I miss my sister...for the first time in say 55 years.

[Scent of Cedar *]

to be the caretaker in their parent's later years in an attempt to finally be the mother's hero.

This could be it, SWOT.

and the other siblings are happy to let her do it.

I am happy my sister is taking care of my mother. She sees to be happy there. She continues to go back there. I would still be involved in summer care, but there was that last time my mother hung up on me.

And all at once, I am like...no, I think I will not start talking to her now that we both are back in the same area because she will be lonely if I don't.

Bad Cedar.

F you, mom.

Maybe your sister is doing this as a last ditch attempt to be mommy's little girl.

She actually said something like that to my mother, when she was justifying her feelings about my mother's involvement with the man she was going to marry after my father's death.

That she had never had a mother.

So here is my question: Do I allow compassion for her to enter into this picture.

Compassion for my sister, for the pain of all of it. We are all so confused. I can see where that could be the rationale for all of it. No other sibs allowed would make sense, in that context.

And my sister really did explode over my bringing up the pact, and that she needed to contact my brother once a month by email or phone or something, so he would know how his mother was.

That would make sense.

I feel badly for her, now.

Cedar

Okay. But my feeling badly about what happened to all of us and about what that has always cost us and is still costing us today does not mean that what is happening is a different thing than I had figured it out to be.

Wise, and wary.

No one needs me, now. That is an ego position, that I could have changed anything. My nurturing is not what anyone needed, and it will not heal anyone, now.

We all did need a mother.

We do not have one.

Alone is better than practicing, swallowing, smiling through hate.

I can see the win now, SWOT.

I do feel badly for my sister.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

You know, I was talking with my sister about what she was doing, once. And she said: "I know. I can't help it."

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

So, I can understand where my sister would interpreting everything as finally healing that mother wound.

That would take precedence over any sister or brother. To have the mother's presence and full attention.

There were other weirdnesses, things that could not possibly have happened the way my mother described them, things having to do with my sister's intense pleasure in having her parents there in her home.

Cedar

Okay you guys. So, do I answer the phone when she calls or not.

We just lost a first cousin. Do I commiserate with her? No, I say no. She will be fine.

That I might be putting all these little pieces together does not change that my sister is not able to see, and respond to me, as other than a threat.

I think you are very correct in your assessment, SWOT.

Thank you. Oh, thank you very much. I knew there had to be some explanation that would fit the wrongnesses that are happening.

This makes sense, and will change my behavior toward my sister in future.

It's going to be a mess when my mother passes, isn't it.

My sister had a really hard time with my dad's passing, too.

I mean in an unusual way.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Okay. So she is calling me to keep things looking normal. She is "doing the right thing". Because she doesn't know why she is doing what she is doing.

Maybe, she doesn't even know she is doing it.

You know that feeling when all the pieces form a coherent whole?

Yes.

I am going to need another motorcycle, and another needlepoint "F you, mom" before this is over.

I am so happy to know the why behind it, SWOT.

Thank you. More than I can tell you, thank you.



Okay.

So, why is the mother continuing her behaviors.

I get that there is self hatred there.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

KD Lang - Hallelujah (LIVE at the Winter Olympics 2010)

True.

Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

Cedar, why did my mother answer my calls and talk to me before she disowned me? She could have said, "We're done." "I hate you." "For reasons best known to you, you are no longer my daughter." It would have been kinder and she knew it. In her case, she was not doing it to be nice or normal. She cared about neither. She was doing it to stick it to me and make it hurt worse, is my best guess. At the same time, she certainly was saying, by not recipricating my calls, "Call me if you wish, but I will never forgive you for whatever you'd did (counting up all her many grudges which I was never informed of.). So this was on me for wanting something badly enough (civility and closure) that I kept on being a fool.

