I had to teach myself how to be ok with the fact that I did not have a mom, a dad, a family.
I had to teach myself how to be ok with the fact that I did not (do not) have friends.
I had to teach myself how to be ok with the fact that according to the world, I am hard to love and easy to leave.
I did it.
I did it all.
Yes, I now know that I am easy to love and hard to leave.
Yes, I now know that my parents could not know this because they were broken humans who never got what they needed to heal themselves, thus had none of it on hand to give to or share with me.
Ultimate tragedy? All the love we never knew. Lost generations ago and none since had the circumstance nor community to recover because that is what generational trauma is, what it does, and how it harms long after the moment.
I now also know I broke the generational trauma cycle. I know because my son and my daughter know nothing of the things that were my ‘usual’. Just like I know their absence from my life is just the price I pay for being the last broken link. I suppose it’s requisite, but man, it’s hard.
They look at me and see whatever they see, but they see it from a reality that looks nothing like mine, and never will.
They cannot understand me and that is no one’s fault (unless it is everyone’s). Suffice to say, they aren’t interested and I am out of energy to continue chasing it from either of them.
I think back to trying to get my grandmother to live with me. I think back to trying to get my mother to live with me. I didn’t need to live with them, I wanted to help them and get as close as we could be in the time we had left. They weren’t interested. I took it hard, especially since both were struggling financially and I could have helped them just as they would have helped me.
I know that neither of my children will ever care that much about me, and I’m finding my way through it. I don’t know if I’ll manage it fully, but after 60 years of chasing my kin with love only to eat their disdain, dismissal, and dust, it’s time to try.
Thoughts sliding through my head as I enter the 213th day of the year, heading to my sixth decade with my tenacity in my teeth and giving life the ol’ double eagles as I continue to insist upon myself as a generally good human trying to maintain that trend in a world that seems to have largely abandoned such fripperies.
I continue to say ‘I’m going to…’ but the fact of the matter is, I am doing it. Actual. Real time. Right now. The work is this; the daily nattering of myself with myself as I stew through feelings and memories, extracting the last, lingering flavors of ‘what might have been’, reaching my own conclusions, rendering as much of the hurt away as possible, so I can lay the gentler, kinder memories into the mental attic for keeping.
To stop thinking of it all as unresolved and nebulous and thus, still ripe with potential and possibility.
It is resolved, I simply have not wanted to accept it.
…So I would choose to be with you
That’s if the choice were mine to make
But you can make decisions too…
– Billy Joel, ‘And So It Goes’
And so it goes…