On Family and Familiarity

A pipe dream is still a dream

I’m working through some rigid emotional patterns today around family. I can’t say which is harder for me. I am forgiving family members for once again being utterly disappointing and unceremoniously rejecting me while ironically painting me as some outsider who rejects family, and I’m forgiving myself for believing that anyone of my own bloodline has done enough inner personal work to overcome our inherited generational trauma to behave in a manner that is worthy and deserving of the esteem I place upon them whenever one of them reaches out to me in any semblance of friendship.

I have trust issues, and the primary issue I have is that I trust people too much and with too much value before properly vetting them.

It’s not all people. It’s just the people I happen to be related to genetically.

I recently found a stone of great value in the riverbed outside my backyard. It could be worth anywhere from $800 to who knows how much. It’s a hefty chunk of variscite someone apparently dropped in the river unwittingly at some point in this river’s history. Could’ve been in there for decades or even a century. It’s clearly had some river tumbling to give it its oval, dragon egg shape and appearance. People have already offered to purchase it from me, not even knowing its full value. I find myself strangely attached to it, so much so that I won’t sell it presently for any amount of money. I haven’t even entertained the offers enough to ask what they would give me for it after they ask me if I would be willing to sell it to them.

This rock makes me feel lucky. I kinda feel like I need that feeling in my life right now. It gives me hope.

I also think of how things show up in our lives to bring us wealth. This rock could be one of those things. I could use the wealth and release the pretty rock that I didn’t have in my hands a few days ago. It was worth nothing to me before I had it. A mere three days ago, I didn’t know it existed, and I certainly wouldn’t have paid money to buy it. But the way it came into my life by a particular happenstance that felt as though it was related to me personally, I now suddenly place a higher value upon it than money. It may cost me and my family to keep something I never cared about until I found it. But for whatever reason, be it some attachment to my brief experience with it, my relationship to having it in my life, I can’t seem to let it go.

My aunt recently accepted my FB friend request. I don’t know when I sent it to her. I always liked her, and felt I related to her more than my mother’s other siblings. She was the only other person in my family on my mother’s side who was a blonde. Maybe that had something to do with it. She gives off an air of having her shit together more than anyone else in my mom’s family. My aunts could all be petty in picking on my mom to watch her fly off the handle. I’ve witnessed them take a deranged pleasure in gaslighting her and watching her react madly to their gaslighting. She’s easily spun up, and she’s somewhat psychotic so I can’t say I blame them for having their issues with her. Still, my mom has this demented opinion that her sisters are everything, and for her whole life, she’s had this ridiculous dream, fantasy really, that her ultimate outcome for her retirement years would be having her sisters live next door to her in a row. For some reason, she truly believes this dream may come true somehow even though my mom lives in Texas now, near her grandchildren and far from any of her family. Her sisters that are the closest to one another live in Sacramento, California and Oregon respectively and rarely see each other. They both love their abodes and feel no such inclination, close as they are to move closer to each other. And the last aunt, whom I believe left California first, still lives in Washington state.

Maybe for my mother, the closest she ever felt to unconditional love was some point when her sisters all looked out for one another as children. She has spent her life, rather than creating an inner relationship to herself that makes creating more relationships like that possible in the future, trying to get back to that childhood experience, naively believing her sisters also share her dream and would relish living next door to one another. For this reason, she has refused to even bond with her own children or give her own children the fealty she offers her sisters who as adults and grandparents, all in their seventies, delight in antagonizing her. It’s very unhealthy, truly. And yet, they all feel somewhat loyal to her as well. Out of some strange loyalty to my mother, they wouldn’t attend my sister’s wedding, for example because my sister invited my half sister and my mom wouldn’t be in the same room as my half sister even for her own daughter’s wedding reception.

Ok, if you haven’t figured it out yet, my blood relations are all a little retarded. It has taken me until my forties to accept this fact enough to distance myself and sever ties with my mother, father, sister, brothers and until a year or so ago, my half sister.

When my aunt accepted my friend request, I felt honestly nervous at first. The first couple messages she sent me were about my mom, updates I just ignored. I don’t need to keep tabs on people that are not healthy for me to be in a relationship with and who have not given me the credit for what it costs me to even attempt to keep their insanity in my life.

But over the past couple months that my aunt and I have been FB friends, liking each other’s photos, memes and whatnot, I grew quickly attached to my aunt. We had messaged a few times about her daughter’s art and planning her daughter’s wedding. Then, out of the blue, a reel I shared had another aunt (a slightly more petty, cynical and untrustworthy aunt) liking and commenting. It was a post that the first aunt had commented on as well. I realized for a very hot second that there was a sort of familial humor. I got a little excited about the rosy idea of kinship and healthy familiarity. I wondered what might have brought them around, but I thought maybe memes and reels could truly heal the world. Then, out of the blue, my first aunt is gone, and it’s clear she had blocked me. I have no idea why. A few days later, the reel is gone, and to make matters worse, this reel for no reason whatsoever has been removed, labeled by FB as a cybersecurity threat which is utterly preposterous (it wasn’t, it was an old lady knitting so hardly controversial material and certainly not a cybersecurity threat as I have been assured by my techy husband) and my account has been demoted to “yellow status” whatever the fuck that means for sharing “dangerous content.”

Talk about shit going sideways. But I’m still in an emotional tailspin about the prospect of sharing family humor one minute and being blocked by the aunt I was barely getting close to the next minute. I was like, what the fuck just happened??? I’m hurt. I’m disappointed. I’m hurt more than I should be. Did I say something? Did cynical bitch aunt say something about being friendly with me? What is this? Did my mom find out and poison the well?

Or are all of these grown ass adults still too emotionally feeble to hold a relationship with a person and not have it be about or the business of anyone else? Yeah, that’s the problem. And why did I give her appearance in my life so much more significance than it deserved? It’s like pretty rocks. You’d think humans should be more valuable than pretty rocks, especially ones I am related to, but I can’t seem to let any of them go easily. I wanted our brief relationship to be significant, like a wild, exotic bird from Peru appearing out of nowhere and landing on my head in Utah. It could happen, but if it happened, it would be a really special happening that one wouldn’t take for granted or dismiss so unceremoniously.

I think a piece of my heartbreak right now is coming to the conclusion that the underdeveloped people I am related (all of them) to aren’t just retarded, they are damaged and hurtful. I know I spent a lot of years in personal growth seminars, forgiveness work, trying to make being with these people tolerable. Eventually learning that even if I could tolerate them, maybe I didn’t want or need to. I wrote my book about it in 2019, but since then, the hits from the people I saw as possibly more tolerable and potentially unscathed by our genetic trauma keep coming. As I realized, we’re all a little touched, as the old saying goes. I saw that the ones I thought might be cool made most of their lives about day drinking and other escapism which I took to be hobbies, but were now apparently just coping mechanisms for the toxic lifestyle we were brought up around and an outright refusal to address it, grow from it and fucking evolve already.

Everything in their world is too pretty. I mistook it for health. It’s a bunch of saccharine. How do I keep getting sucked in and how do I get over it and move forward stronger?

I’m going to leave this question open ended and this blog open ended because there’s a saying about living the question and one day growing into the answer. My hope is that my surrender to the unknown and uncertain without trying to stuff all my holes with reasons will bear a better ultimate outcome here. Faking it until you make it only goes so far. I don’t want something I can conceive of in my grief to be the finish. I want something infinitely and inconceivably better for myself,

and I am willing to wait for it.