There is a mean gene in our family. Mother has it. My grandmther had it (and was very good at hiding it and, in my opinion, was a nicer person anyway). My uncle was just a jerk...treated people like dirt, such as the girlfriends he cheated on and my sons, but I don't know if he was mean. Same with brother. Rather emotionless, but not particularly mean. Sister blows mean to high levels. I can too. However, I try very hard to control my mean and it has only happened once in the past twenty years after my dad had everyone telling me how "bad" I was on his 85th birthday and my sister was throwing oil on the fire. I did blow up and leave a nasty message for my dad on his phone. It was directed more at my brother. My brother happened to be there and hear it. I apologized and explained that I do have mental illness and while I an usually control myself extreme pressure and stress can override my medications and coping skills. Apparently, he never did forgive me because there was no interaction between us since then, except the letter he wrote to me. Yet he forgave my sister for so many years of "You are so ugly and gross and you are not invited to my wedding because my soriety sisters (I hate the snobbery of sororieties) will know I have an ugly brother and that would embarass me." Cedar, does this make sense to you? If it does, please share. I stopped trying to figure it out other than to realize that in my particular FOO, anyone can do anything horrible to somebody, but they WILL eventually be forgiven, except for me. Why? That's easy. I am the designated scapegoat. If I do something stupid or am not nice, and that's THEIR opinion of nice, it is a blight I wear like a Scarlet A on my forehead forever. But only me. Nobody else they know.

So, yes, we are talking about the abnormal and no sense. It is what it is and, if you pinned them down, they probably would not give a clearcut answer.

Interviewer: You say your boyfriend abuses you.

Sis: He does. For five years.

Interviewer: And you sister abuses you?

Sis: Oh, yes.

Interviewer: As consistantly and a meanly as him?

Sis: Well, one time she...

Interviewer" No. Answer the question.

Sis: Well...

Interviewer: How many times have you hung up the phone on your boyfriend and called the cops when he insisted on continuing to text you after you told him not to?

Sis: (uncomfortably) Never

Interviewer: But you have done this to your sister many times. Called the cops because you were mad at her, asked her not to call, and she called.

Sis" Yes. But...


Interviewer" But what?

Sis: B-but I LOVE my boyfriend!!!!

You get the gist of it. Yes, she would get mad and hang up and I'd get mad and call back to try figure it out and she would call thel cops for "harassment" but she has never done that to her boyfriend whom she admits abuses her. Now I get that I shouldn't have called her if she asked me not to, but to call the cops? To blot me out for months and years because of this and then to suddenly pop back into my life with the same swiftness that she left? That is not how normal families function.

Tell me how this makes sense.

This is old baggage from childhood which she doesn't share with her real abuser. He is not from her FOO. And I really think that's where it is all coming from. Perhaps (and this is only a guess) she is jealous because my life ended up good and she thinks she deserved the good life, not me.

But none of this is logical. And none of your FOO's stuff is logical. The "logic" behind these interactions in our families are twisted and old and should have been buried, but we have a FOO who carries that mean gene. And when the claws come out, so does Mean Gene. And they do these things for no other reasons than to irrationally hurt us and to irrationally think they scored a win. And they do hurt us. And they do win, if that is their goal.

Can you think of anything else?

Cedar, as for answering the phone, if you feel up to up and want to talk to her, answer it. If you don't feel up to it and don't want to answer it, let her leave a message. She isn't going to know you're standing there letting it go to voicemail...hehe. Oops...there goes the Mean Gene. Get back here!!!!

As for when your mother passes, in dysfunctional families, that can cause feuds to escalate. My poor dad...I hope he lives twenty more years...but if he doesn't, my husband and I have already planned to go to his funeral with our REAL family, stay only with our REAL family, and give him the respect he deserves then go home. Brother is executor of th e will. I will make sure I get my money if he doesn't send it in a timely fashion, but otherwise I am not going to interact with either of them at all. And if for some reason he holds it back, I'm not sure I'd even care enough about it to fight it. I really don't want anymore FOO wars, especially because of the tragedy of a lost loved one. But my own Mean Gene will probably make sure I don't get the shaft one last time, even if we have to hire a lawyer. That way the interactions will be between lawyers, not us. Brother is pretty logical and cut and dried. He'll likely do exactly what Dad wants him to do so I don't anticipate a problem. And then my FOO will be a past memory.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

She was doing it to stick it to me and make it hurt worse

Did you stand up to your mother, SWOT?

