bullying

A few days on, I still haven’t answered my dad’s email.

I’ve drafted the you-should-reconsider email, and I really like what it says. I’m just not sure I’m ready to urge him to reconsider. I really feel that just dropping him would not be a terrible idea.

BF and I spoke with his parents about this whole thing last night, and that conversation was illuminating. (They love me a lot, and were appalled, saying a lot of the same kinds of things you fine people said. I am so grateful to you for your vitriolic support, by the way, that I have no words for it, and actually choked up when telling BF how much my blog-friends mean to me. Thank you.) MM gave me much, much good advice. The way she came down on it, this is an absurd and horrible thing my father has done, but I shouldn’t close the door on him. She said I should wait a couple of weeks and then write him a letter, a physical letter rather than an email, and ask him to think it over before he refuses to come. She said not to mention anything about paying for the wedding, just to drop that half of the conversation, and especially not to mention anything about my mother so as not to stir the pot.

My intention with my letter is not only to tell him he should reconsider. I want to tell him that it would have been fine to tell me he wouldn’t pay for the wedding, but that the way he did it was unnecessary, petty, and extremely hurtful. I find it very important to put this in. MD thinks that in the week that I haven’t written back to him, Dad’s probably been getting more and more upset, since without any contact there is no control over me. MD may be partially right, but honestly? I think Dad probably thinks I’m just pouting about no money for the wedding. (It is clear by now that he doesn’t think much of me.) I want to make it absolutely plain that I don’t care about money for the wedding – in fact, I don’t care about money at all. What I cared about, before this email, was that my father was present for my wedding. If he could realize that, maybe there are more things he could see.

I also plan to start sending him $100 a month, no matter the outcome of our relationship. This is a majorly passive-aggressive thing to do, I know, but I am tired of him complaining about how much I cost and I think if I steadily pay him back, either I will have some ammunition against his complaining, or he will realize what an ass he’s being and will think twice about pulling this shit on my half-brother. In the past I’ve tried giving him money to repay him for various small loans, and he has tried refusing it, saying he doesn’t need to be paid back, which is YET ANOTHER little detail as to why this whole thing makes me so upset. If you don’t need to be paid back, don’t bitch about spending. In any case, I withdrew $100 in cash – cash so he can’t just put the checks aside and pretend to forget about it - and it’s been sitting in my wallet until I’m ready to respond to him.

There was a lot of talk last night about forgiveness being empowering. Much as I respect that, and believe it probably works for some people, I have never found redemption through forgiving those who have hurt me. I’ve forgiven my parents over and over again, and it’s only allowed them to hurt me further, which makes me feel like a fool, not empowered. I forgave Eric, and it has given me no peace about the awfulness of our relationship. I forgave KJJ repeatedly and it hasn’t changed anything. I’ve failed at a lot of friendships, but a lot of friendships have failed me, and nowhere in that process has there been empowerment, rather than merely a lesson grasped in my fist like a cold stone.

MD pointed out that I have persevered through asshole parents and become a remarkable woman, with maturity that my parents do not possess, and maybe that’s a little empowering? Yes, this is true, but I think I’d trade in some of that maturity for not hearing all the things I’ve heard them say about each other. In a hot minute, I would.

The thing that I found most interesting was what MM told me about the pattern I’ve gotten into with my parents. I’ve allowed them, over the last decade, to triangulate me into an unpleasant set of conflicts, and have acquiesced to them expressing their bitterness at each other to me, rather than cutting it off cold. I figured out while she was talking that they have bullied me, exactly like those girls in middle school bullied me, and frankly – sorry if this is disillusioning to any eleven-year-olds out there – there is no good solution to being bullied. You can try ignoring them, you can try talking to them, you can try fighting back, but none of those things are going to stop the bullying, or make you feel any better about being made to feel insignificant and despicable. None of those solutions have worked with my parents, either. I’ve just allowed them to say what they want to say, and not allowed them to bait me into saying anything myself. This is the ignoring solution, and no, it doesn’t work.

What MM said is that I need to just cut it off. If Mom starts going off about Dad, hang up the phone. If Dad starts blaming me about something with Mom, walk away. Children can’t disengage from bullies because they are stuck at school, but adults certainly can, because we are free. So I think I’m going to do exactly that: disengage from any kind of talk at all from one parent about the other one. “I won’t talk to you about him. I will hang up if you say anything further.” And then hang up. Simple. I’d thought of that before, but I figured I was being kind, and helping them to know that I was not taking the other parent’s side, by letting them go on to a small degree. But I was wrong; it helps no one and hurts me, and perpetuates an ugly pattern.

I called up a friend of my mother’s who is also a friend of mine, a Boomer-age man so interesting that this small cameo does him no justice whatsoever, and asked him if he was willing to help me tell my mother about what my father has done, via a three-way phone conversation. She is going to be very upset, and I want someone to be there for her as support for when she hears this news. I also want to be able to tell her and hang up without hearing too much nastiness about my dad, and have someone be immediately there to hear the flood of fury that she will need to release. MM advised me not to tell Mom about the list, because she thought that would just be stirring the pot and telling her dirt she doesn’t need to hear. I hadn’t considered this at all, but I think she’s right. To me, that’s just part of the package of the low way that my dad has treated me here, but Mom does not need more evidence of his character, and she’s going to be plenty upset about what she will already learn. She will just have to trust me that he made it Very Clear that he won’t be paying, without details as to exactly how clear.

This has been one of the most challenging, exhausting weeks of my life. And it’s more evidence that February is just a shitty month. It makes me sad, because this is also the month that BF asked me to marry him. (And it’s Kim’s and my mom’s and TB’s birthday month.) But boy, am I glad it’s the weekend. I’m going to watch Wayne’s World and forget about my horrible family for 90 minutes. With wine.

I have some other significant bits of news, actually (tried on dresses! good work news!), but I’ll post it all later this weekend. Thanks for sticking with me throughout this ordeal; it means the world to me.