betweenthewires

I’m going through it at the moment. It kicked off with Joel’s anniversary and then having to deal with the up & coming distribution of my Nanna’s estate has tipped me over the edge. On top of that Tamika’s health has been precarious and it’s just too much.

I really do need to go and find myself a new therapist, but as usual it’s money that is the issue. Tomorrow my so called family are getting together to distribute everyone’s inheritance from Nanna’s estate. I have had no part in any of it, no communication, nothing. I’ve been effectively ostracized. I spoke to my Dad today and he remarked that I should appeal. LOL. Appeal what. I’ve been telling you for the last year that this is so unfair and you’ve shrugged. And now the day before you suddenly realise just how shitty this whole thing is. And you want me to appeal and cement myself even harder as the villian? No thanks. My sister knew what she was doing. I told him that after tomorrow I’m done with all of them, including my sister. I don’t want to hear about her, I don’t want to know about her, she no longer exists. It’s just too painful for me to deal with. I will work through it in therapy and draw a line under it all.

I’ve been crying a lot, just letting myself feel everything that comes up. It’s not easy, because I come from a family of avoidants. Even when I show emotion around Dad he immediately gets uncomfortable and tries to shut me down. I realise that I’ve never really had support from my family, apart from platitudes. It’s been an interesting realisation. It’s any wonder I’m so independent. I’m sure being AuDHD has a lot to do with it, but also I do not remember my mother or father being overtly comforting. My Nanna on the other hand, she was such a comfort to me. I had my Mum for 27 years and my Nanna was my replacement Mum for 24 years. No one seems to understand how close we were, how much of a support she was for me when I lived in Chelt. When I went through life changing surgery (twice) and she looked after my cats and made me meals and showed me more love than anyone else combined (apart from my Dad). My own sister visited me ONCE while I was in hospital. I was in and out for FIVE months and that was the best she could do. At the time I shrugged about it, now I hate her for it.

I want to live what time I have left without such negativity in my life. I’ve had such a hard time ever since Joel died really, even before that. Understanding my neurodivergence has helped a whole heap, but i’m sure I have buried a whole lot. I really just want to live a simple life, doing the job I love, keeping to myself and finding joy in the little things.

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Tags: family, life, mental health, writing

(I may or may not come back and edit this for clarity – this was an early morning stream of consciousness)

Something that’s really interesting to me that I’ve observed over the last 24 years of not having a mother is that people have lost their empathy. I don’t expect people to feel the same way that I do about losing my own mother but every year when I post my anniversary post it gets less and less interaction and that just feels strange to me. People who would once reach out via SMS or phone just do not bother anymore.

I’m certainly not looking for grand gestures, but recognition matters. Recognition that my life has actually been really hard without my mother. I struggled really hard for so long but because people perceived me as being the strong one I feel like that I never really got the support that I needed.

Another thing that I find interesting is the parallels between myself and my grandfather Harry. He was obviously a very broken man after serving in the war. And I’m not saying that I’m broken in that way at all. But he found life increasingly difficult and eventually he bought a camper van and moved into the middle of nowhere and seemingly found happiness in the last part of his life doing his own thing. And I wonder about his neurodivergence and I wonder if he ever received any empathy. Because the messaging that I received from my Nanna from my parents from my aunt and uncle’s was that he was a loser basically. He was given no understanding and compassion from what I could see. A few years ago I made an offhand comment about him and one of my uncles really tore into me about my grandpa being an alcoholic and I was surprised that my uncle who was then in his 60s still couldn’t see his own father as a fully formed human being who had complicated life experiences and no doubt had PTSD. Instead my uncle chose to still demonise my grandpa and I find that extremely sad. But it also helps me to understand the way that my family have treated me. It’s like any form of perceived weakness gets you outcast from the family. One of my other uncles was / is an alcoholic and he’s been derided all of his life by the rest of my family as well and I stop and think to myself well what was going on for him that he felt that he needed to self-medicate in this way. There genuinely doesn’t seem to be any sort of curiosity from my family around that sort of stuff which I find confronting and depressing. 

I still really struggle with the way that my family have treated me and I don’t think I’m ever going to get any sort of closure around it. The hardest thing has definitely been the way that my sister has ostracised me and the fact that she stole part of my inheritance from me. I just cannot imagine treating anyone like that I just don’t have it in me to be like that and to be able to sleep at night and to be able to look people in the eye and know that I’m a decent human being. But clearly she doesn’t think that it’s a problem to steal money from her big sister who is disabled who can’t work full-time and who is overall struggling in life. But there’s nothing that I can do about that and once the money arrives, if the money ever arrives, I will go no contact with her because I don’t need someone like that in my life at all. That doesn’t bother me so much what does bother me is not having a relationship with my niece and nephew but maybe someday they’ll come to understand just how poorly their mother has treated me but I’m not holding my breath because I’ve seen the way that my family makes a pariah out of those who are different and who struggle.

I often find myself wondering what my life would look like if my mother was still alive. Because it seems like she was the glue that held the family together and kept things functional. It didn’t take long for things to start to disintegrate once she had died. I certainly don’t think she would stand for them treating me the way that they do but who knows. I don’t want to make the mistake of putting my mother on a pedestal because at times our relationship was really quite difficult and rocky. She hit me a few times we often butt heads over things but overall I feel like we had a good relationship. I wanted to how accepting she would be of my neurodivergence. Unfortunately I don’t have a good memory of my childhood but I feel like having an avoidant father who wasn’t really around much and a mother who was probably there more for other people than she was for me really did do damage to me. And the fact that like a lot of girls in my era I was raised as a people pleaser and how moving away from that as an adult and putting boundaries in place has meant that my family sees me as some sort of arsehole instead of understanding that in order for me to survive I needed to put those boundaries in place. I have been out more than once trying to be the person that does everything and after my major surgery and the subsequent shit storm that came with that I just couldn’t do that anymore physically and mentally. And I feel like my family never stops to think about how traumatizing that whole experience was for me and what it must have done to my body and my mind. Again it’s that need for people to be strong and stoic when I was anything but strong and stoic because I was literally on death store for 5 months. It still hurts that my sister only bothered to come and visit me once when I was in hospital for 5 months and even then she made sure that she had to rush and be somewhere else immediately afterwards. I feel like for a lot of my life I’ve looked at my sister and my family through rose coloured glasses and I can finally see them for who they are and they’re actually not very nice people and the compassion and understanding that they think that they give people is just not there unless you fit in their neat little box. 

I’ve had a lot of these thoughts rattling around in my head now for months and I’m sitting here doing voice to text because typing it out just seems like too much work.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: family, life, mental health, writing