I don't mean over that incident. I mean, were you...there were times when I saw my mother crumble, back down, back away. I was not bigger than her, so it wasn't a physical threat.

It was just that I knew what I knew.

Or maybe it was that she knew that if she allowed any further degree of crazy, she would kill us and that sort of snapped her to her senses or something.

I just wonder, if you did sort of confront her with the perfect understanding that you knew what she was doing was wrong, whether that is why she would hurt you like that.

Were you at a ceremony, like they show on television, so that the humiliation was public?

And here is another thing: When I was in The Will (and D H was made Executor over my own brother even while my father was still alive) it was our intention to correct whatever the wrongness was if it was in our power to do it. If there was a discrepancy, an attempt to hurt from the grave.

Now, I am very sure D H is no longer Executor, and equally certain I am not in The Will at all.

My mother sent strawberries to her sister's funeral over some slight involving strawberries when they both were young. That is vengeance.

Ew.

I had best gird my loins for this whole The Will thing.

***

My mother is still with us. I anticipate nothing at all in her Will. Though I will say that she certainly does (did, when we were talking) bring up that Will, and what did we think she should do with her money (regarding investments, I mean).

Then?

She would launch into this whole diatribe about the economy and how stupid we were to have whatever.

So, who knows what that was all about. It felt like she was fishing. You know, tossing out bait to see what would elicit a hurt.

She generally did wind up calling everyone stupid. Our generation was stupid, rock and roll in general and the Rolling Stones (whom D H is partial to to this day) in particular, were stupid.

Stuff like that.

Was your mom like that, too?

My mom even left her Will lying on a kitchen counter and went into the other room once. I did not read it, but I always wondered whether she meant me to, or believed I had.

Just that phrase The Will carries a kind of numismatic magic.

I'm sorry that happened to you, SWOT.

What a cruel biatch she was, to reach out from the grave with that stink.

Would you like to borrow my motorcycle and needlepoint?

So this was on me for wanting something badly enough (civility and closure) that I kept on being a fool.

You were not a fool. You were a human being with a working brain. Everyone around us has a mother, SWOT. They seem to really enjoy their children and grands. We just don't get it why our moms don't behave that way about us. It is shaming to us.

But you know now who I think that shame belongs to. And about a bucket of rage that goes with it.

Your mom was differently wired, SWOT.

I think that might be code for "psychotic biatch". Maybe it is like I was posting to you about my mom. Fishing for something to hurt you, she landed on that because it hurt you. Custom made torture.

You made yourself a wonderful mom, and you gave a wonderful mom to so many kids, SWOT. Living well is the best revenge, and vengeance is a dish best eaten cold.

I never used to be about revenge or vengeance. I am probably just being a big shot right this minute. But that phrase appeals to me. "Vengeance is a dish best eaten cold."

Where is my pirate skirt.

Roar.

I am so over our mothers.

Apparently, he never did forgive me because there was no interaction between us since then, except the letter he wrote to me. Yet he forgave my sister

How do you know he forgave your sister, SWOT?

My sister bullies my brothers. It's all like, "dear" and "love" and etc, but it is at her convenience and they are dropped again at her convenience. They seem eager to respond to any positive effort on anyone's part to include them because my mother hates one right out loud and twists the other to keep herself in the boss position.

So...how do you know he forgave her?

Maybe, she just overwhelmed him and wants you to think he is allied with her against you.

My brother has been so badly hurt that all he wants is to do the right thing by his mother (and she takes shameless advantage) and that same, forever unknowable thing we all want, a family. He has his own very loving family. He was an excellent father.

F you, mom.

I will write more later, SWOT.

Thank you for working through this with me.

Copa, Confused, Insane? Please post in if you like.

