Thinking about unconditional love and cutting umbilical chords...; a letter to my birth Family

I've been thinking much about what I wrote Doug... and then what I posted on this blog last night and subsequently returned to a draft... Rehashing past horrors or past injustices... and the possible responses lacking deep thought...  My intense reaction approaching renovating Margarita's passport for continuing her American tourist visa process...  for visiting the family with her... participating in family events etc...  

One must live through the experiences of family and what the adults do or don't do or what the older cousins or the older siblings do and have a strange form of patience.  Patience, if the child is being sexually abused should he or she have patience for arriving at that day when they are big enough for flying the coop?  A big dilemma.  And what if it wasn't sexual abuse but neglect, physical abuse o emotional abuse?  

And no one from my family ever wanted to hear it.  And I've found myself repeating and repeating and I guess hoping someone will say they understand or understood.  But then what?  When it comes down to it, everyone just wants to live in today towards the future.

You may think I enjoy rehashing the past.  But, the truth is that you are the past and you insist upon interjecting yourself into my present and my future.

And what if nothing happened.  Mom, I know you know the truth, although you wish for everyone to think you were the only true victim and that you are a saint.  That's fine too.

Because, truthfully, I don't like you.  I've never liked you.  I don't like Beth, nor Sheri, nor Craig, nor Seth.  And why not?  Aside from what was done to me, what they did or what you did and what you didn't do, I don't like any of your personalities...  Maybe it's all connected, my dislike for your personalities and what you did or didn't do.  Or maybe it is all of your denile and dishonesty etc, that shaped your personalities into forms that I find detestable.  In the end, it is all the same.  

The problem arrises from fantasies projected upon the children or upon the society of unconditional love and family ties.  So, one feels inherently guilty if they don't participate in family events or if they can't say "I love you too!"  To their mother or to their sister, although they know that their sister has the tendency towards being horribly superficial and signing "Love---" actually means nothing more than she wishes there was actually something more profound between the two..., although unwilling to listen to the other party, like when she said, "I'm sorry for not reading what you write.  I just have little patience for reading."  Well, sometimes if the person is truly important to you, you decide to change your tendencies, no?  Maybe you would be interested in what that person feels, believes or says...  But, that's just it; superficiality and fantasies of the other and having those fantasies projected upon my person, doesn't interest me.  If she isn't truly interested in me, I have no interest in her.  But, that's actually besides the point.  A person who doesn't like to read or doesn't have the patience for reading is totally dependent upon television or radio news or hearsay for what they understand about the world.  And as we know, those people don't add to the society or relationships, because they tend towards being shallow.  Which would you prefer diving into; a 3 foot shallow pool or a 13 foot deep pool that gives you space for gliding through the water and turning upward before your head hits the concrete bottom?

What would happen if I said to my mother, "Mom, I'm enjoying my life without you.  I accept that what I wished for from you as a mother and from our relationship can't possibly be, you haven't evolved much and you continue insulting me directly or insulting my senses.  Truthfully my life is better without you.  Enough with foolish fantasies and your hurtful, offensive and manipulative games."  But, I have too strong a conscience and I feel bad for hurting her, no matter that she didn't feel regret for all that she said and did to me as a child and a young adult.  

The problem is, and something she and my sisters understand about me, is that I tend to be easily forgiving (in the moment; don't confuse the moment when I say, Ok, I'll give you what you want... with rehashing the past when I realize that I've been taken advantage of again and made the fool).  No, I don't want to rehash the past and the only way that I can be freed from the past is freeing myself from people who don't evolve.  I saw/see a different side of my mother than all of those who rush to her defense and claim she is an incredible person especially having survived the aftermath of the death of my father.  But, everyone ignores how surviving the aftermath of that same death was for me, and the role my mother played in that aftermath for making things much more difficult for Beth and I... different for each child.  I mention Beth so you can understand that I was also there listening to Beth's screams those Saturdays or Sundays, me cringing in the corner of the living room downstairs, worrying that I would be next...  I remember trying to leave the house as early as possible before I could cross my mother... before she could grasp me.    But there was also Sheri to fear.  And it wasn't just about my mother's violence, but her promiscuity; the revolving doors of random lovers mixed in with those lovers who were long-term...  I remember best because each new lover was a potention father-figure and baseball catch partner for me...  I can't imagine how horrible it was for them having me ask them to have a catch with me in the back yard.  Worst was my mother's horrible statements belittling me, ostracizing me, humiliating me, intentionally emasculating me and destroying any possibility for developing self-confidence;  all because she was afraid she would develop an incestuous relationship with me after my father died, since I had become the "Man of the House" at the age of 4.5.  

And now that she has decided that she has gotten past that era of her life, she believes that we can exist together as if nothing happened...  

I slipped into the past again.  I believe it's inevitable.  

But, putting aside how my mother related or relates to me, I see her as a master of denile, horribly sarcastic, manipulative and a gold digger.  From how she has changed her story regarding her relationship with my father and how she related to Bruce before their marrying and afterwards, it is clear that my mother is a user, a gold-digger.  She used my father for escaping the "ghetto" of Queens and must have been incredibly resentful towards her prince in shining armour who suddenly turned into a corpse.  Maybe it wasn't only the worry she explained to me when I was around the age of 20 (the reason she pushed me away after daddy's death) that she would develop an incestuous relationship with her only son, because incest ran in her family, but she must have hated me, since I was the greatest representation of her worthless Doctor husband.  If you were to follow her behaviors towards me from my father's death until I left for Mexico, you would see them as incredibly hateful behaviors.  You may say, "A mother hating her child?"  Have you never heard of child abuse by mother's towards their children?  

If there wasn't child abuse in my mother's house, why would she have said to me, "But I was so much worse with Beth than with you!"  Maybe she was more violent with Beth than I.  But, emotional abuse and neglect have much longer lasting affects.  They hit deeper...  They are more destructive, since they destroy the child's will.

She used Bruce for saving herself from a desperate economic situation since she wasn't willing to accept a degraded salary due to early 90s downsizing...  But, not all of us can find someone to pay all of the most difficult bills and the dinners out and all the vacations every year and spoiling the grandchildren etc...  

No, I don't like my mother.  I don't enjoy the time spent with her.  I don't appreciate her shallowness and her random sarcasm and her incapacity towards listening to things that aren't about inter-personal relationships, since those issues don't exist here for me and I don't have any interest in her family...  

But, I have been influenced by the issue of family duty and I have found it difficult coming to terms with the issue of visiting or not visiting, being in contact or not being in contact.  And that issue with family duty tends towards momentarily burying the truth that I don't have any true desire for being in my mother's family circles and I must accept that truth and let them stay where they have decided upon staying; a place I intentionally left 11+ years ago and to which I never desired returning.  The problem is that someone always appears and pulls upon those out-dated "heartstrings" connected with a very strong desire during childhood, adolescence and young adulthood to be accepted and included by them without someone deciding that today is humilliate Ross time, or ignore Ross time or exclude Ross time.  No Craig, Sheri, Marsha, Bruce?

But we do grow up and we do realize who we are and where we belong and what we appreciate and what we don't appreciate.  And I don't appreciate you... because you've repeatedly acted in ways that make you less than appreciable.  And it doesn't matter what other people think or say about you...  Curl up with those people and accept what you've done and how you've behaved and, truly, what it was that motivated your behavior towards me and leave me be.

Thank you.

Ross