family

Absence

~ KJ ~ 8 Comments

My father’s service was last night. I did not attend.

I know that, in many people’s eyes, that makes me a horrible daughter. I’ve already heard it. But that’s okay. I did what was best for me. I made a decision that was in my own best interests, for once in my life.

What would going to a service do? My father is already dead. I know that. I don’t need to go there to confirm it. I don’t need to go there and talk to people and pretend that he was a great person, when he was not at all what he should have been. Other people can attend and mourn for who they knew him to be. I mourned for who I knew him to be long ago.

I could not go and see my mother. There would have been no avoiding it. While I may not be scared of her in the moment, I have younger parts that are still terrified of her. Why would I expose them to that? Why would I expose myself to that? It wouldn’t be fair for any of us. It is too much of a risk.

And honestly, I don’t trust my mother at all. I can’t say with any amount of certainty that she would not try to hurt me. It doesn’t matter that she said she wouldn’t do anything. The fact that people even had to ask her that question says a lot. She is predictably unpredictable.

I’ve made too much progress to throw that all into jeopardy for a few hours of faked grief. I am not grieving. I am not mourning. I’m not sad that he’s gone. I am relieved.

My absence doesn’t make me a horrible daughter. My absence doesn’t make me a bad person. My absence proves that I have grown enough to realize that I have choices.

 

Wishes don’t come true (The loss of my father)

~ KJ ~ 12 Comments

Last Thursday, I told my therapist about how I kept seeing my father in random strangers.

It turned into talking about all of the things I wanted in a father, but never got. My therapist mentioned something about my wish for a real father, and I told her that my wishes never mattered, because wishes don’t come true. In that moment, I thought about all of the wishes I made that never came true: my wish to be dead, my childhood wish for someone to help me, my wish for decent parents, my wish for the pain to stop, my wishes for my parents to die. All wishes left ungranted.

Just 24 hours after that therapy session, I received word that my father was in the hospital, on life support, dying. My immediate reaction was guilt. All of those times I wished for his death, now he’s going to die. This was all my fault. I shouldn’t have wished for him to die. I shouldn’t have complained that my wishes never come true.

I didn’t know how to feel. Sadness, anger, relief, guilt, fear…they were all running through my head. 

My father had been sick for nearly a decade, but he seemed to go on forever. But this was it. His heart stopped and he wasn’t coming back from it. He passed away Monday night, July 4th, 2016.

When I found out he had passed away, I didn’t even cry. I just…went on with life. I went to sleep, woke up and went to work. I had moments of inner confusion, but I wasn’t heartbroken. I wasn’t distraught. I was okay.

Perhaps I prepared myself for his death in the days before. I went to therapy Monday morning knowing that my father would be gone in the next few days. But in talking about it in session, I didn’t even cry then. I cried more on Father’s Day than I did on the day he died.

That’s because I already lost my father, well before he died. I have been grieving his loss for awhile now. I grieved it when I ran away. I grieved it when I wrote him that card just a few weeks ago.

I can’t help but wonder about the timing of all of this. I have been muddling through so many emotions and such concerning my father, especially during the last month. My view of my father has changed considerably. I used to view him as a fellow victim of my mother, but I learned that he made his own choices, and those choices included hurting his children. My mother didn’t force him to do that. She didn’t force him to help her destroy me. He had the option to be a good parent and he chose not to.

If I hadn’t realized who my father really was in these last several weeks, I would be grieving a fantasy right now. I would be grieving a person that never existed. I would be grieving the person I hoped my father was.

At first, I was angry at myself. I didn’t have a chance to confront my father. I never got any closure. In reality, I know I would have never confronted him anyway. But at least while he was alive, it was always a possibility I could hold on to. Now I’ve lost that. That is what I grieve the most.

Hold on, let go

~ KJ ~ 19 Comments

I’ve still been struggling with the reality that I am without a family. Which is weird, because on some level, I know I never had a family to begin with.

Did I have a mother? Sure. Half of my DNA comes from her. She gave birth to me. But that’s where her mother-ness ends.

Did I have a father? I guess. It’s questionable where I share his DNA, but he was a man who identified himself as my father, so I guess he was. He provided financially for the family. And that’s where his father-ness ends.

Was I a member of that family? No. I was an involuntary member of my mother’s cult. I was a pawn in my mother’s chess game. I was a servant to the almighty queen. But I was never a real part of that family.

Yet for some reason, I am still holding on to the emotional connection to that family. In the absence of my mother, I have taken on her criticisms and her hatred and continue to punish myself, just as she would do when she was there next to me.