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

Copa, Confused, Insane? Please post in if you like

Right now, actually, I am listening to Hallelujah over and over again. Will be posting...it may take me the rest of my life...to make sense of what is there.

 

[BusynMember]

Did you stand up to your mother, SWOT? I tried, but I didn't have the communication or social skills to give her a good argument. I'd just jumble angry words and end up crying I am a very talkative person who tended while young to blurt out stuff that did not mean what I meant. I did not learn how to express myself in an empowering way until later in life and often my method was an attack on an attack and that just makes the other person feel validated that they called you rotten, ya know?

I don't mean over that incident. I mean, were you...there were times when I saw my mother crumble, back down, back away. I was not bigger than her, so it wasn't a physical threat. She never backed off. Not even when my Dad screamed at her, and he could sound intimidating. She'd bait and bait. When I was very young, sometimes she actually apologized when I was in my room, hating myself, wanting to jump out my window because I knew something was wrong with me and that I couldn't control my rages and that mommy thought I was bad...I thought of suicide very, very young. When she would come in I'd hug her hard and say how sorry I was. But that was sometimes and when I was very young.She never wanted to acknowledge something was wrong with me, but I knew something was and I needed her to try to get me help. Most kids are not as unhappy as I was.

It was just that I knew what I knew.

Or maybe it was that she knew that if she allowed any further degree of crazy, she would kill us and that sort of snapped her to her senses or something.

I just wonder, if you did sort of confront her with the perfect understanding that you knew what she was doing was wrong, whether that is why she would hurt you like that. When I hit my teen years, I definitely stood up to her, the best I could, trying to explain that I was not the way she said I was and that I had problems beyond just being "bad" or "lazy" and that she was ignoring them. But if she called me a name, I crumbled and died and cried. A part of me believed her accusation. A part of me was devastated that she would tell me I was such a terrible person.

Were you at a ceremony, like they show on television, so that the humiliation was public? No. It was just a family saga. She did not hide it from the other kids. But, honestly, she did not drive or work so she was always home. We never went anywhere with her.

And here is another thing: When I was in The Will (and D H was made Executor over my own brother even while my father was still alive) it was our intention to correct whatever the wrongness was if it was in our power to do it. If there was a discrepancy, an attempt to hurt from the grave. Oh, gosh. I adored both of my siblings most of my life. It my mother had treated them the way she treated me, and if she had considered me a favored child, I would have intervened on their behalf, threatening to stop talking to her until she treated Sis or Bro better. That's how I am. If the Will had been in my hands and been an obvious attempt to hurt one of them, I would have given them something, even though I don't think anyone got much. I would not have wanted them to suffer the pain of a total parental rejection, even though it had been going on for years. The actual fact of it is different...it's like the whole wound open and scratched with a giant knife.

Now, I am very sure D H is no longer Executor, and equally certain I am not in The Will at all.

My mother sent strawberries to her sister's funeral over some slight involving strawberries when they both were young. That is vengeance. It is amazing to me how mean some people can be...and at such inappropriate times! That is horrid!

Ew.

I had best gird my loins for this whole The Will thing. Yep. It brings out the worst in hurtful people. I don't know first hand as my mother's affairs...I know nothing about them, really. Hubby and I chose to let it be and not find out if there was any way we were entitled to anything of hers. That was actually a wonderful decision and kept our lives calm and balanced. She had no big Estate or anything. If she had, we still would have probably just sat back. She didn't like me. It is her business what she does with her money. My brother is rather stoic and a puzzle to me...I barely know him anymore...but he would not try to cheat anyone.

***

My mother is still with us. I anticipate nothing at all in her Will. Though I will say that she certainly does (did, when we were talking) bring up that Will, and what did we think she should do with her money (regarding investments, I mean).

Then?

She would launch into this whole diatribe about the economy and how stupid we were to have whatever.

So, who knows what that was all about. It felt like she was fishing. You know, tossing out bait to see what would elicit a hurt.

She generally did wind up calling everyone stupid. Our generation was stupid, rock and roll in general and the Rolling Stones (whom D H is partial to to this day) in particular, were stupid.

