I visited one of my oldest friends and her husband the weekend before Christmas... it was such a good weekend; over far too quickly, naturally, and during the course of the weekend, we discussed some family issues of mine.
Pertaining to my mother. Who I love. But who I simply don't like sometimes.
And to all my loved ones near and far I say now, stop reading because this is supposed to be a place I can divest myself of every manner of thought and emotion, good or bad, and there may be content here that will not sit well. If you keep reading and there is an issue with anything I say, then I only ask that it isn't buried and not talked about as has been the way all too often.
To everyone else, this will ramble and may never be cohesive. The end.
So to begin... my grandparents, as I've blogged about, were my world... world... when I was young. Summers spent with them are pretty much the sole source of the majority of my happy childhood memories.
My gramma died of kidney failure in 1992. I was crushed. I stayed by her bed for the last three days of her life, giving her ice chips, wiping her brow, cleaning her whenever she soiled... I had a friend who said "Why did you do that? Why didn't you let the nurses care for her?"
Um. What? Why would I let a total stranger do that...? I did it because... well... because. Because what else WOULD I do.
It's what you do when you love another soul; I held her hand when she left this world, whispering words of love and devotion in her ear as I lay my head next to hers on her pillow...
And then I went into a clinical depression.
I was there when my best friend, Mama Lois, died of breast cancer at the age of 34 a few months later, too. Held her hand and her brother's hand hands as the last breath left her, and hugged him while sobbed. Broke my heart in a million pieces and pushed me deeper into the black hole.
But it's what you do.
And I digress...
My granddad died twenty plus years after my gramma. He remarried about a year after she died, a very nice lady he and my gramma had known, but he pined for my gramma and missed and mourned her until the day he died. They'd been married for over four decades.
My dad was - and this will sound all melodramatic but, in reality, it's just the facts... Jack - an absent father at best.
Consciously, it didn't bother me - he always sent THE greatest birthday gifts and he worked for the ATF and as a secret service agent under President Ford... what wasn't to love and wallow around in as a teen with not one shred of "cool" going for her when she moved to live with her dad in 1980 - but unconsciously I know I've based a lifetime of "please-love-me" choices on that fact and they've all been poor ones.
So. To see devoted love like my grandparents was a lesson. Did it set the bar too high? Perhaps. But to have them shower that same love on me my whole life?
Another lesson in how it's done.
To have one man in my life who was ALWAYS my supporter and loved me wholly until the day he died?
Again. A lesson.
And both reasons I absolutely believe in the power of forgiveness and all it encompasses.
It's beyond hard to forgive someone when they hurt you. Somehow I was blessed enough in my early 20's to learn I didn't want to go through my life discarding friends or family, cutting them from my life forever, unless they were truly and irrevocably unredeemable.
So far, my daughter's dad - despite plenty of people who have done plenty of TRULY awful things to me and mine, and even despite the fact that my own father was not someone I EVER recall seeing before the age of 15 when my mother shipped me off to live with him, is the only one I've never been able to truly forgive. And frankly, if he fell down on his knees and begged our daughter's forgiveness for being such a money-grubbing, tight ass, emotionless, unthinking, uncaring asshole to her her whole life (and then backed it up), I'd probably forgive him, too.
Because to me it's about awareness. Self-awareness of yourself, and your affect on the world around you... and if you are aware you have behaved badly and you are genuinely remorseful...
Well then, we have something to build on.
If you are unaware, or aware and stubborn or insincere about your mea culpa, piss off.
About a year after my younger brother was killed in a wreck a month after graduation and a month before his 18th birthday, my dad and I met for lunch and talked. He was remorseful. And, more than that, apologetic that he hadn't tried harder as I was growing up, acknowleging that as the adult it was his "job".
LOTTA bridge repair happened there, I assure you.
Navy apologized while saying he was sorry for him and how he couldn't say he was a good person or tried. Insincere. Self-centered. Self-involved. Nice words, but piss off.
So.
Now the question is... am I capable of letting go of a fluctuating dislike with my own mother and forgive her?
