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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 660157" data-attributes="member: 17461">Here is an unusual thing, SWOT.  I thought my family was funny, too.  I thought I missed the laughter and the brilliance of discussion, too.I don't know why I thought that, SWOT.As we have gone sifting through the memories, sifting through the real things that, unbelievably enough, did happen...I heard the hatred in the laughter; I saw the prejudice in the brilliant discussion, and the hatred there, too.  I came to understand my entire family of origin is about, functions and draws its energy from, hatred.It's an extraordinary thing to realize.  And like always...I am so surprised at the intricacy and depth of...pathology, really; determined hatred and labeling and hurtfulness and it never, ever stops.It is amazing to me that this could be so.I am sharing things here that were particular to me ~ that shamed or hurt me, individually, because I want the shame and the secrecy over.  But when I broaden the scope, when I sift through what they believed ~ it is all so wrong, SWOT and Copa.  It has always been so deeply wrong on every level.  I was thinking yesterday about the cleaning and cooking and etc that I did.  I was thinking more about the way the house looked and was run when I was little, before I took up the slack there, actually.  Little flashes of things that were so crazy and so dirty and so wrong...as though someone, as though the adults involved, were lazy.  Or worse.It wasn't good, SWOT and Copa.It wasn't at all good; none of it.Yet for years I have created a bare bones skeleton and fleshed it out with hope or with the things I created.  A quiet, clean home and the smell of dinner at the end of the day, the parents soon to be home and I would do the freaking dishes, too.What a strangeness my life has been.I have posted before that my father called me Cinderella.  Well, for heaven's sake, he must have meant it.You cannot believe, SWOT and Copa, how strangely different all of it looks, from here; from this perspective I have now.I like myself very much, now.  That change of perspective is so amazing to me, SWOT and Copa.  I am the Frenchman in the castle in Jabber's Monty Python piece, and I think of that, all the time.  That is exactly how they are, my family of origin:  Give us food and lodging for the night and you will be allowed to outfit yourself and your men and accompany us on a Quest for something you already have (something you freaking embody) but we don't, at your own expense and with some interchangeable one of us as King.Or Red Queen, and how extraordinary is that, to imagine loving a murdering Red Queen.I used to send my sister money.  Just as it has been for so long with my kids, I could never feel I'd done enough because they were not okay, yet.  Those are the same belief systems that enabled me to function as I did growing up. I was certain I could change everything because I've done it, before.But they never change, my family of origin; and maybe, not my kids, either.But I do love my kids; I love them enough to learn new ways of being for their sakes and for my own.So that's a difference, there.My daughter is coming, today.  I talked with her yesterday.  She seemed so miraculously much better than she did when I talked to her on Sunday.My son turned 40 yesterday.I had already sent the card.  There was no thank you for his card, or for the card and money sent to the grandson whose birthday was a few days earlier.  And there was no phone call, either.As I have posted, he did not call D H on Father's Day though he has been calling on my days.  I am seeing a game here.  I don't like it.  I am not about to stand for him hurting D H or myself, or playing stupid games that are hurtful with the time either of us has left.  So, we did not call him on his birthday.  And I didn't make us call.  I would have not called him on my own.  This is very new.I have called through these past weeks and have not been picked up.  I have left messages and there has been no return call.  In the past, I would have kept holding good intention and doing the freaking work of continually trying to pretend there was relationship because I loved.Like that could ever be enough.But I am writing my son a letter.  I will share it on P.E.So, that is what is happening, there.Again, I cannot even express my gratitude to you both for staying with me through this long process.Everything looks so different, from this changed perspective.***I am drawing back from my sister, now.  When I see her, I still see her crying, but I am further away.  I see the family members like a series of vignettes, each working separately and all working together like some evil engine that never stops.  Heads roll.  The Red Queen reigns; tyranny.I never knew that I knew this.I did know it, but I didn't believe it because I believed it was me who was wrong, who just couldn't bring us together.That was never my job, any more than anything I did was, technically, my job.  Those things were the jobs, the rights and the honors and the obligations, of the real mother in that family.I can never figure out whether things would have been better or worse had my mother not worked.In any event, I am seeing from such a changed perspective, now.  I am so pleased and happy about that.  I thank you both for staying with me through it, and I think we all have done amazing work, and are very brave.Cedar</blockquote>

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