I give in to the voice inside of me that tells me I am nothing without her. I listen as she tells me I am worthless, that I will never amount to anything, that I can’t do anything right. I believe her when she says I will never survive without her.

It doesn’t matter that she is no longer with me, because her voice is still inside of me, programmed into my brain, telling me all of the things I’ve heard all of my life, continuing to poison my thoughts, continuing to destroy my sense of self.

So why do I keep listening? Why do I keep holding on to something so toxic and so damaging? Because it’s all that remains of what I knew to be my family. That toxicity is all I have left. In a sick way, I keep my family alive by continuing to act on my mother’s toxic legacy.

I find comfort in familiarity. I find validation for my mother’s truths in my current life circumstances. When something doesn’t work out, when I’m struggling financially, when I can’t handle my life, I tell myself “See, my mother was right. I can’t live without her.”

I’m so afraid of losing that last connection. As damaging as it is, I keep holding on. I keep giving in.

My therapist showed me this meme in session today. She said it reminded her of me. At first, the person is holding on to the rope, as it tears and cuts into his hand. Then, as he starts to let go of the rope, his hand starts to get better. When he lets go completely, his hand is no longer being damaged by the rope at all; he is free from harm.

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I’m still holding on to that rope, so very tightly. I’m holding on to all the shit my mother programmed into me, even though it’s hurting me and causing me pain. My therapist is trying to pull me away from that rope, telling me I don’t need to hold on to that anymore, trying to stop the emotional bleeding I am putting myself through. But I pull away from her and instead keep holding on to the rope.

I need to let go.

Father’s Day

~ KJ ~ 12 Comments

I went to the card shop the other day to pick out a card for my father for Father’s Day. I did the same thing on Mother’s Day, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to do it again.

After a few minutes of reading the fronts of several cards, I picked up one that instantly made me cry. There were so many people around and I couldn’t stop crying, so I bolted out of the store empty-handed.

I sat with my thoughts outside for a bit, gathered up my strength, and went back into the store to buy that card.

Over the next two days, I wrote everything I had wanted to say to my father in that card. It was more difficult writing to him than it was to my mother. With my mother, I have consistently held the same feelings towards her for a long time. It’s been different for my father. For a long time, I held on to hope that he was better, and only recently did I lose that in him.

As I was writing, I went from feeling confusion, to sadness, to anger. I filled up the card until there was no space left to write. I didn’t read it over again; I was afraid of being emotionally overwhelmed. So I put the card back in its envelope and it sat in my backpack until therapy this morning.

I told my therapist about the card. She asked if it would be helpful to talk about it. I didn’t want to at first, because I didn’t want to go through the emotions again. I didn’t want to cry. But my therapist reassured me that crying was okay, and that crying can be helpful.

My therapist asked if there was a reason I chose that particular card. I read what it said on the cover: No matter how small you were – when Dad said, “I love you, kid,” you’d feel bigger than the sky. I started crying as I read it. They were tears of grief, the loss of something I never had. I never had that experience of feeling bigger than the sky. I never had that experience of a loving father. I wanted it so desperately; I wanted to be the kid on the cover of this card.

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After I composed myself, I read the card out loud.

Daddy,

I don’t know where I went wrong. I don’t know what I ever did for you not to love me. You never once said those words to me. You never once showed that you cared about me. I should have been daddy’s little girl, and instead I was your big mistake.

Why didn’t you protect me? Fathers are supposed to protect their children, and keep them from harm. But you didn’t. You threw me right into the fire, and left me to burn.

You knew what mom was doing and you did nothing to stop it. I understand that she is your wife, but I was your child. I didn’t have a say. I couldn’t stop her. But you could have, so many times you could have. You didn’t. You let her destroy my childhood, you let her hurt me day in and day out. And you helped her do it.

I grew up thinking that all feathers hit their children, that was just normal. I held on to hope that you were just doing what fathers do. Then I realized that’s not what being a father is, that’s not what loving your child is. Were you ever a father?

I know you worked hard, and maybe you didn’t know what she was doing while you were gone. But that’s just the lie that I told myself because I wanted to believe you had a shred of decency inside you somewhere. I think you knew everything. You knew all along. But I guess you just didn’t care about me enough for it to matter.

I can forgive you for hurting me with your fists. I can forgive you horrible things you told me my whole life. I can’t forgive you for not protecting me from my mother.

I was relieved when you got sick. As horrible as that sounds, you lost your strength to hurt me. I watched you slowly lose your strength, your heart, and your will to live. You wanted to give up because you couldn’t tolerate being in pain. Yet you made me live in pain every day of my life. You appeared strong all that time, but you were always weak. You preyed on your own children because they were the only ones weaker than you.

