I need to change my language about myself, my family, and my life. It’s just so easy, especially around the holidays to get caught up in the negative language my family tends to use.
Every year, it’s the same. Christmas gifts just happen to be one battleground.
Mom wants to get crafty for Christmas gifts, even though they’ve made it clear all other years we’ve made handmade gifts that they don’t appreciate it. Sheba used my mother’s handmade quilts to wrap furniture for moving and then threw them out, almost the whole family sneered when we gave gift baskets with hand-selected gourmet foods, handmade fudge and cookies thrown out, and several family members tried to give back handmade, beaded Christmas ornaments within minutes of us giving them to them. They’ve flippantly admitted to just throwing things out if they don’t want them or like them anymore. The only thing they seem to have kept is my framed, artistic photos I gave them back when I was 18, but I suspect it’s for the same reason people hoard National Geographic magazines rather than sentimental reasons. While it’s their right, I guess… it does hurt our feelings.
Jass and I are both urging her to reconsider and just get gift certificates. It just isn’t worth it giving them another opportunity to hurt us.
They want a definitive time frame for everything under the sun. Being out of work, they’re going to want a definitive time frame for when I’ll get a job. (Forget the economy here in Michigan and across the country.) Experience or lack of experience, competition, whatever — it’s irrelevant to them.
According to them, I’m brainless, worthless, useless with no applicable life skills. I’m a slacker, a child who refuses to grow up, and destined to a life of failure unless I live like they want me to. I’ve wasted all these years of college and have gone nowhere.
NO! No more!
I can’t continue letting that dialogue creep into my own thoughts. There’s nothing I can do about them, but I can do something about my own thoughts and actions. Every time I say that, think that, replay the last time they said that to me, I tear myself down. The fact is, I can never please them. I need to realize that and move on. Change my own language so it has less of an impact. Back when I was a teen, I actually had thoughts of harming myself — or worse — after one of their diatribes.
For whatever reason, they deemed my mother the black sheep of the family back when she was a child — the one who is at fault for anything and everything that happens in this family. Because we’re her children, we’re an extension of that. It’s time we change our language and stop being their scapegoat. This isn’t love, it’s the product of some really messed up people.
I can’t allow them to do this anymore.
I don’t want to say they don’t love us; we certainly love them — which is why this always hurts so much. However, there is no connection, no support, and no sense of belonging. What there is, is a cycle of verbal and emotional abuse. We have to stop it.
If that means moving or being excommunicated from the family, so be it.