Stuff like that. That's really sucky. I'm sorry you had to go through that. That is not the sort of rot my mother would have pulled. She did other things.

Was your mom like that, too? Cedar, if you asked me what my mother was REALLY like I wouldn't know. She is definitely quite a chameleon. I only know what she was to me, and that was sneaky, a big troublemaker, mean, a namecaller, one who not only disowned her daughter but disowned her daughter's grandchildren because they were my daughters, and a VERY unstable woman. She was also capable of extreme hurtfulness and, if she wanted to, she planned it and languished in it and did it with a twisting dagger. Again, this was how she was with me and I don't doubt my sibs would say I was lying, but I'm not. She was able to be who she wanted to be with whom she wanted. I heard her fight with her own mother many times and her mother, my grandmother, was very close to me a nd she upset her own mother VERY often and a lot. My sibs would vehemently deny this, however they did not have the daily, close relationship with my grandmother that I had. So this is something I know that they do not.

My mom even left her Will lying on a kitchen counter and went into the other room once. I did not read it, but I always wondered whether she meant me to, or believed I had. I don't even know if my mom had an actual Will. I'm sure she had things legally in place to make sure I didn't even get that dollar that I am supposed to be entitled to...lol. My brother knew all about her will, I'm sure. I don't know if my sister did. I sure didn't. I didn't expect to be in it, but when it actually happened, I felt as if s he was laughing at me from wherever she was in the afterlife and it hurt like she had planned it to hurt.

Just that phrase The Will carries a kind of numismatic magic. I hate the idea of Wills. How many real life folks have been killed over money? It's sick.

I'm sorry that happened to you, SWOT. And I am sorry what is happening to you, Cedar. But we will survive. We already have.

What a cruel biatch she was, to reach out from the grave with that stink. Yes. Conniving too.

Would you like to borrow my motorcycle and needlepoint? At the same time? Do them both together? Hahahaha! Sounds like, er, fun????

You were not a fool. You were a human being with a working brain. Everyone around us has a mother, SWOT. They seem to really enjoy their children and grands. We just don't get it why our moms don't behave that way about us. It is shaming to us.

But you know now who I think that shame belongs to. And about a bucket of rage that goes with it.

Your mom was differently wired, SWOT. That is putting it mildly, Cedar. Yours was too. I remember being shocked awake at 3am often in my teen years. It was my wild-eyed mother screaming at me about something t hat was bohering her about something I had done three weeks earlier that I had thought had been resolved. Terrified me. Woke my sister too. When I saw the wire hanger scene on "Mommie Dearest" that reminded me of my mother's night raids. She didn't make me clean up, but she scared the bejeezus out of me and wakeing me up at that hour over things that had happened weeks earlier...I mean, she couldn't wait until morning if she had to rage at me? She looked a bit like Joan Crawford too. She was very pretty. But Joan Crawford always freaked me a bit because of the resemblence in a few ways.

I think that might be code for "psychotic biatch". Maybe it is like I was posting to you about my mom. Fishing for something to hurt you, she landed on that because it hurt you. Custom made torture.I have no doubt that the latter years were done just to hurt me, yes. Don't let yours hurt you that way. Please be smarter than I was.

You made yourself a wonderful mom, and you gave a wonderful mom to so many kids, SWOT. Living well is the best revenge, and vengeance is a dish best eaten cold. Thank you, Cedar. And you turned out to be such a caring, giving, wise person. And, yes, living well is the best revenge. It doesn't allays set well with siblings who are not quite as happy though.

I never used to be about revenge or vengeance. I am probably just being a big shot right this minute. But that phrase appeals to me. "Vengeance is a dish best eaten cold."

Where is my pirate skirt. LOL. Really, I just agree that being a good person, having a lot of love in your life, and feeling peace and stability is tremendous revenge. And it hurts nobody intentionally. If others in the clan make choices that hurt themselves, that is on them. You and I are not choosing to live wild, crazy, manicky lives with horrible men and substances and dramatic, toxic people. Nobody can take my wonderful family from me and they are in my life because I made good choices in the man I married. Twenty years in a month! How long have you been married?

