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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 659502" data-attributes="member: 17461">Oh, SWOT!  Your poor hands.  I feel badly.  Please don't do that anymore, SWOT.  If you could begin making the choice to treat your hands well, that would be a good, good beginning.That just hurts me, right in my heart, to imagine your poor hands.***When I was older, I wished I was adopted.  I don't remember thinking that when I was little.  I knew friend's moms seemed kind and happy and so pretty in their eyes and in their faces and hands.  I didn't want them to know  how it was with me and my mother.  She had such hard hands when she hit.  Kicked us, too.  I m having a little of what that felt like.  So hard, to be hit and kicked like that.Her face was so ugly; I was scared all the time, and very lonely.Like your mom too SWOT, mine would pull me out of bed, yelling and screaming in the middle of the night.  Or, she would attack my brother and I would just go and stand there watching, and she would stop.What an ugly story.There comes a time, around twelve or so, when fear turns and changes and becomes a kind of distaste.  Maybe the difference is that by that time, I knew I was not going to die.  And I knew there was an ugliness there that did not happen in other families, maybe.  When I was a very little girl, I did not know what was happening was different than what was happening to anyone else.  I did not know that until eight or nine, when the difference between my mother and those of my friends was something I knew, and was ashamed of.  My mother began to look and sound so unattractive when she would yell; patterns of abuse become recognizable and seem sneaky and cowardly and predictable and purposeless when we are around eleven.  The style of the abuse changed; it became a matter of turning out our drawers or destroying our things, or of turning an electric burner on high and threatening to burn quickly as opposed to the other kinds of burnings that were threatened when we were physically too small to have stopped her lifting us bodily.  The abuse when we were older became a matter of public humiliation and of invalidation.My mother told me once that with as much time as I spent on my hair, it should look better than it did.  She told me she was embarrassed to be seen with me in public, to have people know I was her daughter, when my skin began breaking out.***I wonder what people really thought of the live in housekeeper and nanny my mother had created of her own beautiful daughter.  I was beautiful; I don't know what she thought about that.  She told me to stop parading around about it because one day I would be fat and ugly.  I believed it, too.  I thought once I had babies, it was over.  I am still pretty cute.  So, that was a lie my mother told me, too.  I don't know why I believe every word she says to this day.  We ordered clothes from a catalog because we lived away from the city.  I thought I was a size eleven.  I wasn't, of course.  I just believed I was fat, though I knew I was not.  Even now, there is that kaleidescope feeling around whether I was fat.  I would roll the waists so the clothes fit.How strange.I think I was not fat.  I have been this same size all of my life.  I am not fat now, so I probably was neither fat nor ugly, then.  I am not ugly now, so extrapolating back, I probably was not ugly then either.How strange.How proud she was, in that overbearing way, to display what she had done, that she had created a built in nanny and housekeeper out of me.  Oh, how spotlessly clean it all was; dinner and breakfast always ready on time, as a matter of course.I used to make sweet rolls in the morning for my father.  I thought nothing of it.  The kind you make with baking powder, not yeast.An ugly story.I still feel stupidly ashamed; still feel the difference in how I saw her once I was no longer a little girl.  I don't usually think about it like this.  Usually, I would just end that track, and we all could try together, again.   It didn't seem to matter what had gone, before.  But it does matter.  Whether it was my mother or my mother and my sister together, things have never been     even acceptable with my FOO.I am surprised to have these feelings.And while I do believe my sister hates me and that this will never change, I don't condemn her for it.  Of course she would want to separate from me and all I represent.  Of course she would create family if she can, separating herself and her mom from the others.I wish it had been different for us.You would think that with all the posting I have been doing, that I would have put the pieces together before this morning.  Ours is an ugly story.It could be that fitting my sister in made the difference.  While it is true that strange things happened, it is also true that we had formed a relationship.  