I don’t know or do I?

Recovery for me is often confusing.  I get moments of clarity, or think I do but then hard family pain from the past comes up leading me to question if what I know is real.  As the youngest in an older and far more established family (by the time I came along Dad was 41) meant I was behind the eight ball.  Everything was geared to business and empire building (though not in a fully conscious way).  Mum and Dad came back to Oz broke at the end of the wash up of World War II in the early 1950s.  Dad had been stationed in Indonesia where his work was to fly POWs home.  Mum and he were there for over 5 years with my older brother and sister.

Today the subject of my oldest sister’s suicide attempt came up as we met with an old family friend.   I was back at home with Mum and Dad when it happened.  I was 20 years old,  My sister came unstuck trying to come back to the family in her early 30s to compete or at least set up a business where she would be recognised.  At this point Dad was in business with my older brother and Mum in business with my older sister and her husband.  I was just out of school but had an NDE at 17 and was in hospital for over 3 months.  I foundered and when my sister had her cerebral bleed some 6 months later, booze and drugs had become my way of hiding the fact I was shell shocked and had not a clue which way was up.  Won’t go into the whole story, have shared about it in other posts.

Today Mum shared that coming out of her suicide attempt my sister (who had at that point been abandoned by her husband who sent her back home with a one way ticket and absconded with her four boys) asked not to go back home to live with Mum and Dad.  She also tried to strangle my mother when she visited her.   I cried all the way home after hearing about this today.  I really need to call my therapist.  Its so confusing what went down in those years.  It traumatised me to say nothing of the impact on my sister and apparently on the day she took her life Mum was at work and Dad just thought she was oversleeping.  I know my Dad was emotionally distant but how the hell could he have been so oblivious.

I know it is all in the past.  I have processed a lot of it in therapy.  I cant help questioning my sister’s anger with my Mum.  Did she just need a target to offload some of her profound anger and grief at the abandonment?  Was there more too it?   I will never know.   I miss my sister as she was more like a mother to me in my younger days but in later years it wasnt that healthy a relationship as she encouraged me to drink to an excessive degree.  Its seems that for so many years I was just lost and enmeshed in the family dysfunction.  Saying it is all just about ancestral pain alone also doesnt quiet cut it.  I feel in many ways I never ‘escaped’ and yet I only know we break out of enmeshment slowly.  I am sober today.  I dont mood alter (apart from a daily cup of coffee).  I often find I am the sponge for the grief which was never mine.  I was just the empathic witness.  But how much empathy do you give to a sick damaged thing?   Its a question I am not entirely sure of the answer to.  In the end I need my own life outside of it all.  That is all I know and am slowly coming to realise.