Roar.

I am so over our mothers. But are we ever really over them? I only tend to think about her now when I vent here. But it took a few years to get over being disowned. However, I did it and I managed to keep my head on straight with those who needed me to stay strong.

How do you know he forgave your sister, SWOT?

My sister bullies my brothers. It's all like, "dear" and "love" and etc, but it is at her convenience and they are dropped again at her convenience. They seem eager to respond to any positive effort on anyone's part to include them because my mother hates one right out loud and twists the other to keep herself in the boss position. I don't know how it happened, or how Sis talked herself out of all the horrid abuse she heaped on her brother, but I believe he forgave her. She probably told him she was mean to him because she loved him so much and he was so sick and she pushed him away...because she was so afraid he'd die. I am finding she can really be good at snowing people. I neither know nor care. I won't say I'm not needy. I am. But I have my needs met with my hub and kids. Sis didn't pay that much attention to Bro until she decided to cut me off again...actually, though, I think this time I cut her off. It's iffy. At any rate, she needs people to lift her up and without me he is the only one left. So I can see her suddenly playing up to him to get close to him.

So...how do you know he forgave her?

Maybe, she just overwhelmed him and wants you to think he is allied with her against you. Naw. He isn't really the one who does revenge much. Yeah, he wrote me a letter. His therapist probably told him to. He was under mother's influence for a long time. I'm sure he buys her version of me. But I believe Sis snowed him with pretty words and he's kind of socially awkward. Nothing against him. I am too.

My brother has been so badly hurt that all he wants is to do the right thing by his mother (and she takes shameless advantage) and that same, forever unknowable thing we all want, a family. He has his own very loving family. He was an excellent father. My brother has always lived alone. That kind of makes me sad. I can never get as angry at him as Sis. He wants a family too and has tried to make one by being a father figure to his students. I would not be happy with a lifetime of living alone with my students being close to me only, but I'm not him and perhaps he likes his life just how it turned out. A part of me will always feel badly for him...he is so sick and, like me, knows what being bullied by his peers feels like. I hope he is happy. I just don't want to find out what all his gripes are, since he was so close to his mother. I am going to opt to stay No Contact with both of them. From now on when I meet new folks and they ask about siblings I'm going to say I'm an only child so I don't have to answer any questions about siblings. I'm like an only child so why not just state it? My Sis has been meaner to me than anyone on earth, in an ongoing way, other than my mother. I don't know why I kept taking her back after her eternal cut offs. That was plain dumb of me...and naive. Maybe more naive.

F you, mom. Ah, it's so much better to be living a better life than your siblings that she loved more Wherever she is, she sees my Sis making bad choices, wasting her life, crying because she picked such a terrible man to "love." And that she is still living with her ex. There is more. She just does not have a good life. The entire time I tried to advise her, as she did ask for my advice, I tried to help her because she was so miserable. Even though I believe her kids are all nice, thriving kids (remember, I don't know them well so I could be wrong), we all know that we are separate from our adult children and our adult children can not make us happy. We have to make the choices that make us happy.

I will write more later, SWOT. Love healing with you, Cedar

Thank you for working through this with me.[/QUOTE]

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Right now, actually, I am listening to Hallelujah over and over again. Will be posting...it may take me the rest of my life...to make sense of what is there.

The singer is barefoot.

There is another verse. Something about the broken places being how the light shines through.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

So this was on me for wanting something badly enough (civility and closure) that I kept on being a fool.

You weren't a fool, SWOT. You were behaving with integrity. When the pieces were not fitting, you faced the issue square on. It isn't civility and closure we needed from our mothers. It was mothers we needed from our mothers.

But just look how you have changed the world in mothering your own children. We are talking for all time, here. Fine, well-mothered people who will parent with integrity and pass on a different legacy than the one you were given.