I watched you wither away. I stood aside as your wife abandoned you, as she put her own son in your place. You were no longer of use to her, so she put you off to the side and treated you like garbage…treated you the same way you both treated me. I thought for once you would see how it felt to be unwanted, to be told you were a burden, to be treated like you were worthless. But it didn’t seem to affect you at all.

Unlike my mother, I cared for you. I made sure you had what you needed. I made sure you had money because your wife continued to take everything from you and you were too weak to stand against her. I watched as she hit you in her fits of rage, exactly like you used to do to me. And you sat there and took it without fighting back. You always let her win.

I felt horrible leaving you behind. I didn’t know what was going to happen to you. And then I found out that you didn’t even care that I left. Your only concern was moving all of my stuff out so you could have my room. You replaced me, without a thought, you replaced me. I was just there taking up space, and now you had your space back. My existence didn’t matter to you. Now you don’t even speak of me. You go about your last days of life as if you didn’t have a daughter. You erased me.

But you know what? I can’t erase you. I can’t erase the shit you did to me. I can’t erase the memories. I can’t erase the fear you instilled in me. I can’t erase the feel of my head hitting the wall that night you broke me forever. The bruises are gone, but the marks you’ve left behind on my heart and mind will never fade away. I can’t erase any of that. I have to live with it all, every hour of every day.

You’re lucky you get to die soon. Your pain will end. You get it easy. I’m here, left on earth, to pick up the pieces of the shattered mess you and your wife left behind.

You were never a father. Fathers don’t do what you’ve done. You’re a weak man, and a pitiful excuse for a human being. I can’t love you anymore.

I had to stop twice while reading to wipe away the tears. By the time I finished reading, I completely broke down. It was the first time I had processed everything I was feeling all at once. And I just let it all out.

My father will never read my card, because I will never send it. My words will never matter to him; they never did before. But I will hold on to this, just as I have held on to the card I wrote to my mother last month. They are reminders of where I came from, and where I’ve ended up.

Cake

~ KJ ~ 11 Comments

I was going to bake a cake today, just to do something nice for myself and to detract from Father’s Day emotional turmoil.

I used to love baking. I could bake anything: brownies, cookies, pies, cupcakes. I was especially known for my pineapple upside-down cake. People would over me money just to bake things for them. I did it for free because I was more than satisfied just seeing other people happy. I was good at baking, and I was good at making people smile.

But as I started baking more, my mother became more angry. She’d yell at me for using up all of her electricity. She’d yell at me for using her oven (it wasn’t even hers – we rented). She’d yell at me for making the house hot. She’d yell at me for taking up space in the kitchen.

A task I once enjoyed now became another cause for punishment. I started baking less and less. People would ask me to bake them something and I would come up with excuses. I was afraid to anger my mother any more than my existence already had.

One day, against my what-should-have-been better judgment, I decided to bake a cake for a really good friend and coworker of mine. It was just one cake, I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I wouldn’t take up much space or get in anyone’s way. This should be just fine.

Then, as I was sitting at my corner of the table, putting the finishing touches of icing on the cake, my mother came in and started questioning me. I reluctantly told her who it was for. Big mistake.

You never do anything for me. You treat your coworkers better than your own mother. They don’t do anything for you. I gave you life and I get nothing! Not even a cake! It’s always about everyone else, never about your own family. I deserve better and I can’t even get a cake.

The cake ended up on the floor and I retreated to my room, crying. I was so ashamed walking into work the next day without the cake I had been so excited about making.

Just to please my mother, I started baking things for her, thinking it would earn me some sort of respect or a shred of kindness. But it didn’t. Baking wasn’t fun anymore. It didn’t give me any pleasure. My mother sucked all of the positive out of it, just as she had done with everything else in my life.

Today, as I stood in the baking aisle of the grocery store, staring at the baking supplies, I remembered that night my cake was ruined. I remembered the anger and rage my mother had. I remembered how scared I had become whenever I’d bake something. And I walked away from the aisle empty-handed.

She won today.

Family

~ KJ ~ 11 Comments

I was waiting outside at the bus stop earlier today when I saw my cousin walk by. My gut reaction was to scream out and run to her. Hey! Remember me? I’m your family!  But then I remembered her direct connection to my mother, and I started to panic and hide away.

I’m not even sure why I felt the need to hide. My cousin hasn’t seen me since I was a child, at least 15 years ago. She hasn’t changed much at all; I, on the other hand, look nothing like I did as a child. My eyes are the same, but that’s about it. She would have never recognized me. I probably would have scared her, shouting her name across the parking lot. I was a stranger to her.

