Tag: blood family

I’m trying to figure out Grace

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Grace for those I’ve wronged, because indeed I have. I have hurt with words too powerful, too strong. I wanted the cuts to hurt and I’m ashamed of that desire. Hurting someone because you have been hurt, that’s the opposite of what I believe. Why do our actions so often belie our truth?  And what do I actually believe? Why is it wrong to want destruction I ask even as I know it is.

What is grace and can you believe in it, if you no longer “believe.”

To me grace is kindness without reason. Holding your tongue. Not gossiping about someone who hurts you.

That is undeserved. Grace is believing in the goodness of others and yourself. Grace is a desire to be worthy turned into action of all this and more.

Obviously I’m confused. Why are we kind? Why be generous with our attitudes, our words, our motivations when others are just gone? The golden rule presumes goodness in us, if we treat them the way we want to be treated–with kindness.

I wanted so much from my family, a more that they could never fulfill. Or wouldn’t, won’t. I’ll never know. But my codependency on my family was best broken/severed. Sometimes severing a limb is necessary.

severed; severing -(ə-)riŋ 1
: to put or keep apart : divide
especially : to cut off or through

It leaves one with phantom pain. But it’s only indulgence that makes me wallow there in the abstraction of missing. In the perceived unfairness of my wound. Rather than pondering the why. Why was it necessary?

Love hunger is so dangerous, both emotional and spiritual. Ironically my hunger made me willing to hurt a sibling who rejects me.  I’m wounded by the separation.

How dare they? It’s oceans of pain washing over me.

But I need to force myself to confront how I could be so vicious. What values do I actually hold to? How did I lose track of them? Why do we hurt those we love (or need approval from) the most? This is the legacy of dysfunctional families.

What will grace look like then? Holding gently in one hand my pain and extending the other, open.

We are Blood.

I am sitting in my car waiting. As I have sat inside and outside of schools, doctors’ offices, and in cars, all these years.

Always sitting with my sorrow, I wait.

I wish my mother was here, I find myself saying out loud, welcome tears spring to my eyes. Also, I am still surprised by them.

My health feels like a constant betrayal, as if. Am I owed good health, not headaches, not body aches, not a loose stomach, not fatigue, not depression, not anxiety, not sleeplessness? How is it that I of all people “deserve” good health? I know that I don’t. But my mother would have had wisdom about it. I am lost.

The sky is as gloomy and dismal as my mood. It follows the grief of Palestine that is ringing in my ears, my heart, and my mind; abuzz with adrenaline from witnessing genocide. Don’t we remember Rwanda?

So many families, generations lost. I think.

How do I preserve mine? We’re fractured. My sister doesn’t speak to me, specifically. My parents are dead. Holly is dead. Our children are many including Holly’s and those that have joined ours. We are all a legacy.

We each and all matter.

Even though I feel lost, unmoored, untethered, and without roots, I feel my family lineage breaking in my body; I know that it is now my responsibility to be the strength that holds the generations together. Even though my sister has chosen not to be with me, we are vital. We are a link to the next generation. We are blood.

Choking

You choke on the words.
You hurt me.

Three simple words,
a confrontation that won’t come.
The fear-scab
comes off the child-grown-up-into-woman wound.
The mutilation, scarred over long enough  
that you had actually forgotten.
Again.
Impossible.

You needed to forget.
Until
mother-sister-blood
family rips it off again.
Their indifference,
your insignificance,
that’s what you need to forget
their command
over you.

They are the only ones
Wielding the control, able to make
you choke on the words.
You hurt me.

They don’t read.
They don’t come.
They don’t care.

You choke on the words
You hurt me.