prefix: I do try very hard in this blog not to talk about things that will upset people, and the last thing i want from this random babbling of thoughts and feelings that is my blog is to hurt anyone else's feelings. I know some relatives read this blog *waves* i hope very much that you will read this kindly and without offence.
Things haven't always been great with my family.
I'm not exactly sure when things started going wrong with parts of my family...maybe my late childhood or early adolescence...but somehow they just seemed to end up at a point where things were just so tense, so upsetting and so difficult.
At one point Coyote compared us to a group of wild animals circling each other waiting for a weak moment to attack. I think that's a little harsh. in my own opinion, we were more like urchins, each of us with spikes out towards each other trying to protect our vulnerable insides.
My mental health problems really didn't help the situation. It made me feel very defensive and paranoid and sensitive...I am capable of creating a whole argument in my head with people who are my closest friends that I see every day out of nothing, so when you get a situation when I'm not seeing people very often and there are actual crossed wires or issues...I reacted very very badly. Family gatherings started to make me incredibly nervous, to the point of panic attacks, and I dealt with this as I did with most other problems...by getting drunk. Which made everything worse, and really didn't show my personality to its best advantage...and then I tried to hide just how sick I was from them. I wanted to protect my family from the knowledge, I didn't want them to know about the suicide attempts and the fact that I couldn't leave the house on my own any more, my crushing depression and my self injury...I didn't want to upset them, and I felt so under attack, I didn't want to show the very real struggles that I was going through. So when I left work, and didn't get another job I'm pretty sure a lot of people simply saw me as a lazy looser... and I saw this opinion reflected back at me which made me more defensive and isolated from people who were just genuinely worried about me, and upset by my apparent attitude and behavior. It felt to me as if i had been cast in the role of the villain who couldn't do or say anything right, which made me hopeless and come across aggressively...
It was a mess.
So their we all were. Spikes out, in a mess of misunderstandings and miscommunication's...
and into it all came Tabitha...and somehow just fixed everything. Her knowing her family was so important to me that I made sure that they knew all about her and what she was getting up to, it made me keen for everyone to see her and spend time with her. It cast me in a different role, as a mother, a caring, attentive (even if i do say so myself) mother. I was getting something right for a change! All the spikes had to come off, because there was this lovely little baby, and you can't be like that around a baby. and it always gives us something to talk about, because i could rhapsodize on endlessly about how wonderful she is, and they like knowing all about her.
And it's lovely. it makes everything easier and happier. Long may it continue this way.
No comments:
Post a Comment