We have lost so much that is good and strengthening and kind, in our lives.
These will be good things for us to address now. Good, strengthening, kind things. Compassion and mercy for ourselves. Copa, especially for you, mercy. You are so hard on yourself, Copa.
I did not know you had waist length hair that you choose not to color. I like that about you. That has been my choice, too. Serenity, I love how you post about yourself and your life and the way you see what matters. Copa and I are getting there, too.
Joel Osteen was about "No excuses", this morning.
He told a story about a crippled man who lived beside a place where a healer would come periodically to heal those who presented themselves for healing. The crippled man could not walk. For thirty eight years, he kept trying to get to wherever the healer appeared, but he was too crippled to get there before the healer left. So, Jesus spotted him one day, whining away on his pallet about being crippled and never managing to get where he needed to be to heal because he was crippled. And the story goes that Jesus said: "Are you serious? If you don't want to live this way, then do something different." So, the man folded his pallet and crawled away to make something more of his life than waiting around for someone to heal him for thirty eight years.
And once he started crawling, he figured out how to walk.
So, he was healed the rest of the way.
Because it was never about whether he could walk.
Joel Osteen is better than me at this stuff, so the story as he told it was better, right? But he likened the crippled man to those of us depressed by rotten childhoods or trapped in any other kind of addiction to a thought pattern that told us we couldn't.
The crippled man's disorder was "a deep-seated, lingering disorder of thirty eight years."
Huh.
Joel Osteen told another story from the Christian Bible. This one about a brother sold into slavery by his own brothers. (Sound familiar, you two?) Then, the brothers accused him. And he was imprisoned for years and years for something he didn't do. In the end, his destiny was fulfilled and he became a king or inherited all the father's stuff or whatever it was. The point of the story was that in the end, the person was "vindicated, honored, filled with prestige, and was a man of influence".
Because he knew who he was. Somewhere underneath, he knew who he was, even while he was enslaved to them; even when he was imprisoned, by them.
So, I thought that was pretty interesting, too.
Oh. And Joel Osteen also said: "Beauty for ashes; double, for injustice."
He also said: You will beat the odds. None of this is a surprise. It's nobody's fault. Take the high road; move forward. (Okay. So, I did take the high road where my mom and my sister were concerned. But maybe, the higher road would have been to listen to "automaton" and believe myself, and stay true to my own truth instead of the one I thought they thought mattered.)
All I would have had to say is "Man, I am so tense and uncomfortable around you. Wish I could stay and listen Mom. I feel responsible to help you through this but man, I feel crummy that you are gobbling my time for me to listen to you hate my grandmother. I don't know what I thought we were going to do, but I do know this wasn't it."
Then, my mom would have said horrible things to me and thrown me out and I might never have seen her, again. Oh wait, that's what happened, anyway. Only in the meantime? They got to hurt my children, too.
Good thing they are as strong and courageous as they are.
My kids, not my FOO.
:O)
***
To name and taste the sting of the way we've been treated makes me very, very sad for myself. And for each of you, too. We have been able finally to bring ourselves back to life only because those we wish to love and be loved by are out of our lives.
Ours is a strange reality.
There must be a purpose in it we cannot see. Our obligation to our own lives then, is to heal and move strongly through them and not be afraid of endings or beginnings or anything but inattention.
We have lost so much, already.
Have devoted so much time to them, already.
As we have moved through this, and as I have finally come out of blaming and raging and telling such crummy, shaming secrets...I am sad. I love that we tried, all of us. You, Serenity and Copa, and me, but our sisters tried, too. (In their f**ed up, biatchy sister ways.)
:O)
When they come through it, they will also be sad, because a sister is a sister. I hope each of our sisters finds someone, like each of us has, to help her make sense of the hurt of all this. We have worked hard and been honest and we are coming through all of it.
Copa, beneath the bed is just fine. Is way better than in it. It was hard for you to go through that paperwork. You did it, and that makes me proud for you.