That is one of the things that bugged me half to death about my own kids. They had all those things I needed and did what they did, anyway.

Grrr...

There has to be some connection between what I wanted for my kids and FOO toxicity.

For that, I could hate them.

And I do, with a kind of grinding, relentless clanking of mechanical things. Of something, of hatred on automatic, then.

I think I will not honor whatever that toxicity was by allowing it to continue, even couched in metaphor.

Let go.

My children are alive. We have what we have together, and I love having it.

That is enough.

difficult child son still is not talking to me.

Other than that, I meant.

:O)

If I do something stupid or am not nice, and that's THEIR opinion of nice, it is a blight I wear like a Scarlet A on my forehead forever.

A friend told me once that all families are dysfunctional to some extent. Ours were just way out there on the ragged edge. Maybe, if divorce had been more acceptable back in the day, the family would have fallen apart and things would have been so much better for all of us.

Our moms, too.

Every aspect of dysfunctional family systems will display evidence of the dysfunction. Funerals, obituaries, grievances carried over for years, automatic flare ups, thinly covered jealousies and resentments. Each of us will have been targeted when we were vulnerable. We will have learned it is best not to trust.

However much we might wish it, there is no closure.

The badness was mounted and enacted on purpose.

What we can take from our upbringings is the certainty that there was dysfunction. That understanding frees us from responsibility on many levels.

We need to see what is for what it is.

And let go.

It is never going to be alright.

So we can stop trying, then.

***

The other thing I wanted to mention regarding your FOOs condemnation is that this stuff they do isn't normal. There are families out there who do not condemn their own. And there are families out there who trip over each other's feet condemning their own.

Which is a pretty good description of enmeshment, when you think about it.

:O)

Your FOO isn't a normal family, SWOT. Like me, like all of us from dysfunctional families I suppose, we need to learn to expect that they are going to do what they do. Betray, demean, "prove" meaningless things from the past to justify a current position ~ pretty basically, live in the past, the toxic past.

I wish it could be different for us, but it isn't. Even when we are interacting with our FOOs, the games being played beneath the surface of it are toxic and can go no other direction.

It is what it is.

Radical acceptance.

After what we have all been through with our children, after all we have had to learn to survive what is happening to them, taking an honest look at our families of origin is not really very difficult after all.

I wonder why we felt so responsible? An effort to pretend to a control that did not exist, I suppose. I never had that family I am missing. So...when I feel sad about it, I could interpret those feelings as a time to cherish myself for all that I never had.

It is an easy thing to go back and review the bad things that did happen. It is another kind of shame entirely to stand outside the window, watching and knowing others were valued and had their dinner around the table, the candlelight reflected on their faces, their happy, loving faces.

Okay. Now we know where the dinner table imagery comes from, and we know what it means. Time for self-cherishing. Time for expressing wonder that I could come through what I have come through, and still wish for something so wonderful for myself.

That's human.

Beautiful core.

:O)

I think Copa posted something about looking through the window at people loving one another and feeling so much an outsider, too.

It must be a common theme among those of us who survived our abusive childhoods intact.

Good, good, good for us.

Loving, even if we only imagine what it must be like, is so much the better choice than hatred.



Maybe that is why I have that thing going on about white candles, too.







It's hard to break away, hard to believe our experiences could have been meaningless ~ in the sense that there is no point, no purpose, no wisdom to be gleaned.

I always believed my mother could not help it ~ that she would have chosen something different if she could have.

That was never true either.

So isn't that something.

Nothing personal, just like we have always read about abuse.

Maybe that is a lesson we can take away from this, too. That once we identify a behavior (even in ourselves) as abusive, there is no other point. There is nothing to understand.

Abusers abuse because they are abusers.



So here is me, putting all this away.

Thanks, everyone. A special thank you to you, SWOT.

We did good.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

So, this is private chain of consciousness stuff that enabled me to touch another level. I posted it in case it will help any of the others of us.

That is one of the things that bugged me half to death about my own kids. They had all those things I needed and did what they did, anyway.

Grrr...

