For a year, I was no contact, but being harassed. At some point I began to grieve and it felt healthy, though intense. But the harassment seemed to interrupt that process, steal some of the benefit from it. Then after that first year, I was home free - no contact, no harassment and a break from the weight of it. Then I was healing. I felt peace. And then the 6 months ended. And now... now I don't know where I am at. My home free time is over, but no meeting has been set. I don't feel the same freedom I felt during those 6 months, but I also don't feel hunted like the year before that. Part of me wonders if she is giving up. If she is, I feel like the anger she felt when I was a baby for not bonding well and for crying, the anger she felt when I was a kid for not being what she expected, when I was a teenager for embarrassing her and not conforming, when I became an adult for not following the path she wanted, when I became a mother myself, for being able to carry a child, for breastfeeding, for bonding with my child when I didn't bond with her, for wanting someone else to watch Ivy.. all of that anger that she never would admit to (despite it being clear) - she may ball it up, and focus it all on this. Finally admit that she is angry at me. It would be hard to be exposed to her anger again, but it would also free me in a way. It would be validating if she would admit to being angry. She shot her anger out at me so much, but no matter how toxic her behaviour toward me was, she would only say that she loves me, that she would do anything for me, that she waited so long to have me and so on. She was so unwilling to say, I'm angry at you for not being what I imagined you would be. You were supposed to complete my life and make me happy, but you just insist on letting me down instead.
She has always said that she would do anything for me, and I have never been brave enough to challenge that to her face, she believes it too intently. She made me believe it for years. The truth is, she wouldn't do anything for me. She wouldn't make hard choices to put me first when I was a child instead of putting her anger at my dad first, or her need to be the victim first, or her need to impress people first, or her need to push me to be what she wanted rather than who I was. She wouldn't allow me to talk to a school counsellor or teacher, nor would she arrange for independent help for me deal with the adult issues she exposed me to. She wouldn't stop writing unhappy faces on the calendar every year on the anniversary of the day that my dad lost his job. She wouldn't accept me for who I was. Was all of that out of her control? Did she have no control over the pen on the calendar? Why do I have trouble accepting that? Because she could control herself to not write it on the calendar at work. Because she could control her emotions around others. Because she herself got to have support from a psychiatrist. Because she could accept other people for being different. Because she felt bad for other people who were mistreated but showed no remorse when she would treat her own family badly.
I feel like erasing this all because I feel like I should be past it. But clearly, I am not. I have experienced a new depth of understanding of how wrong it was and with that has come with a new wave of anger, and a need to work through it. So, at almost forty, here I am feeling mad about what happened throughout the ages. I wrote a lot though out those years, but I never wrote a word about that unhappy face on the calendar until recently. I never wrote a word about my dad's drinking or my mom's dark days. I was so ashamed about it all, so conditioned to believe that no one would accept us if they knew, that I never could bring myself to even write about some of it.
Writing has freed me in so many ways in my life. I hope that if I can commit to writing it down, I can free myself again. I keep feeling these poetic words floating just out of reach. They flutter like butterflies that as soon as you catch a glimpse, they disappear, effortlessly. I hope that I can get through the sludge of all of these hard words to make my way back to more poetic words. I hope one day soon, I can write more effortlessly about sunlight, firewood, mustard fields, train cars...
