And So It Is..

The meeting is over.  She came with arrows.  She came broken.  Shaking.  Angry.  Hurt.

Her reality is that I have hurt her.  I have destroyed her.  My reality is still tied to her to an unsettling  extent and so my reality is somewhat the same.  But I am working hard to try and feel it differently.

I heard something today and immediately realized that I still have a core belief that I am responsible for her.  It was phrased about a child who sits on their parents lap, and with proper nurturing and reassurance, they will feel secure and first crawl, then walk away from their parent, to explore and discover and they will know that their parent is there and they are safe.  They can remain bonded and break away at the same time.  But if the parent garners their nurturing from the child (instead of the other way around), the child does not feel that they can break away safely.  They want their parent to be okay and they know that they have to sacrifice something of themselves to keep their parent intact.  I related immediately.  I think I fall into all three of the categories that she mentioned can happen as a result.  The first is the one, who in order to have safety and security, they have to give up a part of themselves.  Another is the one who tries to break away, but in relationships in the future, when intimacy increases, desire decreases because in their primary relationship with a parent, love and connection came with an extra burden.  And the last, the child breaks away and never comes back, but despite living a passionate life, they have little stability.  In my childhood, I was the first two, and some strong hints of the 3rd.  Now in my adult life, I am the 3rd and I hope that I am reaching that late enough in life to maintain stability.  It amazes me to see such a link between my childhood and my lack of structure throughout much of my adult years, as well as my resistance to true intimacy.  I hope that I can work on these things and move into a healthier, more secure place as a partner to my husband.  I do feel that that is what is next for me.  I want to be a better wife.  He so deserves more of me than is currently available to him.

As for my mom..  The door is remaining closed.  It is harder than I expected.  I feel no relief.  I don't know what to expect next and I don't feel secure as a result.  I worry that I will never feel free, but I keep trying to remind myself that I have felt some freedom through NC, and I just need to trust that I will be okay, even if she is not.  Right now, I know that I am not okay because she is not.  I want to change that, but it is bigger than me.  No matter what I do, it is there.  This "not okay-ness".  She isn't okay and so I can't be either.  I can't un-tie myself from her.  I am like a tin can tied to the back of a car being driven by someone who shouldn't be driving, but they tied me there so tight I can't seem to loosen the knot.  Sometimes I can get it untied but she finds it and ties it up again.  My thoughts are completely in tact and I know all of the things wrong with this situation, but I can't control it from my position behind the car.  I just keep hoping that by the time I get the string to give way again, the accumulated damage won't be too much.  I feel like I can recover again, but I don't know how many more times.

I realized last night as I struggled with sleep again, I don't like calling her my mom anymore.  She is beginning to feel more foreign to me.  She isn't what the word 'mother' means to me in my heart. That feels like a betrayal, but that goes back to the beginning..

The Meeting is Set

Next Tuesday, I will see my mom for the first time in nearly 2 years.  The power of that fact is greater than I would prefer.  I always want to be okay.  I think I am, but know that on some level, I'm not.  What I am is coping.  In some ways well, in other ways, not so well.

I have no idea what Tuesday will bring.  All of the fears of running into her at the grocery store, all of the anxiety and determination of maintaining this separation, will at least for 50 minutes, be shattered.  I will have to face her.  I will have to see her eyes.  Another version of me thinks, I will get to see her eyes.  This is so painful.

I love my mom so much.  It's like a tidal wave, and it's not good for me.  It's hurt me so much in the past.  I don't know how I will feel to see her.  How I can possibly keep my resolve, with her looking at me, pleadingly, telling me that she is so sorry..

My therapist said that my mom knows that her illness has hurt me.  This is so fucking confusing.  I don't know what I will do.

When I told two of my closest friends about the meeting, they quickly gathered me up, the future me, the Tuesday me.  They made a plan for us to go for dinner after the meeting.  They held me up, in advance.  I cried then and cry again to write about it.  I am so lucky to have them.  I am so, unbelievably grateful.

