Understanding the past and accepting it

I’ m doing a lot of thinking about the past. Trying to understand it , how it’s affected me and how I deal with situations now. There is too much anger over the past. I’ve totally isolated myself, there’s too much insecurity and complete lack of trust for 99% of the people around me. It’s time to understand all of it as best as I can so this is my goal and the subject of the entries I’ll be making.  

I woke up this morning thinking of one of the worst, life changing moments of my life and had an epiphany of how it’s had a lifelong affect on how I deal with the breakdown of trust and family relationships. There was this incident, or I should say a series of incidents at a family picnic when I was 26. In our family, we had multiple family reunions a year, at least one separate reunion for each parent’s side of the family. I always thought our family was close knit when we were growing up. I now realize that this was an illusion. Like all groups in our lives, these groups had their cliques and mean girls (and boys). The large majority of this side of my family are religious. I won’t name the religion because at this point in my life, religion means complete intolerance for anyone outside their chosen belief structure and anyone who commits sin against their beliefs. Enough said on that. At 19, I had a daughter out of wedlock. At that point, I sensed a shift in the family. I was damned no matter what my religious status was. I noticed this in my church too, with grandmother type ladies that thought I needed saving even though I was a college student and was not dating because my life was busy enough as it was. I’m sure they all thought things about me that were absolutely not the case. Anyway, these were the changing vibes I was getting about my extended family leading up to the day I distanced myself from all of them.

On that day, we showed up at the park. My daughter and I had our pet rabbit with us because she loved being outside and we often took her places when we would be outside. We had our picnic and I wandered around to talk with different family members. Conversations were a little uncomfortable but I’d kind of gotten used to this over the years since I had my daughter. Several people wanted to go rent canoes out on the lake and my mom and dad were going to take my daughter on the paddle boat rentals, so I went along. I had strapped the leash on my rabbit to my dad’s bike which was in the shade of a tree, made sure she had some cheerios and water and left for just over an hour to canoe with cousin’s. It would have been fun except the cousin I wound up with kept belittling me because we were slow going. I had never been in a canoe before, and I couldn’t understand what the big deal was since it was a learning experience for me. Needless to say, I was glad to get back on land and go back to the group. I checked on our rabbit when we got back, I noticed that the bowl of cheerios was empty and the water bowl was overturned. I looked around at the family, and another cousin of mine who had a toddler smirked and said her daughter had eaten the cheerios and ‘accidentally’ turned over the water bowl. I don’t know if any of you have had the experience of the world moving in and out of focus for what seems like a long time but is likely no more than 10 seconds, but it seemed like the very foundation of my world was shifting. These were not the only incidence of rudeness or a complete lack of basic consideration by a long shot. These weren’t even the only incidents at this so-called family function. These were the last straw though and I was not about to just sit back and laugh it off. So, I flat out went off on them for picking on a helpless animal and what the hell was wrong with all of them…. And they laughed at me. I started packing up my dishes, my rabbit and my daughter’s stuff and started leaving and as I walked by my grandma, she said, ‘Don’t be a titty baby Gwen’. That was it and the point where I decided I didn’t want anything to do with any of them. I never went to another family reunion, and I never really talked to my Mother’s mother again before she passed away. I wish it hadn’t been that way because, of all my cousin’s and my sister, I was the closest to her of all of them. I was never comfortable around any of my uncles or their wives, especially after this incident and I never had a close relationship with my cousins. We lived over an hour apart and my Mother’s side of the family always left it up to us to travel to see them if we wanted to.

I realized this morning that this was the point in my life where I decided I could remove toxic family members from my life. I had never thought that was an option leading up to that day, and I never felt good about it afterward. I had bought into the whole idea that family was sacred. Now I know that that is not the case. Not when they treat you as less than them. Family is force. They make up all these reasons why you have to stick by them because they’re blood, even when they treat you like crap. Not true. Getting off the subject with that little rant. This morning, I realized that this is the point in my life when I actually started cutting toxic people from my life. I’ve never done it easily or without multiple serious reasons being the breaking point. Now in my 50’s, I wonder a lot of things. I sit and think about those days and little things that didn’t occur to me back then that hit me different now. Their willingness to think so poorly of me, situations in my life that an outsider could misconstrue. With the cousin who let her toddler (if that was true) mess with my rabbits food and water…. About a year before, I had babysat her kids while she and her husband went out to dinner. They told me that I could leave her in her carrier, so I told them that was fine. I was going to be doing laundry so she and I could hang out on the floor together. And my daughter had her best friend spending the night, so her son had some kids to play with. So at this point I want to say that my daughter’s best friend (exact same age as her)  had an alcoholic mother named Lisa. They lived upstairs from us, and this is the main reason why I had her over all the time. During the course of the evening, Lisa wandered down to my apartment, beer in hand, to talk for a bit. She had to go back upstairs for what ever reason and left the empty beer can on my end table. It was there when my cousin came to pick up her children. She never said anything, and I didn’t think anything of it because this is an everyday occurrence when you’re dealing with an alcoholic in your life. It amazes me that I even remember this was part of that night and that it didn’t occur to me sooner. My guess is that this was her misconception and the reason she was such an asshole to me from that point on. So many little things that could have been resolved with communication. I don’t regret having distanced myself from these people. Only that it became necessary because they thought they have the right to play judge over my life. Not their job. Not their right.