Family matters - Getting the story straight

I have been working on my story trying to piece together a timeline of the events of my childhood where things made sense to me.  This week I was talking to my sister about that time in our lives and she added some interesting additions. This is the first time we have ever talked about my mother's death or really anything about our past together.

It was one of her late night calls and I ask her about when mama got sick. I had always heard that she was sick for two and half years but she said three and a half years. She told me that the doctors said they caught the cancer early and removed it all. It was colon cancer in the early 70's and we believed the doctors. She had a year of good health until it came back with a vengeance a year later. She also said she was with my mother when she got that news and she shrieked. This fact is disturbing my mother never showed her emotions. 

This change in my own timeline explains a lot of confusion I had about other events. I thought I was almost nine when she got sick instead of eight. Our trips in the summer and a trip to south Georgia just before her diagnoses didn't fit quite right. On that trip we all ate a ton of pecans and she got deathly sick and my Grandmother said it was because the pecans were green. Later I thought pecans gave you cancer.

It is so strange that we have never talked about this. I have tried over the years but I think she was in survival mode in her own life. Like me she compartmentalizes to survive and for the first time we are both at a point in our lives where we not just surviving. Her kids are grown and learning to survive on their own and she is accepting it. She has some time to look at the past and talk things through with me. 

I am four years younger and she has mostly dismissed me as her kid sister. She was older and wiser plus didn't want to hear how I was treated by our father and ultimately banished by choice from the family.  She had a rift too but decided to return so her own kids would have that extended family. I can respect that and I did try once to mend my own rift but doing this set me back years in my own recovery. 

I went back for my wedding after four years thinking I was adult and could deal with the indifference they had for me. My stepmother was just as angry and vindictive as ever and my father the most passive person on the planet did nothing. Today in my sister's eyes he was a god an all knowing wise man that was pleasant and loving. I loved him too but to me standing by silently while others are mistreated makes you just as guilty as the person doing the mistreating.

My sister spent the years of my mother's sickness hiding out in books. It was how she coped with the real life tragedy she was experiencing. Because of our faith we weren't allowed to even speak of the cancer winning and I am sure she knew better than me that it would end badly for us all. One of my mother's best friends died around the same time as her diagnosis so we knew what could happen. 

I was young enough to believe that God was going to heal her because Daddy told me he would.  I stayed busy and out of the way as much as possible. I wasn't close with my mother because I was a "willful child"and during that time it seemed people were happier when I was not around. I learned to entertain myself and keep my mouth shut. This was and is my coping strategy today. 

It is good to test the memories I have created in my mind over the years.  Working on the real timeline I have noticed that a lot things happened closer together than I remembered. It has also helped me to be more compassionate towards myself and others in my story. I was 21 and very naive when I returned home for my wedding. I wanted reconciliation  and a sense of family.  My sister said she tried to talk me out of having a wedding there but I thought it would heal something broken.

The wedding is really the only mistake in my life and I have made plenty that I wish I could undo. I was still a girl wanting her daddy back. When I was little we did everything together and when my parents were in separate cars I rode with Daddy and my sister rode with Mama. He was wildly patient with me and didn't seem to mind my millions of questions.  

Writing about my past is healing me in places that I didn't know needed healing. It is good to face it one last time and a bonus to get my sister in on it. 

Denial - Survival - Manipulation

I am happy to be off this weekend.  I am still in the purging mode at my house touching everything I own to make sure I still want to own it.  I came across the family pictures of mostly dead people now some I know and some I don't.  Because I lived in the same city as my Aunt and she was the last surviving sibling on my mother's side I got all the pictures. 

In my constant desire for order when I got the pictures originally I separated them by aunts and uncles and thought that I would put them together and send them off to the kids.  Now with time I don't really know where the kids are or whether anyone would care at this point. 

I also had one file for my grandmother.  I have been writing my story and her character is pretty prominent and a character she was.  By necessity she was one of the most manipulative people you would ever encounter.  Her husband was killed in a sawmill accident when she was 30 leaving her alone with nine kids to support.

Under the circumstances my grandmother became the most resourceful person you can imagine.  She never remarried because she said "I don't want another man disciplining my children."  She was totally immersed in the the Pentecost even though she was raised Baptist. She never joined the church because they wanted her to be re-baptized and she that the first baptism was in the name of the same Jesus so she refused.  Even though the church gave her a piece of land and the materials to build her own house and she did of course.

My grandmother built a very thick wall of denial that rarely was penetrated.  She had her own version of everything.  She was very opinionated about a lot of things and didn't readily accept new people in her inner circle.  She kept  most people in that second ring in case she needed something from them.  She especially like strangers and they loved her because they were the easiest to maneuver and she hadn't exhausted them the way she did her family.

When my mother was alive grandmother would plan her own birthday party and invite all kinds of people. She had this one lady make her a fancy decorated cake every year as a gift.  At my grandmothers funeral the same woman came up to me and said "your grandmother would ask me to do things that even my own mother wouldn't ask me to do." I knew what she meant.

Once my grandmother invited everyone to her party she would call my mother and say "I got 20 people coming for a party at my house tomorrow."  knowing my mother would feel like she needed to make that work.  I felt for my parents because the wants of my grandmother dominated our household but no one stood up to her.  If you said anything she would cry and pout and then quote the Bible about disrespecting your elders. My mother was the youngest and took most of the heat.

