Small price to pay for them to feel they are Captains of their own ships.I want to be Captain of my own ship, too.That is all I know about that, Copa.  That, and Brene Brown's concept of "leaning in", of staying present, of learning I did not have to keep everyone, support anyone, make anything okay.It was really a hard thing to do.Uncomfortable.  I seem to search out uncomfortable, now.  That is why fear of my sister or mother coming here or calling was so distasteful to me.  I should be captaining my ship, not them.Yes Copa, I think we are doing the same thing.Maybe it was even working, until my mom and my sister together changed the dynamic for all of us.  But really, I think I decided to just hold steady state.  Welcome family on faith, kind of.  But I have posted about what my sister did every time with those opportunities.  So, I don't know so much this morning about any of it, except that I am not afraid to answer the phone or afraid I will have to be rude if they come to my door.  I won't have to be rude.  I will just tell the truth and they will storm off.Just like my sister when she called and kept waiting for me to buckle and I thought she had hung up so I hung up to and then, there was her voice.But I am glad I hung up.They are free too, to do whatever they like without me in their lives.It never was working.  I was only hoping it would.  Maybe they hoped the same things.  I wonder Copa, whether you always looked at things in terms of power, or if you are feeling so powerless now yourself that you are seeing things in those terms.  I do know you are very harsh with yourself.   Because you left and went to make your fortune away from them, I think you did not always see in those terms.  Family are not supposed to see one another in the way we see and compete in the financial world.  When we see our FOOs, we see the power over terms of our relationships to them.  It's the win; we don't get the win.  We wrap ourselves into pretzel shapes trying to understand why they do that so we can see the win in it.  To us, together feels like the win.  to them, on top does.Remember the story of my sister and the Rolex she judged everyone by though she did not have one yet herself?  That's the difference.  Or back in the day when I could have had a Cadillac or whatever had I wanted the flashiness of that ~ or maybe a Rolex, I suppose ~ but I chose school.  Nothing so flashy about that, lots of risk, if it turned out I'd not been bright enough to succeed there.  Or is it turned out I were evil, like the therapist and my mother believed.  But that is the sort of thing I would want.  Not the car.  Not the Rolex.  My sister went through a time when she was going to go back to school.  I said good for you and that it was easy.  She took a class and lost interest.  She likes that flashy kind of thing that people who care about money know about.  I still wouldn't know a Rolex if I saw one.  I have one piece of really good jewelry and a couple of other nice pieces, but I don't wear them.  Your sister sounds like mine in these ways.  It could be that what you feel from her seems to have to do with monetary things, or with status.  That makes sense to me, that you would think that, that you would try to make sense of the ill feelings in that way.  I do that, too.  But the truth Copa, if you take it back far enough, is that she was mean to you when you were little girls, when you were adolescents, when you were young women, too.If she is like my sister, she never was loyal to you.  You were loyal to her in thought and action...but she never was loyal to you.  I did not say she did not do the strangest things for your supposed benefit.  My sister calls that "seeding into".  The benefit forever accrues to my sister.If she is like my sister, she has always had this thing going on that is not a thing that makes sense to us.  We keep trying to make sense of it.  We are not them.  We do not see as they see.  It is crazy making.As I kept telling the stories of my sister and me, I would reread them and get a little shock of surprise.  It was that she hurt my child that turned me cold.  I fought that, too.  Now I don't.  My sister is snaky like that.  I am not her mother.  She is not my child.  But she hurt my child.  My child is so definitely not me.  She took vengeance, and she took it with breathtaking grace and appropriateness.  But still, my own little sister opted to hurt my child.So, I could not forget that.Snip.No one should be taunting you about any of that, Copa.  That is sacred ground.  Copa, I am sorry that happened to you.  You were a beautiful young girl, a treasure growing into the ripeness of a woman, of the thing that makes the world go round.He had no right, Copa.  He had no right to do that to you, or to anyone.Predator.  Another stinking, opportunistic predator, preying on a living child.  A very, very bad man.  Imagine what it would have meant to you Copa, to have had a gentle, strong, intelligent male in that position, someone who could have taught you and mentored and modeled for you what the relationship between a man and a woman could be.Think how that would have changed everything.That is the true crime in what he did.  We recover from the physical things somehow.  Time heals that.  It is in the terrible patterns they set us up for that the real damage happens, and in the good things they knew about but did not provide, for that child in their care.He was a predator, Copa.You did nothing wrong, anymore than I did anything wrong with the therapist or with my mother.  Can you see him through your own eyes, Copa?  Not his.  Or see him doing what he did through Maya Angelou's eyes.  Believe me, she knows how to see people like that.  D H spotted my sister right off.I would just say:  That is my sister.  End of discussion.Our sisters are sly, Copa.  They are very bright, indeed.  That is how they fool everyone, even us.  Until they do something really reprehensible, we don't take their badness seriously.  We love them.  