Thanksgiving Eve

                Tonight is Thanksgiving Eve, and I find myself unable to sleep thinking about what I have to be thankful for.  The last two years of my life have been an epic adventure filled with the types of emotional, physical, and financial ups and downs that are only written about in novels or seen in movies.  I have discovered who are the good people in my life, who are the not so good people in my life, and who the people I needed to walk away from were because they were so horrifically toxic to my well-being.

                Yet despite all I have to be thankful for, tonight I mostly feel sadness and loss.  And since it is Thanksgiving Eve, I am going to allow myself to have these feelings of sadness and grief.  

                I am still estranged from my father, and in all honesty, that is a good thing for me, and under the circumstances, the estrangement is something I am thankful for.  I am not feeling sadness any longer about the estrangement.  I am not feeling grief for him kicking me out of his life.  I am feeling sadness and grief for the father’s love that I will never have and that he is incapable of experiencing.   I feel sadness for him, because he is missing out on so much by his overwhelming pathological need to be the center of attention that he has felt it necessary to cast me as the villain in his personal drama just to gain attention from his family and friends.  I could, and will write more about the complex, dysfunctional and abusive family he came even, but not tonight.

                Do I want my father in my life?  No.  And I say that emphatically.  Does it hurt that I feel that way?  Yes, it hurts badly.  No one who is estranged from a parent is happy about it.  But not having a good father figure in my life hurts less and less each day, and it hurts less than the toxic hatred and resentment my father poured down on me all of my life. 

                He kicked me out of his life.  He has done it many times.  In fact, I have lost count of the times he has kicked me out of his life.  I certainly don't recall any of the infractions that caused this banishment, but I do remember the pain it caused me as a child.  In fact, one of the last things he snarled at me was "Go to Hell."  He has hurled those hateful words at me more frequently in my 55 years of living on this planet, than he ever said he loved me.  Instead of that hurting me the last time he said it, I simply replied back, "see you there," and I left.  I've had enough.  You don't talk to your child that way.

                Even though we have no real relationship anymore, and any sort of relationship we had was dysfunctional, he still uses my existence to garner pity and attention.  He is still spreading lies and rumors about me, tries to alienate people from me, twists reality into some sort of crazy fantasy where I am the bad person who has done nothing but destroy his life.   I have come to realize that kicking me out of his life serves an important purpose to him, and his own self identity.  He fits all of the criteria of having a narcissistic personality disorder. He has to have someone to pin his own failures on, he has to have someone to blame for his own failures in relationships, and he has such a pathological need for attention, that being able to cast his only child as a despicable, hateful, person allows him the ability to garner this attention.  Everything has to be about him.

                He actually brags that he kicked me out of his life.  What kind of parent does that???

                So, tonight, I am allowing myself to feel sad.  I am allowing myself a little pity party to grieve what I never had.  I am not blaming anyone; this was the life I was given or the life I chose for this incarnation if you lean that way.

             Tomorrow will be better.  I will spend Thanksgiving with one of my precious granddaughters, with my beautiful daughter, and her awesome husband, and Morgan’s other grandparents.  I am very thankful for that.  I am also thankful for the progress I have made in my personal life over the past few years, and my friends who did not let me get swallowed up into the hole I had fallen into.  I am eternally grateful.     

In the beginning...

I decided to start this blog because if I don't write these things down, I think I very well might have a mental breakdown.  After half a century of being the black sheep, family scapegoat, fall guy -- for no reason except that it was easier to throw me under the bus than to accept responsibility for their own actions or behaviors -- I have broken away from my family.  I want to write this down so there is a record of it, and I can refer back to it easily when my resolve wavers.  I also know there are others out there like me.  This will be a work in progress... 

What is the definition of a scapegoat? 

In biblical terms, a goat was let loose in the wilderness on Yom Kippur after the sins of the people had been laid on it's head.  Lev. 16:8, 10, 26  Basically, it was a way to absolve people of their sins, which in this definition is almost an honorable thing.  But the reality of being the family scapegoat is not honorable.  It is painful, it is traumatic, and it is abusive.   

I was an only child and why I became the black sheep/family scapegoat always baffled me.  My parents had tried to have children for years before I was born, and according to all reports I was a wanted child.  I was a good child.  I did what I was told as a teenager.  I wasn't overly rebellious.  I made good grades.  I studied.  But some of my first memories were being told I wasn't loveable, I wasn't pretty, I wasn't smart.  That I was wierd.  That I was an embarassment. 

Being the scapegoat also made it easier for my parents to justify their abuse.  After all, someone who was fucking up their lives so royally deserved to be smacked, tripped, yelled at, pinched -- and how could anyone fault them for having to deal with me. 

I remember one time when I was in either the third or fourth grade my mother had bought the small lunch size chips for my lunches.  I was so thrilled because I NEVER got treats like this and was very conscientious about only taking one a day.  Well, Dad came home, and he noticed Cheeto crumbs on the refrigerator door.  He called me over and asked me if I had eaten one of the Cheetos as a snack even though I knew they were for lunch only.  I truthfully told him that no I hadn't, but I thought my my mother had.  My mother was on the other side of the room watching  all this happen.  All of a sudden, BAM, I got punched across the face and knocked to the ground as my father screamed at me that I was a fat little liar who didn't deserve any treats and that I was disgusting for having eaten the snack and then trying to blame it on someone else.  He then took the rest of the chips off to another room, sent me to my room with no supper, and grounded me for lying.  I was almost 100 percent sure my mother had eaten them.  I was an only child, and she was the only one that would have gone into the refrigerator in the evening to make supper.  I sat in my room shaking from the trauma, physical pain and emotional pain.  A short time later, before bedrime, my mother came into the room and gave me a candy bar.  I asked her why she didn't defend me and admit she ate the chips.  Her response...  "well, you are so naughty all the time anyway, so you can just accept this punishment for something you have done in which you didn't get caught." 

So, for them, my role as the "bad one" in the family was important and allowed them to not take responsbility for their own actions.