I really couldn't understand why she got away with it. Every year we took a trip to visit my aunt in Michigan and up until the last minute she would say she wasn't going. Everyone would beg her to go but she would refuse then at midnight the night before she would call and say she was going.  Sometimes when we got to the house at 10 she would still be in bed not packed.

I can see my dad patiently sitting in the car or on my grandmothers porch while my mother helped her pack.  This was a regular routine.  She did this with her other son in law the day before she was to fly to my wedding and he left her. She manage to get a plane ticket and a neighbor to take her to the airport and got there before my aunt and uncle did.

She loved me almost as much as she loved my mother and after my mothers death and my dad remarried our visits were limited. My dad wouldn't have anything to do with my mother's family after that. Once my uncle stopped by and my dad was cleaning the gutters he never even came down from the ladder.  He loved my mother more than life and I think he only tolerated her family for her sake. Once she was gone he was done.  I don't think there was malice but he had moved on.

Looking at the pictures of my grandmother mostly on her birthday or Mothers Day always wearing a corsage and usually a hat I see a pretty happy person living a life that only existed in her mind. My mothers death did break denial for a few years.  She cried forever until she said God ask her to stop. 

When she was afraid or sad she wrote scriptures on random pieces of paper.  I have dozens of those writings that I saved.  Her faith was unbelievable and kept her going until the end.  She died at 85 in 1984 of bone cancer.  I can't say I remember too many specifics I was newly married living with active alcoholism and maintaining my own world of denial.   My plate was full and couldn't face the loss of the last person who I knew loved me for sure. 

It is weird how denial works it protects us from the things we can't bare to see for as long as it takes.  Why own up to a life that isn't living up to what we had hoped for? My own life of denial kept me in places far longer than I needed to be there because if I acknowledged the truth I thought it would kill me.

The problem with denial is that no one can reach you and you miss out on real connections. You can avoid immediate grief but it is still there underneath sucking the life of you so you don't feel anything.

I think the research I have been doing on my family has helped me to acknowledge a different reality than the story I have been telling myself. It got too real a couple of times and I to take a break.

I loved my grandmother and I understand the denial that she lived in most of the time.  The reality of her many losses was too much for her. She had to survive and take care of her family so in her mind she created her version of reality.  She loved me even though I called her out on her manipulating tactics and I can see eyes now behind those glasses with a little grin on her face.  She knew that knew.

Stubborness - Control - desire

I am making an effort to take care of myself this week.  First by going to the dentist and then visiting my counselor for a little check up after last months surge of emotions. In Al-Anon's Blueprint for progress this is some of the questions it ask you. When the last time you have been to the dentist? When is the last time you had physical?  Reading these questions I thought they were ridiculous.

At the time I hadn't really done either I was losing everything and just surviving.  This wasn't unusual for me I thought life was like that.  I thought survival was all you could hope for and the best you could do was brace yourself for the next trauma. Control every minute of every day to prevent something from ruining your life and making sure everything you loved was safe.

This was an exhausting way to live.  When things were going well I attributed it to all my great planning and maintenance but when it wasn't I blamed myself for dropping the ball.  I have spent a lot of my life retracing my steps to see what errors I might of made.  Even last month these kind of thoughts were the cause of my hurting.

Blaming myself for things not going the way I wanted them to somehow feeling like there is something about me that isn't enough. What doesn't work about this thought is it doesn't factor in that I haven't been alone in my relationships.  I can't control the ones I have loved by being so perfect that they would never leave me. People are working with there own inner dialogue and are the center of their own universe and decision are made that hurt other people.

I have made some of those decisions myself.  Unfortunately for me it was only when I was forced when the pain was so great I had to jump ship. I stayed too long every time because I couldn't choose what was best for myself and I didn't want to hurt anyone. I sat by the sidelines hoping things would magically work themselves out.

The other part of this is that I have always been a fighter.  My stubbornness got me through the worst times in my life.  I would dig in and wait out the storm and it worked. Back then I didn't have a choice to leave I wasn't an adult. Stubbornness a trait that served me as a child left me lingering in bad situations as an adult. It never occurred to me that I could make a decision for my own happiness.

It is still hard even today to not somehow blame myself for not trying hard enough or being good enough to be loved by the people of my past.  The difference is today I am no longer lost in these kinds of thoughts too long and I know that it isn't true and thinking this way hurts me.

I can see that my thinking and my desire to control the uncontrollable keeps me stuck. I am trying to solve the past in hopes of having things turn out differently.

I don't know why people do what they do and maybe some of it has to do with me but not all of it. Relationships and situations are always about timing and where everyone is at any given time. Everything can flow smoothly for a long time until someone or something changes and then a shift occurs,

My counselor said that my true desires are surfacing.  They have been put on the back burner simmering waiting for me to acknowledge that I have them. That because nothing else is demanding my attention and I am feeling settled that they are calling for my attention.  I am at a place of action instead of reaction.

This is totally true I am on the hunt for something or someone that inspires me.  I am ready to let go of the thoughts that have held me back and find something more inspiring to do with my life.

Can I really break this pattern of blame and regret? The rehashing of the past has been a constant companion a source of distraction from the boredom of ordinary life.  Maybe I need that wasted energy to focus on making life a little less ordinary and find some inspiration.

I think I am ready to move on once again.