We have that confused mother thing going on.She is a predator too Copa.  This would not be happening to you if she were not a predator, too.Yes.Me too.Story of our lives, Copa and SWOT.Yes.  And I hate her for that.  I do.  Slime bucket.  Dirty little rotten person with dirty little fingers poking in where she should never have been allowed to go.  Touching my children like a predator touches children or touches the child within us.Just another stinking predator, and not my sister, after all.Snip.But you are addressing that now, Copa.  It will be really good once you get through to the other side.  I am still so surprised.  I don't know why I continued to see her like a child.  She is so snaky.  Like my mother.  Laughing and rolling their eyes at the lady who drives my mother south.  That's what I mean.  Why do they do that?  It's so stupidly mean.  The lady is very nice.  She used to be a therapist.But she is being victimized as easily as any of us.It's that eye rolling thing.  Dead giveaway. Predator.I don't think it's that we didn't see, Copa.  We just didn't believe it.  There was nothing inside us to tell us they meant it.  We don't get the win in what they do routinely.  Just like the story I told about my sister working the pregnant lady alone into a hefty check from someone sitting next to her on a plane.She thought that was ~ I don't know what she thought that was.  It was all connected with religion.Predator.Another stinking predator.I don't know, Copa.  But I do know that both SWOT and I did the same kinds of things.  Our sisters call crying and boom we are there.  Just as we would be now for our children.  It has that feel to it.  But these sisters of ours are not our children.  We are not their mothers.  We never had those sisters we celebrated and held close in our hearts.We just had that stupid predator whose face keeps changing, but who zeros right in on our wounds and before whom we are helpless, confused, guilty of something we did not know was a crime.  it has to do with watching someone watch your eyes fill up with tears.No one real does that.Only predators do that.The rest of us cry like our hearts are broken.  Predators cry to break into them.Because you did not take it seriously, Copa.  Neither did I, until my sister hurt my child.We don't think like them, Copa.I don't think that's it, Copa.  It's like what we all do together, here on the site.  No one is getting anything for it.  All of us gives what she knows and hopes that it makes a difference for a stranger.  We all do that, Copa.  No one is ever going to know who we even are.  Yet, here we all are, doing what we can to ease the pain or light the path or just be there, a kindly anonymous presence in a lonely time.You do not think like she does, Copa.  When we play power over with our families of origin, we don't even get it that we lost.  We did not even know we were playing.  We thought we were making dinner.Here is a story about my sister.  She told me she had been "counseling" a young girl who is a very famous and a very troubled young girl.  My sister has no education beyond high school.  She was "counseling" this girl in a religious sense.  It was an internet connection.  How my sister got the girl to tell her real name, I don't know.  But when she was telling me about it, the sense of it was that she was important because this famous person wanted her "counsel".  The girl has an enormous amount of money.  That was the draw for my sister.  If she has her way, some of that money will be finding its way to my sister.  So what she is really doing is victimizing an already traumatized young girl.  I am sure the girl's guardians are well aware of predatory people.  The girl will be alright.  But it was just the idea.That is what predators do.  They never even see how wrong it is.  They think they should have access to money and they cover it whatever way works.They even convince themselves they are ~ I don't know what they think.I have this, too.  I like that you posted that piece for us, SWOT.I keep getting distracted when I try to go back to find the post I was responding to.  I love it that you were able to cry like that at the deaths of your real people.I don't cry.  I mean, sometimes I can't help it.  But I don't like it.D H and I have been all over with what is real.  He has helped me stand up.  I had to.  I never thought I could control my sister.  I just wanted to help her through the places she wasn't sure about.  I just was there.  I listened.  I did not exclude.  I was available to her any time.  I went to see her when she asked me to come.  She was welcome in our home any time.  She brought the last husband here before they were married, and I never breathed a word about what I knew.   That's what I mean.  It's like I have this mother thing going on.Her real mom is so darn mean.But it's like my sister would subvert or sabotage or ~ I don't know.  It would be like I would step into the role and that was my value.  Not who I was or something.  We do have a pretty little log cabin on a lake and so on.  I think it was more about that than anything else.That could be.Sort of the same thing with the four generation picture.  My mom's house is on a lake too.  Not as nice as this one.  But they took the pics outside.  So there are lots of things I don't understand.  But I do understand that she intentionally and with malice aforethought hurt my daughter when she was already so terribly hurt and confused.Snip.Happy Hour coming up.  I am going to read through your responses. I cherish you both.  Thank you both so much for the freedom you've given me through sharing your stories and reading mine.It's a confusing thing.  If it were simple to see any of this, we would have seen how they do these things to us already.  It was our own good intentions that did us in.  I would opt to believe in them again.  I am glad for all of us that we did believe in them.That is who we are.:O)Cedar</blockquote>

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