I have been very scoured out with grief today. When my gardener, Rob arrived the tears were falling down my face and I know with Rob I can just be me, he won’t comment too much as we potter side by side for a little while in the garden. It means a lot to have some support with my house and garden after years of doing everything alone but as I potter the deep well of loneliness in my family is with me as a gaping wound and I am aware of the tragedy that split us all wide apart after my sister’s embolism. We have never been able to fully re unify and that is, as the youngest, what I have felt to be my ‘project’ and its interesting as I read years ago in a book by John Bradshaw that he says the fourth or youngest child often carries the buried lost connection feelings and feels the need to put back together what is broken.
But one human being is not God and so they cannot do this, even if they offer all the care, love and concern in the world and their heart aches with a wound they are trying to fix by proxy. As I have been crying deeply this mornning it has occured to me that this is what I did at the end of my marriage. I could not set a boundary and leave all the past family trauma behind I was impelled to come back to ‘look after’ my mother and sister who was then abandoned in a home for people with acquired brain injury and as part of the struggle I got a head injury myself though not a cerebral bleed.
I have not (yet) been able to move towards a separate or independent life. My worry for my Mum and sisters has preoccupied me to a huge degree. In that time my older sister died and as you know my other living sister tried to take her life and now struggles to live outside past family dysfunction with her own past relationship in tatters. None of us ever got away completely to a ‘happier’ place.
When I look at my living sister now I see the toll on her. I see how hard she struggled and struggles with her own emotional neglect in a family that when she was going down was hell bent on pulling her back up even if shock treatment had to be used. I feel less of the hurt she caused me when I was in recovery and she was in a more ‘split off’ place. I feel tremendous compassion but it bugs me when she wont let my Mum cry when that is what she needs to do and ferries her around to the doctor for what are somatised grief issues (as I see it.). Sorry if its all a bit repetitive I have shared all this elsewhere.
Anyway I now know my sadness is real. Despite what others think of me I did my best with the limitations I had and have and the illusion that laying my own life on the line would help some day to heal a wound far bigger than me alone, as my therapist confirms so often, means I have paid a very high price. I just pray my breast cancer doesn’t return again before I get a chance for some happiness and life on the other side of it.
Lately prior to this last hiccup I was starting to feel happier. I was and am some days though still deeply lonely and feel orphaned in my soul. Other days I feel parented and loved by my own self and have self compassion. Today the critic is back and I am struggling a lot with seeing how I have not been good at setting boundaries. I take a lot on board, far more than I should maybe but how do I change this as a compassionate person? Sometimes it hurts to see a painful truth and we need time to process and absorb it.
That said the ghost of loss trauma and emptiness over past family experiences will never be fully exorcised. The most I can hope to do is live with it not covering my entire being in a shroud. I know there is life outside trauma and I hope to find it. My therapist, Kat sees signs of me leaving trauma behind more lately as well as signs of new growth. I know I will still have the sore, hurting struggle days becasue I am human. I just need to accept myself and others in the growing knowledge that as human beings we all struggle with wounds and limits and flaws. And as I end this post I am reminded of what John Lennon famously said, “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans!”
Emerging From The Dark Night 