As I sat there, processing the hurricane of emotions I just had in that short moment, the realization started to sink in again. I have no family. I felt the emptiness in my heart, and I started to cry. At the bus stop. With people around. Great.

I know that disconnecting from my family was the safest thing I could have ever done. I ran away from my parents, and in doing that, I also ran away from the rest of my family. I can’t risk my life connecting with anyone who is still connecting with my mother. As badly as I want to feel that family connection, I have to realize and absorb that is no longer possible.

What little family I did have left, I have had to disconnect from. Even though they were technically safe and disconnected from my mother, they were not emotionally safe for me. After enough repeated heartbreak and longing for love and support that was just met with frustration and hurt, I had to cut them away.

Now, I literally have no family. I am still grieving that loss. The wound is still fresh. It’s so hard, because no matter how many friends I have, they are not my family. I need family. I’m not sure what’s so wrong with me that I could never get that.

Now I’m like him

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

As I’m dealing with this throbbing headache (caused by my own doing), I keep wondering how my brother felt after his “incident”.

About 15 or so years ago, my brother had what I consider to be an emotional breakdown. He locked himself in the bathroom, crying uncontrollably and bashing his head against the wall for what seemed like hours.

I remember sitting in the living room, and for the first time, really seeing and understanding the pain my brother was in. The pain he could never verbalize, because he was never very good at verbalizing much anyway. The pain we were never allowed to show the world.

I was used to the pain. But up until that point, I assumed my brother just handled our torture in a different way. He never seemed bothered by it, at least not in very outward ways that I could recognize (keep in mind, I was just a young teenager at the time). But here he was, in very obvious pain.

Once he came out of the bathroom, bruised and bloody, life just continued as if the entire incident never happened. Move along now, nothing to see here. Looking back at it now, I see how fucking bizarre it was. Your son just locked himself up in the bathroom and gave himself significant head injuries and a concussion, and you go back to watching television and getting ready for dinner, like it was just a normal day.

I wish I knew how they explained the very obvious injuries to my brother’s face. I’m sure, whatever it was, it wasn’t the truth. That would tarnish my mother’s “mother-of-the-year” image. But how did no one wonder what the fuck was going on?

Of course now, I feel like I channeled that same pain when I continually banged my head yesterday. The only difference was that I chose the table instead of the wall, and I didn’t do it hard enough to bleed. The emotion behind it was surely the same. 

And now I’m telling myself that I’m just like him. Can’t say out loud what’s going on, so just bang the noise away. 

What a fucked up family.

Strings

~ KJ ~ 8 Comments

I feel like a marionette. Each string is a connection to my life, a piece of who I am. I need those strings to perform. I need those strings to live. But those strings are thin and weak; they started out that way. I started my life out with a disadvantage. 

But I continued to perform, I continued to live even with those weak strings. Now I’ve lost so many strings that all I can do is sit there and twitch a few limbs, waiting for that last string to break, the moment when I lose myself completely.

Some of my strings, I cut away myself. I had to. My parents were not supportive strings. They had to go. They were taking complete control over everything. The other strings couldn’t work right. I needed some freedom. 

In doing that, I weakened some of my other strings. The strings of people who I thought were there for me, they ended up snapping. They were only helping me alongside my parents’ strings. Once my parents’ strings were gone, so too were those others.

And then the strings of people in my old life, my friends and acquaintances. I feel them weakening as time goes on. Some of them have broken already. Some are splintering, seconds away from complete disconnection. I look up and see the damage, but there’s nothing I can do. So I have to watch as my strings continue to break away.

The strings of people I called my family – they are weakening, too; they were weak this whole time. I’m seeing now that those strings are not supporting me. They are there. I can see them. Everyone on the outside can see them. They appear to be strong, maybe a little colorful, but it’s all for show. They are not doing anything for me. They’re just there.

There’s one strong string. That is the string of my therapist. She’s holding me upright, even as all of the strings around me are snapping and breaking away.

But now that I’ve lost all of my other strings, all of my other resources, And I have nothing left to help her; I have nothing else left to help me.

Soon, that string will be cut from me. And I will have nothing. My supports will be gone, and nothing will be there to hold me up anymore. So I’ll fall to the ground, limp and lifeless.

I’ll no longer have a purpose.

They were wrong

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

“I want to hate him, but I can’t.”

Those words I spoke during my therapy session yesterday have continued to stick out in my mind.

I told my therapist what I had been struggling with in relating to my memory, in a very general way because I wanted to avoid a flashback. I don’t understand how someone could do that. I don’t understand how you can reject your own child.

I tried so hard to hold my feelings inside. Anger, hurt, and sadness were swirling around inside of my heart. I tried to hold in the tears, but that wasn’t working as well as I had liked. Even my therapist could tell I was trying to hold back, and told me it was okay to let it out.

