People who have been following this blog for awhile will know that we cut off contact with our parents after a last attempt at honesty and reconciliation in the late summer of last year. We have since experienced an amazing acceleration of healing and I think it would be naive to think the correlation was merely a coincidence. But what happens during a family emergency?
I don’t know why I feel the need to defend myself but I do, so here it is anyway — I do not *want* to have abandoned my parents. We have made it clear to our father that we are willing to meet with him to try working on our relationship but only in the presence of a therapist. He has fought it tooth and nail, seemingly scandalized that we would dare to set a standard of mental health. He has tried to convince us we are wrong to feel the way we do, tried to make us believe we’re brainwashed by our therapist, tried to shame us into giving in, tried to plead with us, and tried to turn up at our house against our wishes. It is genuinely not a lot we are asking of him, yet he is so mad that we are trying to control our own life, he sees it as a power play. The truth is, I don’t expect we will ever get the chance to mend our relationship, and I can be okay with that. It is entirely up to him whether he agrees to talk to us with respect (which a therapy session would necessitate), and if he can’t do that, then he is no good for us.
Sometimes I need to say all that to remind myself that I am not a horrible, vindictive daughter abusing her poor, victimized and innocent father. He certainly wants me to believe that I am one.
Anyway, what is meant to happen when there is a genuine family emergency? Is the no-contact rule a static thing or does it bend with the needs of circumstance?
My uncle in England had a stroke last week. He is my father’s brother.
My father is not on any social networking sites and my mother has been keeping him from meaningful contact with his family since she moved us all to another continent over a decade ago. There was genuinely no way he was going to hear about his brother’s emergency in the foreseeable future unless my sister and I told him.
My sister said that she would not contact him, because it was not our responsibility to keep him aware of his sibling’s life — he should be in contact with that side of the family himself. She also made the point that our father does not contact people who are suffering, he simply takes on the knowledge of their suffering and turns it into his own, victimizing himself via other people’s pain. He wouldn’t call to speak to his brother, he would simply lose sleep over how much it hurt him to have a brother who’d had a stroke.
I have to say, for all my sister’s flaws, she is an accurate judge of character in this situation. And it really makes me wonder (more and more I’ve been wondering about it actually) whether my mother wasn’t the only narcissistic parent.
But back to the issue at hand — and I have to mention that I’m not being flippant about the situation, my uncle is fine, though the stroke was a real warning sign.
I felt like I knew the right thing to do, so I had to do it. The right thing to do, my heart told me, was to tell my father that his brother had had a stroke. I reminded myself that he is essentially living in a perpetual “stockholm syndrome,” believing he has no escape from his life, and empathizing with my mother, his captor. He may be misguided but his mind has been warped by years of abuse.
But here’s the question…was it really the right thing to do?
Because suddenly I got texts from my dad asking if he could come over and talk to me. He didn’t seem to care at all about his brother, he just saw it as an opportunity to try and break the condition we had set. I told him no, I had already told him we would only meet him with a therapist. And then he proceeded to tell me once again how angry he was that I dared to victimize a blameless and innocent man such as himself, and if I wanted to talk to him then I needed to turn up to see him at the weekend because he was “done on texting.”
I’m offended for his brother, to be honest. The situation wasn’t about me, I was trying to relay a message about someone who should mean a lot to my father. Apparently I was wrong.
The next day I learned that the theory about why he had a stroke is that his blood pressure was so high. His daughter, my step-cousin who is sixteen, is starting treatment for lymphoma this week. I had no idea she was sick. It has already been such a stressful few years for that side of the family, I had assumed there was a limit to how much suffering people had to endure before getting a break. Once again, I am wrong.
I am torn about whether to tell my father that his niece has cancer.
On the one hand, I would want it to wake him up to the fact that he is not the victim in this situation, that there are people who he says he cares about and they could really use some support right now. I want him to break out of his spell and see reality, care about people again, be a good man instead of just telling everyone what a good man he is.
On the other hand, my sister is probably right. She says she doesn’t want to give him the ammunition to use our cousin’s tragedy as his own. He doesn’t deserve to know about her suffering because he would just pervert it, make it about him.
I want to do the right thing. I hate that I don’t know what that is. I suppose the truly right thing is to focus on the people who matter, and not at all on the people who don’t.
Sometimes I absolutely hate seeing traits of my father in myself. On re-reading this I can see that my concerns are primarily focused around issues of control — who know what information, whose job it is to share information, who fills what roles. I need to be able to let go of all that because though it may be second nature to me, it is a part of my parents’ twisted world and not the world I want to live in now.
I also recognize that this may sound like a really selfish post because it’s focused on me and not on the people who are clearly actually suffering. The truth is, I can only ever speak my truth and I wouldn’t want to try to speak for my uncle or my cousin. They don’t read this blog and my contact with them is personal. This space is a selfish space, it’s about me.
I feel really muddled. I think contact with my father sends me into a really guilty, defensive, unsure state. Makes me question my right to have feelings or to express them. I feel like apologizing for saying all this and asking for people to point out how wrong I am, but I’m going to hit “publish” instead.
