Monday, March 12, 2018

Coming to a place of peace - my amazing family

My best guess is that my curiosity about what makes my family tick started before I could speak, began in the cradle & crib, watching the different personalities interact.  Words were not needed to convey the messed-up dynamics that saddled my parents & sibs with the mess of nerves & neroses that still addles my experience of them.  

Looking at the endless shelves of books on surviving family trauma, can safely guess that we were far from alone in our messed-up-ness.  My gift to the world is sharing my experiences with my truly amazing family to help pierce the false sense of "we are so wretched & other families are so together" - - family funkiness, including varying levels of damaging abuse, unintentional & not, seems more the rule than the exception.    

Where once I was totally absorbed by comprehending the incomprehensible, I now offer up thanks for the incredible education that was mine simply by being part of my family.  And none was a greater teacher than my one & only sister, Mim.

99.9% of those who know the two of us would break into raucous laughter at the suggestion that for almost twenty-five years, my greatest wish was to be just like my sister.  Made sense.  Mim was not only the sun moon stars of my life, but of my parents', too.  Although she registered with most of the world as quiet, withdrawn & self-effacing to the point of self-degradation, Mim was the absolute arbiter of what defined our family & how it functioned.  

Peter might have styled himself a prince who had been switched at birth by hobgoblins, but Mim was the undisputed Head of Household.  Not that any of us saw that - we howled with laughter when Pam, Peter's wife, observed that the family quaked in our boots at her displeasure.  But she nailed it.

Mark Wolynn's book, It Didn't Start With You, helped me nail it - well, at least tack it down a bit better than before.  It's not lost on me that the book that gave me a loving handle on my fetish with figuring out family fault lines came out in after Mim's 2015 passing.  Would I have processed it differently if she hadn't died?  If things associated with her passing hadn't happened?  

One of my friends marvels at the sense of peace I've come to with my family, especially since she had a ring-side seat at the sturm & drang that came before.  When she sighs & wishes she had a similarly healthier experience of her own apparently very together but under the surface whack-a-doodle family, I share my belief that when we remain open to amazing things happening, they usually do - - but it might take time.  And there's no knowing what will trigger the change.

Mim's 07/03/15 passing had an unexpected ZOWIE impact on everything, for reasons I could never have guessed.  It wasn't related in any way to her no longer actively being in my life, although the best of her insights & influence will always be with me.  It wasn't related to working with my niece in Australia to put together Mim's 100% online memorial.  It was because of the stunning things shared that would never have been said while she was alive & which I absolutely positively hungered to hear.  

After a gathering of friends watched the memorial, one of Mim's nearest & dearest suggested we share memories & stories there, instead of at the celebration party.  She kicked off the comments by observing, "What most people don't know about Mim was that she was tough."  I smiled, thinking she meant tough as in emotionally resilient.  Not so.  The friend looked directly at me & said, "Deev, it could not have been easy being her sister."

Never never never did I ever expect to hear those words; never had it occurred to me how it would feel, having those words fall on my ear.  Nothing more, no further build, just a simple acknowledgement that Mim could be unimaginably & intentionally cruel.  

It still astonishes me, hearing those words, having them register as being said, and experiencing something I never imagined ever feeling - a sense of total peace with my sister.  They talk about someone feeling as if a burden had been lifted from their shoulders - that was me hearing those words, words that freed other friends of hers to offer their own comfort at the party, words that would never have been spoken while Mim was alive.  Above all, honest words that were shared with full hearts & great love for my sister, without so much as a smidgen of reproach toward Mim.  A dream come true, on every level.  And, I believe, something that needed to happen before I could read It Didn't Start With You with a clear eye & tender heart. I am not joshing when I question whether I could have heard &  processed its messages until the finite moment in time that it came out in 2016.

Our family's messed up dynamics didn't start with me - and they didn't start with Mim, either.  They didn't start with Mom or Dad, with Gran or Gar.  They arch back over generations, unrecognized & unintentionally perpetuated. 

Almost all of my life, from cradle to late middle age, was spent trying to figure out MY family.  The gift I was given at sixty-four was the simple awareness & acceptance of how family history touches all of us, touches our families & through them our communities, our universe.  

The very thought that gave me such comfort would surely have aggravated & irked Mim.  Just as my core life goal, from a very young age, was seeing myself as an individual yet part of a greater whole, it was clearly critical to Mim to see herself as shriekingly unique, separate unto & of herself.  Maybe separate from herself, a thought I don't understand but which seems like it fits.  

Here's my theory about Mim:  Our parents came with massively damaged histories.  Peter has described our maternal grandmother as the most evil person on earth;  I never heard anything from either Mom nor from my oldest cousin, Peggy, to dispute that description.  When Dad was in his early teens, his adored mother gave birth to a baby who died soon after & she died within days - Dad always said she died of a broken heart, because his father was having an affair with the woman who subsequently became his step-mother.  

It didn't take any convincing for me to accept that both sides of my family is marked by family trauma - who knows how far back it stretches?  Mim had the burden of openly discussed traumas that reached down into her life - - she was the one, not either of her older brothers, sent to keep Gran company.  Mim was not even in her teens & she was thrust into being companion to a twisted woman.  I cannot imagine the damage that did.  But even before that, Mim was emotionally mangled by some sort of abuse - I assume physical, probably sexual - when she was a very little girl.  It was NEVER mentioned, but it didn't take a brainiac to see how my parents & brothers acted & reacted to figure out, nor to be surprised when it was confirmed by another close friend of hers in 2016 - he never knew what happened just that it had - another disclosure that would never have been made if she had still been alive.  

And those are the circumstances that I know about.  Can guarantee that unknown situation upon unknown situation affected my parents & siblings.  My instinct to judge based on what I know is leavened by the knowledge of all that I don't.  

Here's the bottom line for sharing my experiences with my mega messed-up family - - if I can get to the place where I am, anyone can.  If they want.  But it meant giving up issues that were so much a part of my life, setting them aside was a painful wrench I thought twice about doing.  Those issues had, to an incredibly large extent, defined me - who was I without them?  It meant having absolute faith that what could come through experiencing the voluntary pain of setting them aside would be worth the loss, the temporary but very real sense of desolation.  

It can't be rushed.  It can only happen through keeping an open heart.  It will be painful.  Yet coming to this place of peace was worth it.  





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