Well, it looks like I just played a role there too, while she did whatever she wanted.  There have been very big changes since my father's death.  It is a strange thing, not to be wanted, not to be cherished.  I woke up thinking about families that have that cherishing and acceptance between the sibs, and between all the members.That is a kind and beautiful thing.I am glad I can see it.I will try to help that be the reality for my family.As soon as everyone stops being addicted or slipping off the deep end, I mean.That was a sort of a joke.:O)I am feeling better this morning than I have for some time.  *** I read yesterday that The Battered Child, the first book that addressed physical abuse, came onto the market in 1962.  I remember a television show when I was still pretty little about a mom who hit with wire hangers.  I thought about telling someone at school about my mom, but I did not.  I was afraid to.  What if they did not take us all out of there.Then she would kill us.That is what it seemed like to me.  I read about pathological hatred yesterday, too.  That fit, for my sister.  There was something in that article too about two types of personalities.  One takes the blame, internalizing guilt and shame.  One externalizes the hatred.  That might be what you mean Copa, when you describe the power dynamic.  It seems we are saying the same thing.I wish these things had never happened, SWOT and Copa.  Not to me, not to you or to my sister.Still, it is better to know.Now I can stop wondering why family never seems to work, for my family.Very sad that this happened to us.  Still, we do the best we know.We did that.  We all did that, and kept trying.Good for us.That is so true, SWOT.I will do that too, SWOT.I will read that book.I really like that idea of gentling the memory.They are so ugly; such ugly things to remember.  Imagine it ~ there are people, most people in the world, who don't know these kinds of things.  People whose memories are so different than the things we know.I don't think they see us as real, as people, Copa.  I think they do not cherish us ~ I mean, in that protective, joyful way it seems that we should be able to choose to do, as adults.  For me, for my sister, I know now that she hates me and always has.  I don't mean dislike.  I mean envious hatred that is the only way she can see me.  Given her behaviors over all the years, that is the only thing that makes sense. In a way, the role of pseudo-mom was taken by me.  That is how I dealt with the ugliness.  I patterned after those pretty moms my little girl friends had.  Maybe that is what my sister is trying to create now, with her family and her mother.  All the hatred focused on me so she can love her mom.  Envy, because I continue not to be eradicated.  That would explain alot of what I have seen.SWOT is right.  It will be best to stop believing.But knowing that our personality types are those who internalize shame and hatred, we need to be wise and to be wary regarding how we think about the hurtful ways our FOO see and define us.  We need to see the vested interest to them in trying to make us believe we are as they see us.  that is what they want.  Total agreement that we are nasty and worthless and less than.  Whenever we feel that way, that emotional flashback way (I loved that description, SWOT), we need to recognize and set out to heal that woundedness in ourselves.We can absolutely do that.  It will be a simple thing, now that we understand the underlying dynamic at work even now, even right this minute, in our FOO.Snip.It isn't as though we haven't tried.  That idea that I had to try has kept me hooked for the longest time.***My sister displays that same ownership quality regarding my mother that yours does, Copa.  Think about what I have posted about my sister's rabid hatred of the man who wanted to marry my mother.  It's not a rational thing, Copa and SWOT.  My sister is willing to turn my mother out over this man, and threatens as much.  That's the difference in families as dysfunctional as ours.   Nothing is real; nothing matters but old woundings, and the potential for healing passes away.We needed to wake up.It is a cold, grey day in the land of my FOO today.  But that's okay.  That will pass, replaced by a kind of freedom, and by life lived comfortably within a realm of possibility we have never known.  Think about all the times we were essentially kicked to the curb.  Always, the cry was: why?  Now, we know.  Now, we say true things and the false "family" collapses.We never had those things we believed were coming.  We never did, not one time, ever.We did try, sincerely.  We don't have to do that anymore.It will be a little bit lonely.  But the thing is that we always were alone.We always were.CedarMonty Python's Holy Grail:  "We already got one.  Oh yes, it's very nice."</blockquote>

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