It is like when we joined the site. Over time, we realized our kids did love us. The bad things had to do with drug use or mental illness and never with hatred or failure, at all. Those thinking patterns are what we are changing, now. That willingness to believe the worst of ourselves, that penchant for taking responsibility, when the truth is that good and bad things happen to all of us.
We are not responsible for anything but to stay present; to stay flexible; to let that need for perfection fly off. Our mothers were wrong; may have been mentally ill. We survived physically, but have continued to live responsible for them lives.
Isn't that something.
Our sisters never hated us ~ personally, us ~ and neither did our mothers. If they hated, it is because they choose hate ~ and that's not for us to decide. Whatever the villain is here ~ mental illness or shattered self ~ we need to not enable those behaviors, not even in our thoughts.
Just like it was with our kids, we had to be healthier ourselves before we could stand the pain of detaching, not from our sisters or moms, but from the emotional chaos of our families of origin, altogether.
My mother does drive the destructive engine, here. She is still doing it, and she will to her dying day.
She beat her own children, kicked them and threatened to burn them; scared them half to death when their father was away in the night.
That wasn't an accident. One time would have been an accident. All the time? Is a choice.
Of course she would keep doing it! That is who she is. The question is less why she did that than it is how I ever believed she would change.
Of course she wouldn't change.
We continually are trying to find some way to excuse these predatory, abusive people. There is no excuse. They are who they are. We don't have to like it, and they don't care whether we do or not.
They don't care.
So we are free.
There is nothing more we have to do for or about them.
It is what it is. Time to move beyond them, time to incorporate and move beyond the selves we created with and for them.
I am so grateful to you both, Serenity and Copa.
We did it.
It's a self sustaining thing, now. We no longer have to search it out because we are no longer ashamed to be us. We are no longer ashamed of those true things that happened to us. We claim ourselves, now.
Generous, permeable, flexible.
Strong, fine lines.
***
Until we can get out from under the shame of it, we cannot just step away from the things that happened to us in our childhoods.
Not the guilt of it, which is what psychoanalysis addresses, but the shame of it, which is what we have been addressing, here.
Until we did claim ourselves, until we came to honor ourselves for surviving something so ugly in so beautifully strong a fashion, we could not help but believe the dynamic firing our FOO were valid things, and not the sicknesses they were. Until we blazed through this final part or it, we believed our sisters' treatment must be somehow valid because, though we felt protective or maternal feelings for them, they seemed to hate us. So, we've been listening to that same old hatred because we thought our moms were the only abusers in our FOO.
There were others.
I posted before that I don't remember much about my sister, what she wanted, what she was like as a little girl or an adolescent. True to the family filter, I did not like her or know her.
My sister has been driving a pretty fearsome vehicle, too.
Well, good for her.
I want her to make it out of this, too.
There is nothing between us. Contempt, dirtiness, resentment, fear. Best for us both that nothing more is required. I am glad she has my mom, am very happy she is taking good care of her.
We are estranged.
That is the truth of my family of origin.
We are estranged.
I am no longer a savior. A forgiver. A loyal confidante. I wish I could love them but the truth is I do not. There is no trust without respect. There is no love without trust.
I don't have to do anything when my mother dies. The time that matters is when she is alive. She hung up on me. She is the mother. She should have taken steps to commend herself to me despite what she did to me when I was little.
She knows full well what she is doing.
She chooses this.
I am tired of making excuses for her, or for my sister, or for myself. Or my brother. Whether my mom chooses hatred or denigration ~ whether she chooses to treat herself that way, even ~ that's on her. Whether my sister or brother choose the same, whether they see or do not see ~
that is on them. It's that we somehow believed ourselves responsible for the choices other people make to see however they want to ~ that is the crux of the issue, here.
They get to do whatever they want and take the consequences of their choices with open hearts.
We do not get to enable.
Whether they are sick, whether I think there is a better way for all of us, none of that matters. I know what I know. Finally, I know what I know and that is my truth. They don't have to like my truth, either.
So, we all are free.