There has to be some connection between what I wanted for my kids and FOO toxicity.

For that, I could hate them.

It was an interesting thing that as I read this back, I got it that it could be interpreted to mean I could hate my kids for all they did not provide for me in the way of reputation and reparation of shame. I left it as it was, because I want to explore that a little bit.

Just in case.

I was writing (I think I was writing) about allowing hatred for FOO.

So...that is where the shame in the misery of what happened to our family, to the one D H and I created ~ that is the genesis of that shame response. Those stupid FOO issues.

There should be no shame response to something so tragic as what has happened to our kids.

Yet, I have been ashamed. I have been angry and defensive and broken and more. (Once I got over the shock, I mean.) I spent alot of those early times when either child was doing what they were doing in shock city.

Then, I went to work the next day.

Just as I had gone to school the next day after the things my defective mother would arrange for herself. I have posted that I believed she had not been able to help herself ~ that she snapped or something, and then did what she did.

But that wasn't true.

She had to know what she was going to do ahead of time or it would have happened in public, too.

From anticipatory threat to fruition, hours and hours of it, really. She had to know what she was going to do, because we all certainly did. I can remember the taste of that. Like an adrenalin rush. Probably fight or flight preparation.

Isn't that something.

You were right, Copa. It is a whole other thing to be howled awake and abused. I was trying to think what I did, after. Did I go to sleep? I hope so. Children are resilient, so they say.

I hope I went back to sleep, and I hope I slept well, like the Buddha.

Life is strangely impersonal. Things unfold as they will. The only thing that matters is how I responded.

And I responded well.

There is a book. (The Jesus Incident by Frank Herbert ~ yep, science fiction.) In it, the heroine is drugged and tortured by the powers that be to guarantee that she will never rebel. They want to mark and break and frighten, not just her, but everyone who works for them.

Everyone goes through The Scream Room.

Part of the horror of The Scream Room is what the person being tested does, willingly or under duress, to those who are hurting her, and to those who are innocent. A film is made of each person's performance, so the person can never forget that someone else knows things about them that even they did not know about themselves. The theme for this character is: "I have to know. What did I do in The Scream Room."

And so, she regains her integrity.

Because she did not hurt anyone else.

Though she was hurt, she did not hurt others as she had been hurt.

I think that is what those of us abused as children need to know, too.

We need to know what we did in the Scream Room. Until we do know, we label ourselves coward and fraud and inept and out of control. We have that superiority/inferiority thing going on.

We have external locus of control.

Like the freaking abusers know what is better for us than we do.

For heaven's sake! I never thought about it that way before. That is what that is all about. Of course the freaking abuser would move the locus of control out of the core of us or we would have killed them in their sleep.

I would have.

Okay, so I am being a little bit of a bigshot, here.

***

I was in FOO group therapy. One of the women's (we all were women)
abusers snapped a Polaroid of her after he was done. She lived in horror that it would somehow be found, that it still existed somewhere. She described herself in the picture in the most awful terms.

The therapist told her that whatever she thought the picture displayed, what it would really show was a mistreated little girl.

The shame was on the abuser.

But the grown woman could never recover from the shame of knowing her abuser ~ dead and gone by that time ~ had been able to take that picture out any time he wanted, humiliating her, naming her what he made her into, over and over again.

That is how abusers think.

So...isn't that something.

We were probably the only people ever to take them seriously. And even us, once we get the hell away from them, remember, buried beneath the shame they sealed everything beneath, that they are really, really defective people.

That is the secret we know.

Probably that is why they hate us, now.

Because whether anyone else in our dysfunctional little families ever got it or not...we did.

And that is what is saving us, now.

Demanding to know what we did in the Scream Room. Refusing to accept that the movie is shaming on their say so. Demanding to know, whatever it costs us to learn who we are.

And learning it is the abuser who is the defective one.

Well, isn't that something.

Cedar

So anyway, about whether I meant I could hate my kids for shaming me. Looks like I really did mean FOO.

So, that's good, then.

:O)