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?

front row seats

Another visualization from my friend's therapist, which I've fleshed out a bit. This one pertains to situations in which you choose to interact with your abuser (my friend has chosen NC in order to give herself a break, but knows that, due to current affairs in her family, she will be interacting with her mother in the near future). 

Imagine that your Nparent is running a video projector (I picture it as the old-timey silent-picture type). S/he plays movie after movie after movie over and over and over again, without cease. It's a 24/7 picture show. The projector is casting its images onto you. 

Tou reach for a screen and set it up between yourself and your parent. Now the images can no longer be projected onto you. Instead, they are cast onto the screen. The images on the screen have nothing to do with you. They are old movies, being shown again and again by the projectionist. 

While reflecting on this today, I thought, you may have been given complementary front-row tickets, but you don't have to go to the show if you don't want to!

ticket image found at Alpha Stamps
vitascope illustration from Who's Who of Victorian Cinema

hooks and suckers

A friend is going through her own ACON-ish situation right now, although in her case, her mother probably has borderline personality disorder. The two disorders are very similar, and my friend's family dynamics are startlingly similar to mine. For that reason, she has been talking to me a lot lately, because she knows that I've BTDT (been there, done that) as far as crazy mothers go. Hey, at least there's some benefit to a crazy family - you can support other people with crazy families and all of you can reassure each other that you're not all alone. Yay!

The other day she was talking about a therapist she visits, and shared a visualization that the therapist had described to her. Caution: not for the squeamish.

Imagine looking down at yourself and realizing that your body is covered with hooks and tentacles. These things didn't all latch onto you at once; they were attached to you one at a time, over many, many years. You didn't ask to have these hooks put into your flesh. You didn't put them into yourself.  The suckers clinging to your skin restrain you and prevent you from moving about comfortably.

Picture yourself removing them one at a time. You have to work slowly. Some of the hooks go quite deep and you carefully detach them while trying not to cause more harm. It takes a long time, but you finally pry every last sucker off of yourself, and you throw them all away. 

It's not the most perfect analogy, but I do think there's something to the idea of the things dysfunctional parents do to their children being like barbs that stay embedded in their skin, causing more harm the longer they stay attached. To think of their tentacles holding their children back. We ACONs must work slowly, gently to undo the years of harm.  Some of the hooks and suckers take longer to remove than others. Some come away easily, and some are quite painful to extract. Some have been inflicted more deeply than others - we may carry some like shrapnel, buried within us for the rest of our lives. We may have to heal around them if we can't excise them.

Going no-contact helped me tremendously in getting enough time without new hooks being thrown at me so that I could start to remove the hooks that were already there. I don't know if I'll ever be hook-and-sucker-free, but I do know that I've removed enough of them to move about much more easily. And if I ever have to be around that hook-slinging octopus ever again, I'll remember to wear armor and be ready to duck.

octopus illustration via The Graphics Fairy

fish hooks via Clip Art ETC

baggage ♥

May we all have our someone by our sides, physically or online!