💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › bittertea › 1640401624.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 18:30:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)
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It’s the part of Christmas Eve where I think about all the family I could have had contact with.
When you cut off your immediate family for reasons of abuse, we don’t talk about what that means when you were very, very close to your extended family. When they were the people you got together with every Christmas, when you continued to make time for them outside of social obligation.
I feel guilt and shame and sadness and grief. But I can’t see a way forward.
No one has particular changed the structure of their relationship with the brother they now know raped me. No one has changed the relationship with my mother despite at least having some understanding of why she and I aren’t in contact. And when I left, it felt like their hands were their hands.
I unblocked my mother on facebook a few weeks back. I do that very little, only on occasions I feel the urge to make sure that she’s still alive. Sometimes I check in with my cousin’s social media accounts, because I will never learn of a death or an injury in any other way. There are no polite stiff emails offering me even a small sense that anyone even sees me as connected to them anymore.
The way that I cut off contact with my mother is complicated, because technically I didn’t. I was the last person to message her back in what, 2016? before she just never replied. And I tried to contact her again in 2020, only to leave the ball in her court, and never get it back. That’s part of why I unblocked her: to see what her year has been like. Maybe it’s been too hard. Maybe she’s sick or hurt or too busy or something. I don’t think so. I think she just realized that I wasn’t going to press it anymore, wasn’t going to hold her accountable to change.
2022 will mark 10 years of having left. My mother still has most of my stuff. Much of it belongs to a younger me that has outgrown it, which is why I long stopped talking like I would ever go back home to get it.
But I’m sad. I wish I could talk to my cousins again. I wish I could invite my aunt over. None of these things are ever going to happen. That’s what Christmas Eve always makes me remember: not the grief of the past decade, but that it is never ending—there is no resolution to this. There is no future for us. And now that I tried, in one last futile effort, to get in touch with my mother, only to have it fail, I’m dealing with the added mourning that comes having to fully, finally, properly accept it. One day, I will peak at my former church’s facebook page, and I will see a post for the date of my mother’s memorial service, and that will be the first time I will even learn of her passing. That is my future with my family. I’m not even sure if my mother wants it another way. She knows the damage between us, and I think she’d rather envision some grand union in heaven than do any of the work on earth.
What I really wish for is to talk to more people who don’t have contact with their family, because the way people talk, it seems like there is only “it was the best decision ever to never speak to them again” or “I managed to properly negotiate boundaries.” There has to be others who have lost more family than they wanted, because they had to put their safety before family you know cares about you, but will never understand. Family you could never trust to help you hold your boundaries in place.
Because I feel a little lost and alone in the ways we talk about cutting off family. I didn’t want to cut off this much family. But the cousins that I love I know would do everything in their power to get me to talk to my mother again, I know would be more than happy to go to her to tell her everything about my life to keep her involved. And I couldn’t chance it. So I don’t have any family anymore.