There are a lot of reasons I don't like her as a person sometimes. Most notably that she's controlling and derisive of her children, all of us well into our adulthoods, when things don't go precisely how she thinks they should or she wants them to. To the point that she will get pissed and then gives us the stiff-spine, silent treatment. When we were children, we pandered and ingratiated ourselves to try to curry a return of favor. As teens we rebelled. As adults, we see it for what it is and for what it's done to us in terms of our need to please others to our own detriment - at least I and one of my siblings has... the other I'm not sure about. Anyway, combine all that in her with what we now think could be manic depression or bi-polarism?
You've got one helluva scary childhood. Of course WE didn't know it wasn't normal. Scary was normal. I even found out as an adult that my step-dad was shocked and uncomfortable with her treatment of me when they were married (I was between the ages of roughly 7 and 15), hinting it was inappropriate and even abusive.
Anyway, the story we talked about when I visited my Richmond friends pertains to Mother and goes something like this... 9 years ago my mother accused my grandfather of molesting her when she was young. At the time of the accusation, he was 81, she was 59.
He was her step father. She never liked him. A fact that I didn't know until I was in my 20's with my first child. But she wouldn't tell me why. And it wasn't until over a decade later that I finally "figured it out".
And here's the caveat.
She is the sole person responsible for fostering the genuinely close, loving, devoted bonds I had with my grandparents. Both of them. Including during the 13 years after my grandmother's death and prior to her accusation of my granddad.
Now here's the thing. I know about all the science and research, but when it happens to you, you still can't wrap your head around it...
Why wasn't I molested?
Why would she let me be with him/them?
Why wouldn't she have protected me by keeping me away?
And after each of those questions is the echo "... if it's true?"
There's another layer to this story that adds to why she says she chose to finally "let the cat out of the bag"...
There was another Loved One in our world who made the same allegation after mother did. But when it was made, mother flatly said to me, "Oooh, you know Loved One, if you cut your finger, they cut off their arm."
Sound like someone telling a true story? Didn't to me. Took me aback.
But there it was - and shortly after that, my mother used Loved One's accusation as a spring-board of sorts to write a letter to my grandfather, and letters to his wife and HER children, saying that while she had kept her own molestation private all those years, Loved One's accusation was intolerable and therefore she had to bring it all out in the open and my granddad's wife and her family best be aware so he didn't molest any children in THAT family.
Now here's the thing.
I want to believe my mother. But I wanted to believe my grandfather, too.
So.
Over the last 9 years it has been the pink elephant in the room in my family.
Especially when she got angry at me for not "taking her side" as others in my family had.
And I respected that they did and I didn't blame them - I knew why they did and I could never question their stance. But they - at least as far as I know - never got angry with me for not joining in.
And the thing that pissed me off most and still sits like a giant marble stone on my chest?
She did what she's done my whole fucking life. She was pissed at me but wouldn't say a word. Wouldn't talk to me about it. Wouldn't discuss it. Wouldn't say "I'm mad and I'm hurt." and let me then respond," I know you are and I'm so very sorry.
And why, you might ask, would I NOT "take my mother's side"?
That's not simple to answer...
It's because she fostered such a close relationship for my granddad and me. It's because she never kept me from them. It's because she sent me to them for weeks at a time in summers, unattended. It's because after she found out he intended to cut her from his will, she started sending him Christmas cards. It's because when Loved One made the same accusation, she discounted it. It's because... I didn't want to take either side. Believe either person or disbelieve either person.
So what I'm left with is sometimes not liking my own mother. For putting me in this position, although that I can forgive/forget - it's really just a blip... more than that, for being angry with me that I didn't take a side after 40 years of my life with one reality. For being angry with me that I wouldn't turn my back on him.
That, Friends, is unattractive in anyone - but when it's your own mother...
Anyway... this has all been a process... as I said in another blog entry fromt his week... I've had a crushing weight on me and I was going to fine-tune my counseling... I thought fine-tuning with the shrink was in order but, frankly, 3 blogs in as many days has helped me mentally more than I ever would have imagined it might... and in my universe, voyages of self-discovery are primo.
No comments:
Post a Comment