Create my new family with my friends!

now we wait and see if they contact me re my birthday or Thanksgiving. I hope not.

However, I have no interest in pursuing whatever relationship I might have with them. I looked up my ex on Ebay tonight, and my sister, and my brother’s last name. Feel equally detached about all of them. So perhaps they haven’t all gotten to “as strangers in my life,” but I’m usually interested in strangers, they can be a lot of fun!

DH spent part of tonight making the “crate” to ship the portrait of grandpa to my sister. I don’t want it; have never hung it, and never wanted to. She gave it to me when she discovered the painting wasn’t worth anything no doubt.

It got ripped while we hauled it from state to state with our moves, so I got it repaired. Even though it’s my sister, and she’s rich, I still have morals and ethics, I could have sent her the damaged painting, but it wasn’t damaged when I got it, so we got it repaired.

The foam core the “crate” is made from is black and we got it on sale at a art supply store a few years back for .99 a sheet, as opposed to the usual $5-6 it usually is. She can be impressed with the money she perceived we spent; she’ll glory in it.

Anyway, I get a picture of someone who seems to have been abusive to my father out of the house, and that’s one less item to cart around for some damnable “family museum” which I don’t want, and have no intention of having. DH & I both have the ends of a lot of family stuff, why I don’t know, but we sort of ended up being the final repository of lots o’ family junk. Most of it we don’t want and never did so it sits around our houses in boxes. I’m getting rid of mine. There’s very few pieces I want to keep, and I’ll keep those, but by in large, it’s going OUT!

Last week my cousin (Remember the phone call out of the blue a few months back from someone I LIKED?) sent me the part of his family history that includes my family. Jesus. I come from a long line of really f’d up people. My dad’s older sister got married at 18 because her mom had died and her dad (my grandpa) had gotten remarried fairly quickly and then had a kid (my dad). Her marriage ended when she ran away from her husband and 8 yo daughter to live with someone in Chicago who she eventually married. She never saw her daughter again.

Her daughter was devestated by her mother’s desertion, as you might expect. (The daughter killed herself eventually.)

The portrait is my dad’s dad, the one who got remarried fairly quickly above. Almost certainly, he’s the person that caused my dad to have such a “lousy childhood” that he was talking about it the last week of his life, at 85.

My Mother’s dad ran off when she was 8 or 9 because of she got scarlet fever. Grandma was a Christian Scientist so Grandpa had to get the sherrif in before Grandma would let a doctor see my mother.

Some legacy huh?

Most of these people were successful on the face of it, but apparently really f’d up!

For years and years I thought I was the only one with problems. I thought I was the “black sheep” of this family of brilliant, successful people, and if I could just “get over it,” as the family mantra went, I could probably be brilliant and successful too. What a waste.

Being a family scapegoat isn’t fun. But it’s even more ridiculous when you figure out that what they all laid on you is their secret shame.

I guess that’s what all scapegoats are isn’t it? The manifestation of pieces of ourselves we can’t face or want to acknowledge. We all have the capability to be cruel, bigoted, vicious, nasty, selfish, etc. It’s much easier to see those traits in others than it is to see and admit those traits are in us. So the scapegoat pays and we can stay “virtuous.”

Hmm. I have a piece of a short story that’s related to this, and I’d forgotten where I was going with it. This has reminded what I had intended. Thanks 43t…thinking out loud (so to speak) has allowed me to get through another barrier.

Yah!

jkd

I’ve been trying to sleep (it’s 1:26 am here) and just the two emails from my brother have me rewinding old tapes, travelling the same old pathways. The wounded child is back: replaying old scenarios…being dragged hysterical back to boarding school (it just confirmed what the housekeeper said, “No one who wasn’t paid would want to live with you.” etc., etc., ad naseum).

I have damned few defenses against that wounded little girl she comes back and comes back and comes back. I hate it! I want desparately to be someone to whom this is simply a story and not a short cut into my gut.

