splitting : and some more of my trauma story

I wonder at times if I made my family into more unfeeling monsters than they were in the painful aftermath of all of our family trauma. That said how could I be less fearful and feel more a part of something that was of a far older time. Dad was 41 when I was born and Mum was 36 and in the 60s they were older parents and I was the ‘mistake’ though Dad often said I was the happiest mistake they ever made. As I shared the other day I look at my Dad with softer eyes now and a clearer heart. I know what he underwent in the years of trauma not only when my accident shattered him but Judith’s haemorrhage too and the financial stress my brother put him under. I think of how with his soft Libra moon he internalised more. He was a man of few but well considered words. He wasn’t shown much affection so he didn’t really know how to do that and my brother is very similar really. And Dad was only 24 when Gary was born but away at the War.

When I was born the family was on an upwardly mobile business trajectory. It was my older sister who bonded with me but she went away when I was 3 and that was confusing. She came back to live in Sydney after a few years in New Zealand and I was closer to her and her two older sons because the age gaps were closer for me than with my own siblings and I prayed for them to come back to Canberra but it wasn’t long after that she had the haemorrhage and then was taken away from us then returned with a one way ticket and those dark years she never spoke of even when she was in the home. She kept so much locked up inside but it was when I had to wheel her out of the cinema after she started screaming in a scene of a movie where a woman’s children were taken from her I realised the trigger. I had to apologise for wheeling her out, was I becoming the mother who said “be quiet with your suffering Judith, what will the neighbours think?” after her husband abandoned her?

I think of the trauma I witnessed on her return as my parents slowly discovered she only had a one way ticket and her husband had no intention of welcoming her home again. They tried to ring his brother who told them the truth, and apparently shortly after this he told the two older boys they were on their own. The other two got sent to boarding school as the woman my brother in law had shacked up with over there would not allow them in the house. Is it any wonder the third oldest was diagnosed bi polar too many years ago?

I still don’t really know if my brother in law was a ‘bad’ man as my mother thought, or a weak man. I don’t like to label anyone bad but people can feel frightening to be around that is for sure. I see what my brother in law was struggling with and know my sister was in intense person and in some ways bought about her ‘crash’ by pushing too hard with that addictive streak the force and power of which comes from unresolved ancestral grief that went back two generations.. yes to New Zealand and she ended up marrying a New Zealander.

Anyway it was all a blur for me and I had my own trauma. I have reconnected with my sister’s boys since moving home in 2011 and I speak to two of them quiet frequently but I never escaped from all of this family trauma really it was always slumbering there.

I just posted a poem about the Christmas my sister crashed a few years after I moved back home. I could not go to spend that Christmas with my Mum her and her oldest son but I got horrific nosebleeds the entire 3 days. I had to go to emergency they were so bad and my nose literally was passing clots the size of small tennis balls. It just felt too unsafe to be around them then and I cry about it all but writing this is important. I think I carried so much of the feelings, lostness and confusion. Maybe with Mercury now moving forward its coming to light. I don’t think I am splitting maybe just struggling hard to make sense of all the feelings such events triggered as well as the reason relationships have so often felt unsafe or like land mine territory for me.