The intensity of the pain that I am feeling is unexpected to me.   I don't know what I expected, but I didn't expect to feel.. this..  It feels the same as when your heart is broken.  It feels like I lost my mom to death, and will get to see her one last time.  Just like how unbelievably fortunate and painful that would be.  Except that it can't be that clean, pure pain. It is not a heartfelt reunion. It is tainted with guilt, with past traumas, and with very diluted anger.  Above all of that, love does seem to rise.  She is not gone, she is still here.  I still have a chance to see her eyes, that mother who despite it all, I do love...

This is heartbreaking..

The Truth Is

The meeting with my parents is approaching.  It is not scheduled yet, but will be soon.  I feel calm.  I want to reflect on what I want to say to them.  Sometimes it hits me, out of the blue.  What I want to communicate.  Those thoughts are like small, polished stones among a beach of rocks.  I catch sight of one, but then it quickly gets lost among the overwhelming amount of rocks around it.  Most of my thoughts are those rocks.  They are what I know so well.  Defence, defence.  Trying to explain it.  Trying to justify who I am, what I feel or what I believe.  And then there are those little polished, calming stones that are simply the truth.  I have several weeks to sort through the rocks to find those stones and the resolve to leave those rocks behind, for good.

The truth is, I can't explain it anymore.

The truth is, I won't put them before Ivy.  I view any relationship with them with the understood risk that it may end again.  I am not willing to put Ivy in a position to have to lose them all over again so she will not be a part of the equation without the confidence that my mom understands.  In the same spirit, my aunt is welcome back in our life if she is willing to have a relationship with us independent of my mom and can commit to not abandoning us if we need to resume no contact with my mom.  I feel like my dad should fall under the same category, but don't trust he could do it.  These thoughts always lead back to me knowing in my heart that contact holds the potential to do more harm than good.

That leads me to my next truth.  I believe contact will be better for my mom than for us.  It puts my family and I in a position that could really hurt us.  The truth is, I don't feel comfortable opening the door for my mom's sake, when Chris, Ivy and I may suffer the consequences.

The truth is, I can't handle any more high intensity stress.  It has affected my health, both physically and mentally.  My goal is to be the strongest, healthiest and happiest mama to my girl that I can, as well as to be the same for my husband who has stood by me through years of intense stress.  I will not allow anyone into my life who threatens those things.

The truth is, I didn't like who I was when I was still in contact with my mom.  I so often had to fight for myself, for my rights to be who I am, for my right to live my own life, for my right to make decisions as Ivy's mother.  I cannot fight anymore.  I will not have a relationship where there is room for that.  That would mean not being alone with my mom, not allowing access to my cell or email and limiting contact to scheduled, agreed upon times.

The truth is, I cannot re-open that door without the confidence that my mom has a sincere  understanding of why this happened in the first place.  It is the only way I believe that it could ever be any different.

The truth is, there may be a time when I could accept her back into my life (with very strict and enforced boundaries) if she doesn't have a sincere understanding of why we are here, but that time is not now.  I am not ready.

What Am I Now?

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...

How I Want it to Be, and How it Really Is...

I want to be okay.  I want to be strong and calm.  I want to sleep through the night.  Some days I am all of these things, and then I start to believe that I am through it.  I start to feel proud that I made it through.  I start saying it out loud.  I am okay.  I sleep every night again.

And then it changes.  Something throws me and I am back there.  The day my 6 months of no contact ended, I was back there.  Couldn't sleep through the night.  Then I saw my dad, out of nowhere while picking up my car from the shop.  It was so painful and so nice to see him.  He was happy to see me, and that gave me some peace.  It made me wish so hard that it could be different.  I told myself I was okay, but I wasn't.

So, maybe there is some kind of in between.  Where you are okay and then you are not, but when the pendulum finally rests, you will be okay.  I really want to be okay.  I want the anxious times to continue to become less frequent and last less time.  The anxiety is intense when it is there.  I don't remember feeling this way when I was younger.  There were times where I felt some anxiety.  I had one particularly rough patch, but it was about a thing and when I had worked through it, it was gone.  I kept on top of it back them, maybe.  I made a decision every day to not worry about all of the things I could not control.  And then I followed through and didn't worry.  I didn't want to be my mom.  I wanted to break away and be the opposite.  I wanted to live and love and feel free.  And I did, all of those things.  I want to go back there.

