Something came to me recently…a whispered idea to my heart…a voice inside my head…
they really don’t like you…they just say they do…because they have to…
My competitive feelings with my ex…
My constant insecurities with my children…
My feelings of loneliness…
They all stem from my fears that my children (and people in general) will ultimately not like me.
Not that my children won’t ‘love’ me…because I am their parent after all…but that they wouldn’t choose me, had they had a choice.
Like HE did…
That if they had the choice to leave me too, they would.
Because it is me that is unloveable. That I am too hard and unsavory and that the chances out there with someone or something else are more appealing than choosing me. I am unworthy of love and affection, just as those that came before me. Obviously there is precedent set at this point.
Cringeworthy Examples
My mother taught me how to tolerate a mother out of obligation and duty. My father taught me how to ignore and ultimately have no outward feelings one way or the other about a mother.
My mother despised and had no respect for her own father. He was a long time cheating bastard to my waif-like grandmother. My mother tells me of how she lost respect for her mother due to her weakness of staying with such a despicable man (who ultimately ended up leaving my grandmother after 30 years of marriage to finally marry one of his paramours so she could gain citizenship-who ultimately took him for everything as I guess he deserved)
My father had little love lost to his own father. He was a crude businessman with unscrupulous business practices that my father didn’t agree with…my father apparently had some sense of right and wrong.
Loving and accepting your parents and having a strong family connection is not a passed down tradition in my family.
My ex feels obligated and weighed down by his own mother who suffers from bipolar disorder and spent most of her life taking from people without a thought to appreciation or repayment; including he and his sister when they were living with her in their trailer park. He only contacts her out of some sense of obligation and pity. One of his comments to me post divorce was how I should at least now be thankful that I don’t have to deal with his mother anymore…as though if he could divorce and leave her behind, he would.
My ex has no real relationship with his own father who left his mother when he was five. He was the visiting dad, every other weekend, who came and went without much fanfare. When my ex got old enough to choose, he chose not to see him. Throughout our marriage, I tried to help him come to an honest place and confront his feelings and the absence of connection, but that never occurred. He rarely speaks to his father. His one post divorce comment about his father – “I am not my father.” (meaning I guess that he would do divorce ‘right’, unlike his own father who had failed him so miserably)
My Own Inner Guilt
I love my parents. I love them because they are my parents and I have come to accept them for who they are. They are imperfect. They smoke frequently (my mother even marijuana), my father is a functioning alcoholic (beer in the morning shouldn’t be a problem, right?), they have not loved one another for decades. My mother openly disparages my father, and is a difficult woman to please. My father is emotionally unavailable typically, and there are days when I regret having called in the afternoon and he has answered. I have labeled them a symbiotic parasitic relationship for as long as I can remember – one can’t live without the other, yet they feed off one another in an unhealthy way.
The Bottom Line?
I do not want to end up like history has taught me I should
I do not want my children to only visit me out of obligation. I want them to desire a relationship with me. I want them to be happy to have their children around me because I offer a safe and secure environment of love and care. I want to be the place everyone comes ‘home’ to for that feeling of stability and security.
I want a family unlike the experiences I have had in my own life
I have looked to reap my rewards of family in my older age. I envisioned an old couple sitting on their porch with their grandchildren running on the lawn, sitting around the cozy fireplace reminiscing of times gone past and memories of fun and laughter and joy. The shattered dream of that vision has rocked my world in more ways than I could ever have imagined.
I was so deluded.
Now I just live in fear. Not rational fear, mind you…but fear nonetheless.
A sometimes crippling fear…
And a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts in my own mind…
And I just continue to move forward regardless…
Because HE left me because of HIM, not because of ME.
Right?
Making Sense from MY Perspective 
Abso-fucking-lutely right! And don’t you think twice or otherwise about it. People put up with what they want. People love whom they want. And people leave and give up when they want. Everyone has their combination of sane and crazy and it’s up to each individual to decide what they can live with or without. And when you are dealing with selfish, narcissistic folk, you have to under that they only think of themselves while pretending to love. And when they leave, you start questioning everything about yourself. So stop it. You may have faults, as I will assume you do because you’re HUMAN. That doesn’t give his walking out on you any credibility. Bottom line, he was a jerk that left his family.
Phoenix is right! We are all little broken….some more than others. We just need to pick ourselves up and piece ourselves back together and move on to something better. One day at a time.
Narcs leave you when they realize they have sucked you dry. The “game” is over. they need a new challenge. Let them go….as hard as it is. There will be better days….
Changes in the way families cope with things or treat each other can start with one heart, one voice. That voice is yours and you have already started. You have acknowledged things about your parents that cannot be changed. You have acknowledged your dream of ‘the-happy-ever-after’ will never be. That has taken courage to share that with us. You are strong. You are and will always be a “safe and secure environment of love and care … the place everyone comes ‘home’ to for that feeling of stability and security.”
Thank you Elizabeth. I hope you are right. 🙂