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how do you let go of the past, when it rears its ugly head around every important turn? 2007-07-17 4 1:58 a.m. sometimes i worry that things are so fucked up, they're not fixable. that i'm not fixable. i feel broken, hobbled as my sister describes it. nasty pessimistic streak i've got, i know. but every time my sister comes home for any length of time, she digs up shit that i would much rather let stay buried, and if not forgotten, at least avoided. it's just more and more proof of our eloquently dysfunctional background. she found these letters buried in my mom's files - cause my mother keeps pretty much anything and everything and my sister loves to dig thru stuff and "find the truth". one was a letter our father wrote to her when she was about 8 because she had written to him, and in her endless child-like inquisitive nature, asked him many serious and deep questions such as, 'why did you leave us' and 'don't you love us anymore' - crazy deep sincere and emotional questions from a child so young -- and it tears my heart out to think that instead of sitting down and connecting with this scared hurting kid, all she got was an impersonal and poorly written letter in return for her pain. and this letter can cause me pain even today. now my father was not a child when he and my mother divorced - they had been married 14 years and were not immature teenagers or anything like that - yet my father acted like a 16 year old no-common-sense type of kid in all his interactions with us. in the letter, my father actually tells my sister that he didn't actually love her when she was first born - it was only over time, and with the things she did and the love she showed to him, that he fell in love with her. what kind of a lesson is that to teach a young impressionable child?? that she has to do something in order to earn a parent's love - even worse, that she has to love him in order for him to love her? how fucked up. and we have all these letters - i've read a few of them before - where my father and grandfather bitch about how my sister and i never sent thank you notes for birthday or christmas presents - many of these letters are written in the 80s when my sister and i were about 10 or under. but my sister dug up a new cherry i hadn't read before - this one from my father to my mother where he told her he didn't send us christmas presents one year on purpose because of all our previous lack of appreciation -- in order to teach us a lesson. ... i'm sorry, who the fuck is the adult in this equation? sure as hell isn't my father. you're bitching because a nine-year-old doesn't say thank you? grow the fuck up. you're a dad - you're supposed to buy things for your kids and they're supposed to be greedy and just take it - that's kinda status quo - why do you need your kid to thank you for being a father? the worse part of the letter is when my mother asked for money (which granted she did quite often cause she was a single mother of two and my father was getting a 100k raise every year or so) and he wrote back that he'd give us more money but he'd like the girls (me and my sis) to write and let him know what it was going for. my sister and i cracked up reading this because we figured such a letter would go about like this: "dear dad [written in an elementary kid scrawl], will you please send $20 so i can turn on the tv and watch cartoons after school? thank you so much. i love you." now i do love my father - don't get me wrong. i have a tenuous relationship with him these days - one of kinda acquaintance level instead of father/daughter or even distant relative to distant relative, but seriously - what the hell was he thinking to treat children this way? and my mother's no angel in this equation. she played me against my father from day one, and withheld her love on a very fragile and conditional basis as well. and that's what kills me to think of it now - that this is my definition of love: something to be worked for and earned only when someone else's expectations are reached - a treat that can be yanked away at the slightest provocation or disappointment. so it's hard as an adult to contemplate feelings toward another human being and to not use the role models i've had - to instead forge an idea that love is something easy and sweet and given freely without any expectations. and as usual, my heart knows things all along, but my mind is slow on the uptake. but while rooting through all my papers that i'm organizing this summer, i found a semi-quote from thich nhat han scrawled on a scrap of paper that said: "causes and circumstances airse and then they go away, and this is just who i am under these circumstances." so i strive to hold on to that thought - that i'm not who i was in the past - that as an adult, i can believe in more than what i was taught, more than what i was shown, and create a life more than what i had. and you know what they say, the cycle ends with me. previous - next