Substituting Control for Grief

Scroll through my blog posts and you will see that I have recently had my family fall apart. Not my kids and partner. No. Actually, life for us has been better this year than it's ever been. I can't help but wonder if it's the distance from my parents. More likely it is a combination of positive changes including the distance from their toxic patterns.

The gist of my situation is that my parents to not approve of my lifestyle and believe they can better raise my children than I can. The idea my mother expressed was that she would forcefully instill values in my children which they are deeply resistant to because those values (as presented by my parents) are actively harmful to who they are.

Are you familiar with religious trauma? For me it was being shamed and abused based on my God-given sex and attributes. I was highly sensitive and easily overstimulated and punished for it until I learned to hide my feelings not only from others, but from myself. I only recently came to terms with who I am physically, sexually and spiritually. It is not who my parents want me to be. The same is true of my children. They have been given information about different faith systems and opportunity to pursue and discuss what they believe. We accept that they believe differently even than we (their parents do). My parents do not. They believe we should force conformity, and not to our parental values, but to theirs. Thus the rift.

But the rift is also based on a recent loss in our family. My grandmother passed away leaving an emotional wound. It is my family's pattern to fill vulnerability with control of others. So my mom told me she wished I would give her one of my kids to raise. The implication was that she could fix the assumed mess I've created despite that, for the first time in her life, my child is experiencing confidence, happiness and a freedom from anxiety.

I felt insulted. I told her my child would not fill the hole Grammie left. My mother agreed it was "probably true."

That request happened before a rather nasty effort to gaslight me outside the safe space of the therapist's office where we met for a mediated conversation. It stuck with me, but today is the day I am coming to terms with it. Meaning, I am giving a term to it: hurtful.

In fact, there are many terms I could apply including insensitive, thoughtless and cruel. The entire session was me hearing how much I am mistrusted. How I have never been worthy of trust because I have an active imagination. How it was "really important" for me to hear "how wrong" I was. I'm still folding over inside thinking of this.

But I'm not letting it crease me.

Today is one of those days when I'm doing my okayest. I'm tired. I want a break from this painful reality. But it's alive for me. No such break exists because I need to allow myself to feel this disappointment, write through it, accept it and let it release.

I'm getting there. And if you've read this far, thank you. I needed an ear. Today is hard. Today my heart hurts. But today is also beautiful because we are here together.

images from pixabay.com