Writing about what happens when family relationships are pulled apart by loyalty, influence, distance, silence, and competing narratives. The grief of loving people who are still alive, the confusion of being shut out, and the reality of trying to live inside a relationship you no longer get to participate in.
For only the briefest of moments, I considered feigning, here, as if I felt purely serene and celebratey about today, Thanksgiving. But why? For whom would I be posing? Recovery frees me from the urge to seek approval from the disapproving. If a person sits in judgement of my struggle and pain, or my sharing of it, that is not my concern. Those are the folks from whom I am unhooking and healing. Last night, I slept poorly and in the hours intended for…
"You are overreacting, out-of-control and crazy. You should just go along with this and be OK with it." When you are on the recieving end of this for your formative years and more, it makes you lose connection with your inner compass, costs you your faith in your ability to perceive and discern. You become lost, all that you lose makes you a loser. Worst of all, you lose, first trust in yourself, and then also trust for and of…
There was not a single moment with family or my husband type person- the person who went after all my shit--with endorsements by my female sibling (it literally makes me ill to refer to him as anything other than the father of my children), in which I experienced even a glimpse of pride or protection. I was neither safe from them nor with them--- Those decades were the Most Unsafe and shameful times. It was very dysregulating....not knowing how to…
I pull into the second of two gas pumps at Costco. I turn off my car, get out, and walk toward the pump just as the car at the first tank pulls away. The woman behind me in her shiny black Lexus sticks her head out the window and says—more command than request—“Please pull forward.” My car is already off. I’m already at the pump. So I say, “Sorry. No.” She grumbles, pulls up to Tank #1, gets out of…
