50th birthday

If any friends are reading this- sorry for suddenly dropping off the radar, my mind has been in a whole other place apparently. 

It was my dad's 50th birthday today, my grandparents came and we had a relatively toxicity/fight free time, we watched some old baby videos my dad had stashed away and had cake. It was.. it was probably one of the few times I've found a get together to be fun or at least decent/neutral and not draining. Seeing little me on the screen made me think of how much she was going to have ahead of her, how much pain and little tragedies. I wished her good luck. It also made me rethink my time with my family, who I've been feeling  betrayed by recently in the aftermath of that big fight and the revelation that my family and grandparents have always hidden things from me. My parents seemed so loving in those videos. We all seemed so happy. I was such a hyper, smiley kid. It's hard for me to reconcile that with the somewhat neglectful image of my parents that I've held. 

To think of what has happened since then, I can only call it a series of tragedies.. maybe the tragedies started before I was born, maybe it was after. All I know is that my world was shattered at age 10, my parents lost and found many jobs, crashed cars, my aunt died. I slowly withdrew from my family. And my parents fought constantly, bitingly, often escalating into fights and threats of divorce. I hardly saw my grandparents and my cousins and other relatives even less, maybe once every couple years. My life was threatened, I developed an eating disorder and recovered from it, I felt profound fear and profound happiness and profound depression, and profound lonliness. I'm a different person now, but I still believe that an unhappy, wasted life lived in denial is a tragedy. But by that definition, I could argue that my entire family is a tragedy. Perhaps going generations back. Now that I've finally been deemed fit to know my own family history, it seems wretchedly sad. 

My grandmother is going senile these days. Her life was full of tragedies. Her husband comitted suicide. She labored day and night for years in poverty to send her daughters to college. Her oldest daughter defied her and the two were estranged for years until she died from cancer in her 40s, without telling anyone the severity of her condition. She's old now, but I know that she never let go. She's old, and bitter, so bitter, and anxious. And she's an abuser. 

My mom never knew friends or hobbies. After age 8, she only studied so she could make a better life for herself. Even now, work gives her life meaning. It makes her happy. Try as she might, she has trouble picking up hobbies. When her sister died, she didn't tell us anything and quietly mourned inside herself. She told me she would be strong, but I knew she "healed" entirely too fast. She is also an abuser. 

My dad seems like he spent his younger years having a lot of fun. All of the pictures of him feature lots of other people and a wide smile. After he met my mom, she and her mother abused him every day. He's old now, but he tries to make the best of it. I don't think he knows how to make decisions for himself. He just wants to make their marriage work, and from my perspective he constantly makes concessions and gives himself and his needs away for it. He's forced to laugh when being yelled at and berated, he sighs a lot and spends hours on his phone, and vaping, and holed up in his office. 

My grandfather was almost sent to fight in the war when he was 8. My grandmother lived in the countryside. I don't know much about their story. Nowadays he's the smart one who's kept his senses, but gets depressed about his age. My grandmother's a little doddly in the head but she's intensely caring (stereotypical grandmother telling you to wear a jacket, bringing us food). She gets bullied by the rest of the family, though, because she's slow and stubborn to pick things up. Even grandpa does it. Once she brought food for my dad while he was trying to leave, and he smacked it out of her hands and yelled at her. I could feel myself dying inside a little. I know how much caring she puts into the things she makes for us. I've even had to defend her once when the entire family ganged up on her for something stupid. 

I don't know much, can't tell much, hven't seen much of my family besides the stories of and the evidence of these tragedies... in my mind, it seems like my entire family is one intertwining net of them, and I'm the newest result of it. But I don't want my life to be a tragedy. But branching off that point, I'm then not sure what role I want my family to play in my life. 

I don't want to abandon them or cut them off. I can't deny that they raised me though innumerous pain and hardship, even knowing the pain they probably put me through. I don't want to dwell on that anymore. My mother and father are humans. Like anyone else. They want empathy and companionship, fear aging, worry about me leaving. When I get a bit older and more independent, we'll be equals. When they don't have hold over me any more, I can already see that our relationship will change.