Shunning is such a hurt filled thing. I have been shunned twice that I know of. I had posted before that there may have been other times when I may not have recognized the shunning for what it was. This time, all told, has been in the works for seven years, since my father's death.
So this has been a progressive shunning.
Oh how freaking strange these people are.
Can it really be true they don't even miss me?!?
Well, how do you like that.
***
For someone to write (on beautiful stationery) labeling the family as nasty and cutting themselves off for that reason ~ woot! I will think about doing this.
I would love it.
But that is the point. I would not do that. Neither would any of you. When presented with the nasty ugliness of the behaviors in our families of origins, each of us tried harder. No one was willing to make that family dinner I always used to post about; I made it.
Multiple times.
And my sister would have her children march around the table waving flags and singing patriotic songs until everyone was ready to throw up and go home. Or would have her grand place her hand over her heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance over and over again at the top of her lungs.
And then, demonstrate same in sign language.
And then, take out cards with the President's faces on them and have the three year old name the Presidents.
I kid you not.
And it was just all so unusual but not really offensive ~ except that it was. Little kids are cute. Performing to the point of glass-eyed boredom prevents sincere interaction with the children, and prevents interaction between the adults.
That is why she did it, every single time.
The question becomes why she did not just stay home. Or, host her own dinner. (Here is something else that p***** me off, you guys: My sister invariably says, now that she is married and has money and when she brings her husband and cannot make him recite the Pledge and then, repeat same in sign language because these things just do not have the same effect when it is an overweight male performing as they do when the performers are little girls. (Though she does tell him, in private, to just sit there on the sofa.) My sister invariably says to one and all, how hard D H and I are working to prepare and serve the family dinner.
She says this multiple times, and bless our hearts and etc.
And then? She says: "You worked so hard to make this dinner! We would have had it catered."
Arghhh! And I am just getting mad about that now.
She says that, alot. Oh, how hard you are working. Her husband wanted to help D H with the barbecue one time. D H said no. I always thought he was so rude and would get mad at D H.
But he was right.
Huh.
He could see it. I could not.
***
And I mean, that is fine. I am just saying it p***** me off.
It feels like getting bonged with a sock full of rice from behind a wall by someone who is laughing and so, you think it is a joke in poor taste but you laugh anyway.
Until they hurt your child.
***
If no one was willing to believe in any of us, I believed. If those poops acted badly, which they invariably did, I didn't see it.
Roar.
Each of us drove ourselves nuts questioning ourselves about why our sisters or mothers seemed so weirdly outside the bounds and why our brothers behaved like Mafia hitmen. (Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.)
And that is just what they are like, you guys. Think about it.)
But we never once blamed them, until we were healthy enough ourselves to see the pointless ugliness in what they were doing. That key word, pointless, is the operative phrase. (No. The operative phrase here is: Healthy enough. :O) What have these people gained by their stupidly hurtful acts? Nothing. It drives me batty. I just cannot figure out the win and there has to be one. There has to be some reason why this is the preferred modus operandi. Here is a secret: (It might not be a true secret but I suspect that it is.) The reason they unite, the mother and the sister, has to do with fear of us and what we know and who we are. I could be wrong about that of course, but nothing else makes sense.
Maybe, that is why we are insufferable to them.
***
I really am still so angry over this. I will always be angry about it. I will always miss them and wish for them in my life. (Just not the way they really are, of course.) There are times I am so disgusted by their behaviors. (Like when I actually force myself to see what they are actually doing.) We can label it all kinds of psychiatric things and say they aren't really responsible and blah, blah ~ but at bottom, it is all the same: A series of moral slippages.
Shunning is another incidence of the stupidly pointless uglinesses running our family genetic lines ~ running my line, for sure.
Given what I have learned here on FOO Chronicles, this is what I now think about shunning: It takes a certain personality type to instigate a shun. To perpetuate a shun ~ to see the hurt to someone and know you could stop it and choose instead to keep hurting them (
and I just cannot believe they don't miss me ~ WTF?!?)
