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irrevocable
May. 10th, 2009 10:18 amIt's been a year, almost to the day. Mother's Day was on the 11th last year. It's peculiar to think about how different things are now. The scars on my arms are fading. I live in a different place. I haven't spoken to my mother in eleven months. Two months ago my sister was found guilty of assaulting me and given a sentence of three days in jail and a fine. I haven't spoken to a single family member in the past six months except my father.
This is so fraught and strange. I know friends and strangers will often say there is so little time, anger isn't worth it, etc, etc, infinite. Even Buckley seems forgiving of his vitriolic mother in his new memoir. That's fine. That's a choice. It isn't flippant and I don't wish to downplay the genuine feelings behind those sentiments. But it is a choice and it is not my choice.
I am choosing to no longer be the person who picks up all the pieces and puts the family back together. I have parented my family for more than a decade, through situations in which I desperately needed the assistance of a functioning adult and was left alone. I cared for my parents as their marriage unraveled and my sister became a psychotic meth addict, I called the police when my sister attacked my mother and when she threatened suicide. I drove my sister to the ER when she lied and said she was raped to cover up a weekend of runaway partying. I propped everyone up, long after I was out of the home. I've come to understand in the past year that my mother is deeply mentally troubled, and that my sister's amazing capacity for self delusional and denial is not a mystery but a direct and learned behavior from both my parents. While my father drinks to color the past in his own interpretation, my mother simply blocks and colors it to her liking. She denies I ever told her I was raped and that she refused to help me. She told people my sister never hit me, that there was no blood running down my arms.
I'm not going to be the person who tries to make it all better any more. I'm tired, and I'm done. I will make no effort to bridge this gap on my own. If my mother chooses to make some effort, she can do that and I will approach it cautiously. But there will be no more automatic forgiveness from me, and I won't do the hard work of carrying everyone's problems on my shoulders. I have my own life to worry about, and I'm both too old and too young to parent this family anymore.
Yesterday in the grocery store I was nervous, skirting around the displays of flowers and cookies and cakes. I was afraid the cashier would ask me about Mother's Day and I would blurt out something like "She's dead" to avoid the complex and tangled story of the truth. In the car I mulled it over, wondering why death was the first answer that came to my lips. The hollow ache of this past year has been the true and final death of my childhood, and something like the death of my mother for me. It's gone completely. That day was irrevocable - from the moment my mother told me I was a terrible person to driving home crying and bleeding to filing the police report in a little substation in the park.
This is so fraught and strange. I know friends and strangers will often say there is so little time, anger isn't worth it, etc, etc, infinite. Even Buckley seems forgiving of his vitriolic mother in his new memoir. That's fine. That's a choice. It isn't flippant and I don't wish to downplay the genuine feelings behind those sentiments. But it is a choice and it is not my choice.
I am choosing to no longer be the person who picks up all the pieces and puts the family back together. I have parented my family for more than a decade, through situations in which I desperately needed the assistance of a functioning adult and was left alone. I cared for my parents as their marriage unraveled and my sister became a psychotic meth addict, I called the police when my sister attacked my mother and when she threatened suicide. I drove my sister to the ER when she lied and said she was raped to cover up a weekend of runaway partying. I propped everyone up, long after I was out of the home. I've come to understand in the past year that my mother is deeply mentally troubled, and that my sister's amazing capacity for self delusional and denial is not a mystery but a direct and learned behavior from both my parents. While my father drinks to color the past in his own interpretation, my mother simply blocks and colors it to her liking. She denies I ever told her I was raped and that she refused to help me. She told people my sister never hit me, that there was no blood running down my arms.
I'm not going to be the person who tries to make it all better any more. I'm tired, and I'm done. I will make no effort to bridge this gap on my own. If my mother chooses to make some effort, she can do that and I will approach it cautiously. But there will be no more automatic forgiveness from me, and I won't do the hard work of carrying everyone's problems on my shoulders. I have my own life to worry about, and I'm both too old and too young to parent this family anymore.
Yesterday in the grocery store I was nervous, skirting around the displays of flowers and cookies and cakes. I was afraid the cashier would ask me about Mother's Day and I would blurt out something like "She's dead" to avoid the complex and tangled story of the truth. In the car I mulled it over, wondering why death was the first answer that came to my lips. The hollow ache of this past year has been the true and final death of my childhood, and something like the death of my mother for me. It's gone completely. That day was irrevocable - from the moment my mother told me I was a terrible person to driving home crying and bleeding to filing the police report in a little substation in the park.