It is not just the stuff with my mom that is the problem.  I need to simplify my life.  Selling the cottage is one major step toward a more simple life.  I feel so good to sell it.  Now we just need it to sell.  I suppose patience is in order there, the hard part is done really in coming to terms with the decision.  Now it's just a transaction.

What else can I do to live a more peaceful and simple life?  Move away from sales.  Make sure the company gets stronger and provides a more consistent and higher income.  It has to be a priority to get on solid footing at work.

So, I have work to do.  I want to walk towards the life I want every day.  I want to embrace the life I have along the way and be patient with myself while I work on untangling such a busy, often overwhelming life.

Holding Steady

Re-newing my decision to keep the estrangement in tact has relieved so much anxiety.  I know it will creep back in as the meeting with them approaches, but having come to terms with the option of remaining estranged does feel like a relief.  I think I was feeling like I had to re-open the door.  Because I can't bear to go back to being stalked and pressured and because I know Ivy misses them.  But the potential pain and problems arising from that contact terrified me.  I love the peace of our household so much.  It means everything to me.

Quiet, relaxed and happy weekend mornings are still something I cherish.  There were so many destructive, angry mornings on the weekends growing up.  Loud and jarring mornings that led into quiet and dark days.  I still feel like all that was just yesterday.  It never feels very far away.  More than anything else, those mornings stayed with me.  That is why our quiet, happy mornings mean the world to me.  Before the estrangement and for much of the time that the stalking was happening, our mornings weren't happy.  They weren't the chaos of my childhood home, but they were sad and there was an underlying darkness and anger to them.  I tried so hard not to show any of those emotions in front of Ivy, but she knew.  She used to draw our family with sad faces.  Now she draws us happy.  She draws us pretty much every day at daycare, and every day we are happy.  I cannot take that away from her.  As a daughter myself, if I could have made one wish for my mom growing up (and even now), it would have been that she be happy.  I can never have a happy mother, but I can give that gift to my daughter.  I can recognize the things that are destructive for me, and stay away from them.  I can be the provider of happy mornings.  I can be the provider of a stable, consistent home.  I can love her without putting pressure on her to be responsible for my happiness.  I can be a role model for embracing life and living to the fullest.  That is what I want to be as a mother.  Strong, happy and supportive.  I can't be those things if I stay in an abusive relationship.  I have to keep reminding myself, so that I don't get tempted back in.  It would not be any different this time.  It would be exactly how it always has been.  Good spliced with gut-wrenching, awful times that change my whole life for weeks at a time and leave me each time, a little less okay.

Back to the Drawing Board

As my window of contact free time gets smaller, the stress is coming back.  Last week, my friend (and bookkeeper) called and said that my dad had emailed her about the books on our shared property.  At the mention of him, my body went into fight or flight.  Instantly.  It was like someone injected something into my veins that ran instantly throughout my body.  Then she called again yesterday and told me that her staff had been talking with my mom and my mom told them that I don't talk to her anymore and hung up on them.  It put me right back into the headspace I was in last year.  Feeling trapped.  Knowing that she's not well.  Knowing it is all about to start again. 

It took me by storm yesterday.  Any hopes of re-building a relationship with good boundaries went out the window.  I began bracing myself for the stalking, the guilt, the shame, the anger, the pressure and the pain of it all again.  And I know I can't do it again.  I can't go through any more.  

Today I realized, it's done.  I can't have them back in my life.  She doesn't understand that it is inappropriate to dump details of our situation on people I have a business relationship with.  It's not appropriate to hang up on them, creating drama even without having direct contact with me.  I knew that even if I could discuss that with her, she would not acknowledge that it happened.  I can't do one more conversation like that.  Trying to fight for reality, never mind for what about that reality is destructive.

Moving has become much more appealing again.  I would be happy to move to a different home here, even if it doesn't solve the issue of worrying about running into her at the grocery store.  It would provide peace in our home and eliminate the stalking.  Moving further would be even better, but maybe harder in other ways.  Worth consideration though.  

I called an agent who may have clients looking for a lot like ours.  I put it out there.  I am asking for it to happen, if it is meant to.  

So, that is where I will leave it for now.