The Aftermath

Since the visit with my parents, my anxiety has been high. It is starting to settle down, but it spiked for a couple of days and especially nights.  I hope it doesn’t get like that every time I see them.

It’s hard to say why exactly.  I am having some moments where it hits me that I will have to deal with my mom ignoring boundaries and attempting manipulations.  I want to define the boundaries clearly and not having done that yet creates some anxiety.  I have the usual doubts about whether I am the problem. I felt a bit scared at how quickly I took comfort in their presence. I immediately thought that things would be fine now.  By that night, I knew that that was magical unicorn thinking.  It can’t all of the sudden be fine, it never stays the way it was inside of that visit.  But man, I wish it could...

The last few years have been so hard.  The time leading up to the estrangement, the time we spent estranged.  I so badly want it to be over.  I know that I have strengths I didn’t have before because of the distance, but it still feels like I’m a bit of a mess.  This year, I want to create some structure to get back some of what was lost in the wreckage.  I want to do art.  I want to continue writing.  Maybe the book can morph into something semi-autobiographical.  I am having such a hard time to make it palatable when it is about my relationship with my mom.  Maybe that relationship can be a secondary part of the book.  There are parts that I have written that I love.  Those parts feel so good to write.  

I asked my birth dad’s sister how he is doing.  She said he has deteriorated to a point where she can’t be in communication with him.  Hearing that was both hard and freeing.  I struggle with some feelings of guilt and obligation to try to help him or be there for him.  When she told me that he was unspeakably rude to the person who was dealing with his mom’s will and that when Deb tried to talk to him about it, he just didn’t get it, I just knew I don’t have to have him back in my life.  I have felt for years that he doesn’t really want me to be in his life and I know that I am not in a place where I can handle another angry, disordered relationship.  The last Xmas that we were in touch, he wanted nothing to do with us for the holidays.  No matter how much I tried to organize something that would be just us and him so that he would be comfortable.  Not even us bringing dinner to him.  He embraced the invite to go have dinner with ‘all the other people who don’t have anywhere to go’.  They made him comfortable and we made him uncomfortable. I don’t take offence, but I don’t want to keep feeling bad, especially at times like the holidays.  He doesn’t want us near.  He may have wanted Ivy around, but I would have had to limit his contact and give him rules that would have likely sparked more discord than was already forming. 

With the difficult road I have walked with my mom and the scary road Derek walks, I feel a bit lost sometimes.  Nature and nurture are both a non-sensical storm.  I want to create something in my life that is so different from the heartache and confusion of those situations.