alone

Another two years go by. I have such a love/hate relationship with the holiday season. Within my own little nuclear family, it's bliss. Christmas at home is wonderful. Not going anywhere is wonderful. The thoughtfulness of my children as they get more and more into gift-giving in our little family is heartwarming.Visiting with my husband's family, who live locally now, is mostly nice.

But.

I'm lonely.

Everywhere I turn, there are people celebrating with extended families. Cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. And I feel so lost.

There is no big extended family for me. I hate this. I chose it, and I stand by that choice, but this "best" choice still sucks. I want it all. I want the lovely Christmas with my children ANDalso the big hoopla of the extended family AND I want them to be awesome, kind, empathetic, healthy people, and to love me, and to love my kids, and for us to be happy.

That won't happen. Can't happen. But it doesn't stop me from wanting it.

It gets me going down that path of "did I make the right choice?" and "how bad would it be, anyway?"

Really, how bad would it be?

I try to remind myself that holidays with my "one big happy family" were never that happy. They involved marching orders from la madre, everybody held in her thrall, total denial of anybody's desires or comfort except for hers, siblings programmed to think of me as a bitch, ignoring anything I say while laughing at each other's stories, driving home heavy with disgruntlement and hurt. I was no less alone then. It only looked less alone, because I had the big family pictures to show for it. See? We're a happy family! Look at this multi-generational awesomeness!

It's like my favorite Vonnegut book comments: "no damn cat, no damn cradle." It was all an illusion.

My kids have five cousins, but only remember one or two of them. They've never even met one of them. I have no contact with my niece and nephews. I'm estranged from one brother and not at all close to two others. That sense of family ties, family tradition? It's all snarled up.

How do I rewrite my mind to accept that the five of us - me, my husband, our three sons - are enough? That this small, genuine celebration is better than the large, fake one? It's really nice not to go anywhere on Christmas, not to worry about competing inlaws.  I grew up with a big, big extended family. Quiet holidays with just us five plus my mother-in-law and father-in-law are so small. So...boring. How do I learn to accept this as normal and love it for what it is?

Do you know?

blurred lines

It's never simple.

I miss my family.

No, I miss the idea of family. Or the family that I thought I had. Or the family that we wanted to pretend we were.

I want my mommy. Well, not the one I have. The one I wish she could be.

My brothers are jerks. Well, sortof jerks. And I wish I were closer to them. Why would anybody want to be closer to people who are jerks? I long for the good old days. I'm not sure there ever were any good old days.

My sister is a miracle. She has empathy. She gets it. She sees it all. And yet she fears commitment. She doesn't want children. She worries she would mess them up because she tends toward anxiety and depression and we had no good models for how to handle that shit or how to be a good mother. She doesn't realize that the fact that she even thinks about that at all is exactly what would save her children.

I wonder who my brothers and sisters would be if not for my mother. And my father.

I miss my dad. I love him but I don't tell him that. I don't love my mom. At least, I don't think I do. I don't speak to either of them, but really, I let my dad off the hook because I consider him a victim, too. Or did until he spat ugliness at me that sounded like a script written by her. I let him off because he's weak. She preyed upon him. He depends upon her love. She privately scorns him. I feel sorry for him. He has self-esteem issues. He has mommy issues.

But I don't have any problem with my grandmother, his mother. Who must have been a monster like my mother in order to produce a son so needy. Right? I never saw her that way, though.

Not like I see my mother. I don't love my mother. I don't like my mother. I wish I didn't look like my mother. I feel revulsion toward her for the way she treats people. But isn't she a victim, too? Isn't she the product of genetics and a narcissistic father and a weak mother and bad luck? Is she any more able to control who she is and what she does than my father is? Both are broken people. Each is dependent upon the other to keep afloat. He needs her. She needs him. Why am I willing to absolve the passive parent but not the actively aggressive one? It took both of them to create a dysfunctional family.

Is the enabling parent less harmful? More harmful? Equally harmful? Is there any way to tell?

I wonder if there is an alternate timeline out there, one in which my dad never meets my mom. One in which he falls in love with a less poisonous woman. Would his wounds still have prevented him from finding a healthy mate? Would some lovely young woman from a functional family have found him? Is there another universe in which he marries a woman who helps him to grow and heal and become emotionally whole?

I will never know. I will never know. This is all I was given. This is all I get.

