Eloquently written words below. The letter sounds humbled and present. I was touched, but I also held my breath. I had one evening. until late night there were four phone calls. Each getting worse and more “abusive” as time went on. As my “Nos” kept coming out of me. As I stood my ground and understood more with each moment, of what I was actually being told, and what was actually being felt by the other person. The more I stood my ground, the more my Father seemed to be dying thru the phone waves. I know he was thrown for a loop at hearing what’s been on the inside of me. And then he was thrown at the death of a good friend. Life becomes very short when someone you had no time for suddenly is gone. Guilt is abusive in my family. So that night he was carrying all sorts of guilts. And instead of carrying his own, he was dumping them on me. Making me the bad guy. With each phone call, his feelings got more intense and finally, on the last phone call, I was the Bad Daughter. Implying that I have always been the good one. The seen and not heard daughter. Becoming the dead one in her own heart. In the end, on the last, now horrible set of phone calls, he was bringing up something from his past, of my sister’s words to him. GAME. He’d been hurt by what she’d said all those years ago and here now, he was comparing that “bad child” with the one now, that was saying No to him NOW. What she said was mean, but he and my Mother just never seem to look within for the answers to why things are said, or things are done “to” them. It always belongs to the other person involved. Never, so it has seemed to me, never theirs or at least partly to half theirs. My sister probably felt suffocated, which at this time, I can finally see. And I can see her point, and why she’s done many of the things she’s done. Needed to do in fact. In my opinion. The pressure to be THE GOOD CHILD, became ever so real to me on Four Call Night. It has been just a feeling all these years. Unspoken, but abusively implied. The SOUND of it was SCREAMING at me that night. It was also dying. I WAS FACING IT. Body tight as a drum. But everything OPEN. Ears were LISTENING, to what was being said, to what was being implied, to the in between unspoken but yet TOTALLY LOUD screaming hushed silent words. I felt the PULLING. His pulling me into the ways of the now past. The ways of what was NOW flowing past me, like a river flowing past my seated knees, my feet touching the floor underneath me, holding tight, feeling it all. LISTENING TO EVERYTHING. Shock hurt and despair. He was dying. He sounded like it. It was horrible. He was being Gamie and codependent, so totally outerly dependent. If I would only say Yes, then all would be all right in HIS world. But if I said yes, once again, like so many thousands of times before, I would be leaving my life. Giving it up for HIM. I would be in no ones world then. On another trip, with no real meaning, placed in the middle, having to hold up the front and the back ends, being blamed and Being SHRINK. So game filled. Might as well just jump off the closest bridge! I have no life of my own. My life is for about them. Stay seen and not heard and you are then Good Child. We against the world, against my sister. Empty and struggling in my own heart. I love my sister dearly and do not share in the crappy feelings my folks feel and have about her, the ones they have not looked at, that are theirs and theirs alone. I want out of that cocoon I’ve called them “loving me” space. I am stepping out right now. It makes me BAD Daughter.….. and yet maybe, just maybe and finally.…. allowing me to be GOOD to me, and therefore setting me FREE to find out who I am and be ME.
I HAVE CHOICE
(it’s every fucking where!)