I need to learn a new premise, something that makes this not relevant.

I hate my family.

jkd

it was a copy of one he’d sent my sister. This, right after I’d found out that Paul (our best man) had died. Sigh.

Ok.

My brother didn’t move 10 hours closer to me and decide that he never wanted to talk to me. Of course, he didn’t send me an email, he cc’d me on the one he sent my sister.

This is about the tax mess that my sister created by being a thief and expecting the two of us to relieve her of the tax burden that selling one of the items caused. So she’s cheating not only us but the IRS as well. As far as I can tell, she’s misreporting the date of sale, misreporting the base price for the item or making them up. She also misreported the amount of money she gave each of us and the type of money it was. (She said it was income, it wasn’t.) Sooo, it’s created problems for both of us with our tax returns.

Sigh.

jkd

it looks like the shenanigans my sister pulled will cause us to to pay taxes, a lot of taxes perhaps. Sigh.

I hate my family.

jkd

and all of the old behaviors are jumping up and down inside of me and telling me that I should contact him.

BUT...

The end of the quantuum leap, the final piece of letting go of all that pain and crap was walking away from my family, -3- 5 months ago? And, I’ve determined that no matter what I do, or how, unless perhaps I managed to somehow do something like win a Nobel or some such, would warrant my brother simply approving me as a human being. And that still hurts. It also hurts that my sister thinks that whatever she does to either him or me is justified by whatever whim she has, even when it’s stealing, or abusive.

My brother’s brilliant, and an intellectual snob with it. I keep making friends with people, really connecting with them, and then finding out how educated and/or brilliant they are. When I do, I expect them not to like me, it’s a knee-jerk response on my part. “I’m not brilliant. I’m not worthy.”

Of all the things that I missed in my youth the one that aches and perhaps always will is the “bizarre” notion that I had worth just because I was, that I existed. Maybe that’s called love, I don’t know. But whatever it is, I don’t think I’ve ever had it from my family. I’ve always felt as if I had to “measure up.” Be as smart as my brother, or I’d bore him, be as socially adept as my sister, or I provide her with a favorable (in her favor) comparison.

There’s no companionship, caring, sharing, or even simple acceptance. I’m not the cause of their parents’ divorces, but I’ve paid for them my entire life.

And to them? They never “said” this stuff, so it doesn’t exist. Uh huh. They had whole other family structures I didn’t have to lean on and draw from.

Me? I shared everybody with them and the housekeeper with her daughter. Everyone had a prior claim to whatever resources or people were around and no one ever said, “Welcome, glad you came!”

So, I know what would happen if I contacted my brother, he would be distracted and surprised that I’d bothered to call. He wouldn’t hang up on me, but unless I was willing to listen to whatever he wanted to talk about, he really wouldn’t want to talk to me.

If I contact my sister, she’ll be all full of justifications about why she’s done what she’s done, how it isn’t her fault, etc. and she’ll talk about food, the weather, or stuff. Interspersed between all of that will be subtle assertions about how she’s superior to me. In cooking, her job, whatever it is I bring up, she’ll try and trump it. It’s very tiring.

I have to remember that. This may hurt being on the outside of the people I’m related to. But I’ve always been on the outside, and contacting them will only hurt me…again…and again…and again.

jkd

I’m busy this weekend. I may (or may not) get on the net at all between Thursday and Sunday.

Be well!

jkd

this weekend, so the outing I wanted isn’t going to happen.

Next time!

jkd

we don’t go on dates together (DH and I), we don’t take vacations, we don’t socialize in short. Others are NOT involved in our lives to any extent at all.

I think to replace my family, I need to alter this. I need to get DH and I to act more like a “couple” than we do, go out on dates, take “getaway” trips, etc. And we need to invite people to the movies, to our house, to go to galleries or whatever with us. None of those things are things we do, and if I’m going to replace my family’s place in my life, I need to involve and be involved with others.

jkd