I've been feeling guilty about Mom X. A few weeks back, she was after me to attend the wedding of a niece who -- like most of my extended family -- I hardly know. I stopped calling her. She rarely calls me and there the matter stood.
Quite awhile back, I was estranged my family for several years. See, I'm uneducated and was pursuing a low-paying trade with zero stability, hanging around with terrible horrible rock'n'roll radio types, destined for a bad end, etc. etc., issues that look trivial in hindsight. Nevertheless, it was an ugly break and years later when we got back in touch -- slowly, cautiously -- some bond was gone and for me, at least, it's never really come back. Can't trust 'em, after all, and they've been more like overly-familiar strangers than my heart's blood ever since.
I worry about my nieces and nephews, who seem like good kids despite having less-than-ideal parents;* we're not close, too many years lie between us, but I wish 'em the very best. I worry about my Mom and I'd like to help her more than I have been doing -- but dealing with my family is like walking on slippery rocks at the edge of a whirlpool. There's a gigantic, sucking maelstrom of emotional distress and dysfunction howling at my elbow the whole time and I'm not going back into it, period. I've watched my siblings get messed up by it, I've been there myself way too much and only barely clawed my way out, and it's not worth the pain and risk to dip even a toe back in. There's no emotional reward of fuzzy-wuzzy wonderfulness, just a lot of walking on eggshells wondering what's going to go wrong next. If that's family, I'll take the bare-minimum RDA, please. I couldn't cope with any more.
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* Says the woman who never parented. My sibs are-- Difficult people. In some ways, challenged; the three of us are reflections in a fractured mirror. But like most parents, they were well-meaning amateurs and sincerely love their offspring.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
17 comments:
Amen
Dealing with family can be the most lonely event life can present.
No advice; just understand.
I've often said that being related to me does not mean that I will accept behavior from you that I would not tolerate from a total stranger. If anything, you should treat me better than a stranger would. If you can't manage that, I just won't speak to you.
Yeah, well, I have a [deleted] who has tried to friend me on a certain professional networking sight.
Since the only two things I ever want to read concerting that suka will be either a criminal indictment or an obit, I declined the invitation.
Roberta, are you my daughter? I had not thought so previously, but at this point, you sound just like her.
She has cut me off cold. When I announced that I was going to move to a town near where she lives, she threatened to move across the country.
I do understand not being a perfect parent. My parents were not perfect, but they were pretty good, I thought. I tried to follow their example with my own children, and it worked pretty well with one out of three. The other two, well, it seems that it was a different time.
Now I am in my 70's and would surely like to mend fences, but the two younger ones are having none of it. They will not return phone calls, will usually not return e-mail (sometimes, but often not), and just generally want nothing to do with me. Fortunately, I still have my wife and my oldest daughter, but the other two have written me off totally. I am sad about this.
Fr. D+
Don't blame ya. Not all families are like Ozzie and Harriet. Most have some dysfunction, and some are worse.
Dr. D., I like my Mom fine, and I know her better than the rest of the family. It's the entire baggage-train that comes along that I can't deal with. Most of my generation are not people I'd spend time with if we were not related.
I know it's hard, and you have to decide for yourself, but can you have a relationship with Mom without dragging anybody else into it? I feel your dilemma, my wife and I are trying to help my first cousin (76, I'm 60) who has been defrauded by a 4th cousin who's turned out to be a theiving con Man. A feisty, independent minded woman, she's scared by being taken by a family member, and pissed she let him do it. He will find a very hot place in Hell, I hope, while we make it as warm as possible for him legally....So, perk up! It could be worse.....
Been there. It sucks. No advice to offer. Even if I had advice, it'd start with "don't listen to advice offered unsolicited by people like me".
I'm don't have any better advice than Jess or lelnet at this.
Just BT, Doing That Daily.
That saying about being able to pick yer nose but not yer fambly leaves out one important truth - while we may be related there is nothing that says I have to have relations with you.
For 40 years I had a great relationship with my father - never saw him, never communicated with him, never thought about him. I think he has gone and ended that by becoming deceased. At least he's old enough to have done so.
Sometimes it's the only way to stay out of therapy or prison - or both.
stay safe.
The most evil and dastardly people you can think of have relatives ... whom you've probably never heard of because of their "normality".
Yeah, well -- it was never the most functional of families and there's no question I was one of the contributors to the "dys." I don't wanna be, but to be involved is to be sucked down. The only way my family dynamic works is badly. :( I won't play that game.
IMO there are very few parents who have not earned, at a minimum, an honest and respectful response when they attempt to communicate with their adult offspring. This is especially true when said parents are on their march toward the twilight years and begin to develop needs that only one of their own can provide for. As for siblings, be they the genetic variety or not, sometimes the best thing one can do or say to them is nothing.
"Honest and respectful response?" Yeah, *that* went over well. Better, I think, to say nothing.
How common must abnormal be to be normal?
I can feel the angst in your post, the embarrassment of the "dysfunction", your impression that it is somehow unique.
But it ain't. You've pretty closely described my "relationship" with my immediate family, and I suspect of quite a few if not most who read it.
Comfort in numbers? Not really; it still hurts, and I'm nigh sixty. But, to invoke a term so overused as to be annoying but which seems invented for family relations, it is what it is. :(
When a child or young adult responds to a parent the desire is to be rewarded with a smile, I'm happy and/or as your parent "I approve of your response" type emotion. As an adult one should not be looking to obtain approval for their response anymore. Instead, the goal of an adult responding to their parent should be to obtain acknowledgement that, even though you always will be their child, you are now an adult who may have different views and opinions about life and that is something they as the parent are at peace and/or okay with. Unfortunately, when we become an adult the refusal to respond can mean that one has not moved beyond the stage of wanting to obtain parental approval therefore it becomes easier to just live one's life and not respond to the parent anymore.
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