*** Okay. So, Copa, you will know the answer to this one: Is this where projection comes in? Where villainy happens? And where alliance then occurs? Is that the dynamic of shunning? Does it become a tighter and tighter thing, do the lies told become the only truths known? Huh. No wonder they don't miss me, those poops. ***
that requires a certain kind of mindset, too. We can talk about survival of the fittest and genetic heritage all we like...those being shunned
are the fittest. We lived through what we lived through and we did what we could for the others while we could do it and then we moved on. We did not become religious fanatics. We tended not to become those who believe they are secretly destined to save the world. We just lived our lives and did the best we knew.
We did well.
I make great pastry, you guys. I loved my work, and was good at it. I love my life now, though there is pain over the kids and my stupidly ugly, amoral family of origin.
Whatever.
Then our kids fell.
Even then, we did not give up or give in or stop trying or stop trying to learn. We found this site. We work here very hard to set ourselves straight.
And we are doing it.
***
We posted here before about Jacob and being sold into slavery
with the collusion of the father. What we didn't talk too much about was that, to Jacob, and according to the father too, the father still had authority over Jacob even after Jacob, no longer a slave, was in fact a wealthy, powerful man. The father would not have spoken to the recovered Jacob regarding vengeance on his brothers had the father not believed himself in a position of authority over Jacob even after the series of moral slippages resulting in Jacob's being sold into slavery by his own family.
I am going to find that thread and bring it back.
That is exactly our position.
Sold into slavery, the child kept in the dungeon at the center of Ozymandis. I finally remembered the title of that story: Those Who Leave Ozymandis.
We leave.
That is the difference.
Cedar
Okay. So, I couldn't find the story. I did find this poem.
Ozymandias
I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which still survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Okay. Here it is: Those Who Leave Omelas. No wonder I could never find it. I had the title confused with the Shelly piece. In any event, there are those who leave Omelas: We do.
We leave Omelas; we refuse to barter by its systems and we probably always did refuse.
That is the difference.
Moral slippage.
These people (our families of origin) know better than to do what they are doing. Of course they do. A series of moral choices: the banality of evil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas
***
I am seeing everything so differently, now. Anger before was tinged with surprise. That was when we started; when I decided to have a look at what happened. Remember needing witness to see what happened to me, and to all of us, through ethical eyes ~ through eyes that would know that what was happening was wrong? I am seeing everything about them through those same, ethical eyes. This business of shunning. Once we find our people (that would be you guys, for me) and then, find ourselves able to stand up again ~ this whole shunning business is morally wrong. From its inception. From the first "What would Cedar do?" to my mother finding it so funny and so interesting that there should be such intense jealousy between my sister and myself
over my mother to the final, unbelievable nastiness my sister did to my daughter ~ did, willfully did, to her own
niece.
***
Okay. So, I was rereading before posting like usual. I read the part about you guys being my people. I started thinking about who else was my people. I have alot of people who are actually my people. I think they don't think the most important or amusing thing about me is whether I am jealous of my sister over my mother. What a twisted presentation of a mindset!
I am seeing everything so differently, now.
When my mother first said that, about how funny it was to see the jealousy over her between my sister and myself? I thought I must be jealous. Why else would my own mother say such a thing unless it were true?
That is what I mean about seeing things differently.
My mother wanted that jealousy (and the hurt and anger and self defeat that lives beneath all jealousy) to be the thing that mattered, between my sister and myself.
Serenity and Copa, is this the same for you.
Leafy, you have posted that your mother requests that the siblings make amends in the time remaining. Are the underlying currents similar in your family of origin?
I just can hardly believe how differently I am interpreting the stupidly hurtful things my people do.
Is it in response to pain, or is this kind of behavior the simple, everyday, ho hum banality of evil.
A series of moral slippages. Like a series of descending musical notes, or the screen that fades to black.
Cedar