I miss something I do not want. I want something that will never exist. There is no happy ending, only a stalemate. Pick the life that sucks the least.

It is never simple.

mad

I'm pissed, and I'm not sleeping. 

My mother, my childhood, my extended family has been on my mind every day this month. I'm sure it's one part holiday-family-mindfuck, one part normal ACONness, and a bunch of other parts of other things all tossed in for good measure. 

Even while I feel happiness for making the choice to end contact with my mother and father, even while I revel in how good life is without the two of them and their shame parade, there has also been a bitterness brewing inside me. Something I learned tonight put a torch to the whole bitter pyre, and now I'm awake and seething about it.

The lovely message at the top of this post is the FUCK YOU that I never mailed to my mother. It festered in my head for many months, and finally I grabbed a sharpie and some paper and wrote them out. First they were simple line letters, then they became block letters, and then they grew curlicues. A fancy fuck you. Fuck you very nicely! Fuck you very much, y'all don't come back now, y'hear?

It made me smile, and I took the paper and stuck it in a journal. I later glued it in. When I'm feeling especially ticked off, I think of those embellished, bold, black letters and raise a middle finger to my FOO.  Tonight, in my ire, I scanned it and added a frame. It's a Formal Fuck You. I'm fantasizing about mailing it, or creating yard signs, or putting up a billboard, or hiring a skywriter. Yeah, a skywriter.

Tonight I'm feeling MAD. 

MAD that my mother won't leave my family alone.

MAD that my oldest brother said cruel things to me six months ago, things that were totally planted in his head by my fucking mother. MAD that he hasn't spoken to me since, even the one time we ended up in the same restaurant together. MAD about the way my mother played her children against each other, so that they have evil pictures in their heads of each other.

MAD that my mother cries her crocodile tears to whomever will listen, and MAD that they actually believe her. 

MAD about the times my sister-in-law has told me how sad she feels for my mom and my dad, who really do love me and miss me. MAD about how weakminded she must be to fall for this shit.

MAD that none of my siblings seem to remember the times when they were the black sheep.

MAD that in a huge extended family, I don't feel like I can trust anybody except maybe my sister. 

MAD that the habits I learned from my mother as a child make it so fucking difficult to be a patient, loving parent. MAD that I have to work so hard to do something that should come naturally.

MAD that she has the audacity to come onto my property. A little MAD that I didn't know she was there at the time, because I totally would have called the cops on her ass.

MAD about all the time and energy this emotional crap takes - time that could and should be spent on other things.

MAD that my lasting legacy from her is anxiety and depression, for which I take medication. MAD that the medication feels necessary for me to be a kind and engaged wife and mother.

MAD that she didn't deal with her own family shit, and instead handed it down to her kids.

MAD that I'm alone, the only one of her five kids who GETS IT, while the rest still do their adoring mommy-we-love-you-so-much routine.
MAD that this is SO UNFAIR.

And tonight, I'm MAD for one more reason. I'm MAD that she had the audacity to send my in-laws a Christmas card containing a woe-is-me letter. MAD that she's crying her sob story, "apparently I'm forbidden from seeing my grandchildren", to these people who ARE NOT HER PEOPLE. MAD that she is such an inappropriate bitch. MAD that she treats my children like her possessions. MAD that she would tell my in-laws to give my children a hug and kiss from her and tell them that she loves them. MAD MAD MAD.

And MAD that what I really want to do, send her a scathing letter letting her know that I'm fully aware of her manipulative bullshit and that I WILL NOT TOLERATE IT, is exactly the kind of thing I should not do. Do not feed the trolls. DO NOT ENGAGE.

So tonight, because I'm so full of MAD, and unable to vent my spleen all over the person who most deserves it, I'm spewing it here, instead:

BACK OFF, BITCH. My children do not belong to you. *I* do not belong to you. We are not objects, we are not playthings at your disposal. If your grandchildren meant ANYTHING to you as people, as human beings in their own right, you would know that anybody who harms me has NO PLACE in their lives. And if they meant anything to you, you would be working your ass off, night and day, to try to figure out where you went wrong in our relationship and FIX IT. You would not be courting the sympathies of people who are much more important in my life and my children's lives than they are in yours.

My kids are amazing people. I'm an amazing person. And YOU SUCK for not knowing it.

Stay off my lawn, stay away from my family, and STAY OUT OF MY LIFE.

And because maybe you didn't hear me the first time:

FUCK YOU