My therapist asked what I would say to my father if I could talk to him right then. My mind started going into overdrive. So many questions and statements started running through my head, and without really thinking, the first thing I said was not even a question or a statement to my father. I said “I want to hate him, but I can’t.”

Despite all of the things he has done to me, and now the rejection I am very much aware of, I still have trouble hating him. I want to hate him. I think he more than deserves it. But somehow, despite being raised by two heartless people, I have a kind and compassionate heart. It’s what allowed me to bury my feelings and take care of my father when he got sick so many years ago. He didn’t deserve my care, to be honest. But he got it.

My therapist asked me again. I ran through a list of questions in my mind, quickly playing out what his responses would be. Then I realized that, it wouldn’t even matter what I asked him or what I said to him. “It doesn’t even matter, he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong.”

I thought I was right. Neither my mother nor my father would ever admit fault. I always just assumed that it was because they believed they never did anything wrong. That is how they (especially my mother) played it off.

But then my therapist asked what my father would say if I told him what he did to me. She asked, “Would he say there was nothing wrong with it, or would he say that it never happened?”

I didn’t even have to think for more than a second before I had my answer. “He’d say that it never happened.”

I grew up being told that people on the outside just wouldn’t understand, that’s why we couldn’t tell. But if that were really true, and nothing was wrong with what my parents did, then why would they deny it? If they really believed that they were right, they would say there was nothing wrong with it. They deny it because they know they were wrong.

All of a sudden, it started to make sense to me. I never thought of how contradictory their line of thinking was.

For so many years, I’ve been blaming myself for what happened. I have been carrying that guilt within my heart. Something must have been wrong with me, a child rejected by her own parents. The only reason that made sense to me was that something was inherently wrong with me. I was the wrong one.

Part of me still believes that. That is why it’s so difficult to work through shit in therapy. I hold a lot of shame because I still believe it was my fault. I need to stop carrying the guilt and the blame. I need to keep telling myself that they were wrong.

My father was wrong. My mother was wrong. They were wrong.

I was just a child, born to parents who didn’t deserve me. I was not wrong.

Who are you?

~ KJ ~ 9 Comments

Who are you?

A simple question. Just three words. Nine letters total. Yet, it is the hardest question I’ve ever had to answer.

I’ve been working on my graduate school applications. The hardest part has been the personal statement. Nearly every graduate school requires one, and the two I am applying to are no exception. It should be easy, right? I’m a good writer. I’m intelligent. This should be a piece of cake.

Except it’s not. Because they want to know who I am. And I don’t know who I am.

In the first 29 years of my life, I never had the opportunity to be me. Everything I was, was based on what my mother wanted for and of me. She decided where I went to school. She decided where I worked. She had control over the food. She had control over everything.

That is why I have so much trouble, even today, making any kind of decision. I’ve had to have other people order food for me because I couldn’t decide on what I should eat. I nearly had a breakdown at Dunkin Donuts yesterday. The woman asked if I wanted the doughnut with or without sprinkles, and I froze. She asked again, and I struggled to find words. I wanted to cry. Over sprinkles.

Even the most basic facets of a person’s identity are complicated for me. The only thing I can say for sure, 100% of the time, is that I am a human being. Everything else? Complicated. Am I a woman? Yes, I have the anatomy, I guess. But I can’t tell you how many times I have stood in front of the restrooms in a public place and had to remind myself which gender I was, because there are times when I’m not really sure what I am.

For many, family shapes who they are. I don’t have that. I have no connection to my parents, no connection to my brother. I have no knowledge of my mother’s side of the family at all. Half of my genetic contribution, and I know nothing about it. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Shit, I’m still holding out hope that I was adopted. The very little I knew about my birth was a lie; I found out when I applied for a social security card last year that my place of birth was not what my mother told me. Was anything the truth?

Maybe I wasn’t even born. Maybe I don’t exist at all. I don’t even know anymore. Did I ever know?

Most times I don’t feel myself, if I even knew what being myself would feel like. Is this me, or is it a part of me? I don’t know how to tell the difference. What is my name today? I don’t know that, either. I guess I’ll just answer to anything.

I’ve had an identity that was always based on other people. I was never me, I was always Lori’s daughter. I am feeling angry, this means I am my father. I am a woman, this means I am my mother. I have never been me.

In many ways, my identity was stolen from me. I was never allowed autonomy as a child. I was never allowed to make choices for myself. Every aspect of my life was chosen for me; everything was controlled by my mother. How am I supposed to know who I am now if I never had the chance to be anybody?