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Last year I was sad that husband didn’t call or text at all. I’d moved out with the possibility of returning should he get help. He didn’t once ask me to come home.
This year I think it’s fears and emotions flooding from all the birthdays I spent with him. Every year I had someone I thought was on my side as I faced my parents on my birthday. The hurt that they don’t acknowledge and won’t discuss anything close to brothers abuse, that they even (until recently) ask me to talk to him, is real. It’s huge. It’s hard. And I don’t want to cut them out of my life but I don’t want to see them either. Not today. Except I agreed to see them today. We are having dinner. I had a great weekend making cupcakes and playing with the kiddos. And I helped a friend with something. And now this truth that hurts. I know. I have never been heard by them. And I don’t have people in my life to hear at all. I don’t have people who can hug me so tight that I feel safe. Even the facad or the exchange of abuse for those hugs is better than this loneliness. But this example of not being abused is better for my kids. If I can figure out how to be okay before they’re old enough to notice that I’m not or I’m old enough that I’m too exhausted to pretend. I think that my be what happened to my mom. I don’t have anything hopeful to say.
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Good Thursday to you!I've been watching a really long trial on Youtube these last couple of nights and will finish tomorrowHopefully I'll be in the land of nod soon and I hope my peeps are having sweet dreams followed by a great daySending hugs...xo
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Hey all, i know its been quite awhile since i posted on here. Its been a summer all right. Its been something else........... You know how they say not to open the can of worms? Well a few months ago i decided to find out what my due date would have been for my first baby, the one conceived by r***. My baby would have been due on March 4th of 2006. They would be 20 years old. I was R**** on June...
I'll just leave it with...I get it. I never had a real relationship with either of my parents. The rejections...still sometimes stings.
I'm really glad that you had the time with the cupcakes. Really, really glad.
Happy Birthday
I know how it feels. Im estrenged from family for several months now. My birthday past. Nothing came from any of them. There's was no celebration. No hugs, no cake.
Its so hard to pretend that everything is ok. I hope that one day your pain can be relieved.
Hugs
Those six months were spent in therapy doing a lot of soul searching as to what to commit to. I could commit recovery for my future that would disrupt our relationship. I could commit to stability for them at the sacrifice of future recovery. It was the individual or the group for me.
This was the second time around facing this issue for me and my family. I had reconciled with them once before after 8 years apart. However, the reconciliation was not made on common ground. It required my submission so the family system would remain intact and unchanged. That would have been fine if it had been a healthy family system, but it wasn't--not for anybody, not for them, either. The domestic violence in our house wasn't just toward me. Yet they refused to address it. While I had been out of touch for 8 years, they had been punished for not addressing it by being fired by their local board of their 3,000 member megachurch, fired by their international missions board, and deported by the South American police.
After 30 years of a career in ministry as a family, their dysfunctional family dynamics had cost them everything, including their ministry. Still, they refused to change. Instead of seeking help like we do here at DS PTSD, my father had a nervous breakdown and went from speaking to 3,000 pwer week to making a living mowing lawns. My mother went to work in a nursing home. They moved into a trailer in rural North Carolina.
I did address our family dysfunction in a carefully worded goodbye letter it took me 6 months of weekly therapy to write. We've been on separate tracks now for 9 years. We were a codependent, enmeshed family without boundaries, the heart of the abuse problem in our family system, We were a family that cannibalized itself. It wasn't sustainable.
I had to learn self-nurture, then, and that meant I had to make my own holiday plans--Thanksgiving, Christmas, my birthday, That's why this July 1st on my birthday I gave myself the birthday present of a ticket to see the Rolling Stones in concert July 3rd.
I'm saying all of this because it seems really wise to me how you're looking at how ending the cycle of abuse is a good example for your future with your kids. It really is.
I hope your dinner with family goes well this evening, and that you don't have choose family or health like I did. Hopefully, you can have your cake and eat it too, your birthday cake on your birthday. Feliz cumpleanhos!