Quote:
Originally Posted by wolverinewolfweiselpigeon
I try, but there's a lot of tension there. I've been turned into some kind of villainous character, so I've spent a lot of time trying to reverse that image for them. I watch them grow up from the sidelines, mainly.
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That ****ing sucks. For all I know, you are "villainous" (just sayin', since I only have one side of the story), but I also know that family is family, no matter what the circumstances, and the bonds that develop, no matter how imperfect the circumstances, are as much a part of you as you are to yourself.
Not the same circumstances by any means, but my mother was by no means perfect, and yet she's made me who I am -- for better
and worse -- and that if anything ever happened to take her away from me, that would probably leave a hole in me that I wasn't aware could be empty.
We're an awkward family unit, and our closeness is definitely tainted by the past, but as we're the only family that the other has contact
on a consistent, day-to-day basis -- though we have plenty of family nearby that we see semi-regularly who are also important to us -- and there's just something about that kind of close-knit relationship that creates bonds that are impossible to quantify or compare to any other relationship you can have with anyone else.
For the past year or so, she's been ill, to the point where there was a legitimate chance that my family might have had to watch her slowly waste away and die, and while she seems to be mostly out of the woods now, how the alternative would have affected me I really don't know. Honestly, as emotionally twisted around and cutoff from most other human contact as I am, I don't know if I would have come out of her death in anything resembling a healthy mental state. I rely on her for so much -- as a provider of support, general acceptance of my issues, and probably things I'm not even aware of -- that I'm honestly not sure what would have happened to me, not to mention my grandparents.
TL;DR: Even if your specific circumstances are alien to me, I understand how the unique bonds created by a dysfunctional family can bring some of us together in a way that more well-adjusted people just can't be, just as the strife can drive other family away. Never give up on reconnecting, because I'm sure doing otherwise would only widen whatever scars you already have.
Maybe if I'd found my dad when I was still young enough for it to matter, then we might have had something meaningful between us, but people change and develop independently of each other, and if enough time passes, then trying to get back what you've lost might be impossible, just because everything is just too different for the "old ways" to still have the same meaning.