This is what freedom looks and feels like. If I don't see my mom again
it is my choice to do so. D H says it is not my choice. That my mother hung up. That my sister cheats by pretending things are one way when in fact, she does not like me, either. They get to do that. They get to do whatever they want. I am not carrying the shame of their behaviors because they refuse to do what I want.
I don't want them.
That is why I went automaton.
These people are not anything like me.
Interacting with them made it impossible to ignore that they were not the fantasy family.
They don't have to be.
They get to do whatever they want. I have to stop pretending they really want something different than what they have so clearly told me, in thought and action, what it is they do want.
That includes my mom.
How could I not have seen this simple true thing.
Because I felt responsible for their happiness ~ but I wanted them happy as I saw happy. They are happy. Actually, so am I.
Shame.
That was the problem all along.
I can address that without them. That is what we are doing, here. Deciding whether we are so ashamed of ourselves, of who we are in our cores, that they can affect us ~ that they can change the wonder of our being alive in our own lives!
Well, for heaven's sake.
***
D H is right. However it was that he said it, about his mom and death being as natural a part of life as being born in the first place. I will accept that this is true for my mom, too. Death comes to each of us and it will come for us, too. Life is what happens, is all the wonderful things that happen, while we live. We need to be responsible to our lives. Let the other guys pick whatever they want.
***
Sadness is a good place to be with our thinking about our sisters.
And for me, with thinking about my mom.
Sadness indicates acceptance. That determination to "love us out of this" would never have been necessary in a family in which could have come back together.
Our families are never going to look any different than they ever did. They were never supportive or strengthening. They never will be.
Why doesn't matter.
Maybe it is working for my mom and my sister. I hope this is so. But I think it could not be so. None of us has a generous spirit, for the others. Not even me, though I like to think so.
The intention for us then, becomes how to accept and perceive and cherish ourselves and our lives, just the wonder of being alive at all, through generous filters where joy is the navigable star, and nothing else, at all. Joy implies integrity. Joy does not happen when we have cheated.
We haven't been cheating.
We have been requiring ourselves to do the right thing as we believed it to be. Making them fine luncheons, having them to our homes or going to theirs no matter how automaton we had to go to do those things.
Yay.
I read something this morning about someone who turned away from FOO. Suddenly, she was no longer a "savior". She was no longer the rational one, or the forgiving one, or the caring one.
Part of our healing is that we are not going to know who we are, anymore.
The savior/rational/forgiving/caring one does not post rotten things on the internet and decide to leave her toxic family as I have done. That was a big hurdle to cross, admitting what a nasty mess everything just kept turning into.
Yay, that we all did that.
Thank you both for listening, and for taking my pain and confusion seriously.
You have made all the difference for me.
***
Having named what we have named about our families, about our sisters, and about the living harm interacting with them does us, we could not unsee the things we have seen. It could be that our families of origin will change...but we sibs are in our sixties, now. If I were a more generous spirit, would I interpret the actions my sister has taken as her own coming into balance around her changed status since her marriage? (It could be that I did stay generous regarding both my mom and my sister, until daughter was hurt. Really, thinking about that now, thinking about the callousness in it, further devalues them, for me.
As I post here about my sister, I still don't know what I see, but the things I see, the pieces of the things as they come together, are forming a mosaic, too. Today, I am coming into balance around the understanding that my sister is functioning through filters that discolor. I have been functioning through filters that enhance or excuse or believe. Both of us operate through filters that eliminate clear perception.
I am going to stop doing that.
They get to see whatever they want.
I don't need to be wonderful or even, acceptable in their eyes.
That was the thing they could use to manipulate me.
I am done apologizing for myself. I am happily alive.
I don't have to like them either, and I don't. There is no trust without respect; there is no love without trust.
The person I need to respect is myself.
That's where it begins, and that is where we three (and those reading along with us) are going, next.
Thank you, Serenity and Copa.
:O)
Cedar
We are going to D H mom today, so I will not be online so much until tomorrow.
Take good care of yourselves. You matter. Know that I will be thinking about each of you, and wishing you well.
