I Left Them.

A message was left on my answering machine yesterday via a Text to Land Line service.   A computer generated voice haltingly spoke, "Happy Birthday, you are special.  Love Mom."  It sounds like a telemarketer…hard to discern what you are hearing.  It was an almost call from my mother.  Close but with no way for me to respond.  Well, I guess that is a lie, the first part of the message is that this is a text from number xxx-xxx-xxxx.  So, I could have returned the call.

When you lean it up with the rest of the birthday wishes, it feels odd…

I am never real sure why they reach out…for whose benefit, theirs or mine?

What is the expectation?

So much time and life has passed us by, and yet the relationship stalled 8 years ago. In order to resume, we have to start where it ended.

I always feel that when they come in, there is an expectation to begin 'like old times' to overlook the passing of time and the reason for the break up, to just slip back into the casual and normal exchanges…like nothing happened.

It lessens and minimalizes the severity of shattered relationship by not talking about it, and expecting there to be normal social exchanges.  I just can't seem to find a way to hop over the wrecked relationship and resume a shallow interaction…without delving into crash.

In order for me to restart with any of them, I would have to start where we ended…answering the questions once again and seeing if our answers have changed.  

Overlooking the reasons for my estrangement would negate my reason for leaving…

Which leaves us in an odd spot. The very thing that caused me to go, is the very place they are not willing to dialogue.  My entry back into their lives begins where I left…while they want me back by leaping over the past 8 years and start here.

That is what many dysfunctional relationships are like…to overlook the bad and focus on the good memories and times…never staring at the bad or digging to find out what is really there.

And if we start where we ended and we each feel the same, then the estrangement still stands.

I somehow always feel that I am to blame for the differences….and not that each of us carry equal halves.  It is no more my fault than it is theirs…we are just two people who looked at a life altering event completely different….OR perhaps seen it the same, but responded differently.

I would feel better if, instead of coming in with social niceties, they would show their interest by coming in wanting to know where I stand and why.

Mostly what I get is that I am wrong.  I am 'choosing' to walk away from family….It is up to me to make changes in the direction of my life.  I am to blame. They do not feel that they did anything wrong, but I have done bushels full.

Interesting….I broke the relationship, not that the relationship broke due to the irreconcilable differences.  A valid reason for divorcing…and, since I can't divorce my family legally, I have to do it this way….estrangement.

What is the 'normal' protocol for this?  What does estrangement look?  It almost feels like I divorced them, but they didn't get the paper work.  For, in my world, if there were to be a reconcilliation, we again, have to start where the trouble began. Fiinding the root cause for OUR estrangement…and begin there.

Looking around the reason for our estrangement somehow reduces it to a temper tantrum, that I am just out here spunking.  That I am wasting precious years and missed opportunities to be part of a family.  It isn't a we statement, but that I am doing this.  I am the one to blame. 

For what, I again ask?  Why am I to blame for the tear in OUR relationship. Who tore it up or what?

We are not stupid, we all know.  But what we don't know is how to act and behave in a relationship that has died but the bodies live on.  

There seems to be no relationship integrity when they act like nothing has happened.

I would much more prefer them to see it as totalled…then pretending it was a surface scratch.  Our relationship crashed and it will not run unless and until BOTH of us are willing to shoulder their responsibility for what happened.

AND, be willing to fight and work hard at creating a new relationship.  Our old one died and in order for a new one to be born, we will have to find a reason to want it.

It will not be a surprise birth or an accident.  It will have to be a conscious effort on both sides.  I am not willing to leap frog back over my (OUR) estrangement to start again. 

What I love most about this writing today….it is OUR estrangement, not mine!  For in truth, they left me as much as I left them.