Recognizing and Releasing Family Patterns

Tonight I had a call with my mother that really made me realize something. Everything can go good with her and I and then she says something that I get irritated over. Tonight it was about my father. I had asked her about something that happened years ago that had to do with child custody/support.  At the time when I was asking her I was trying to remember why they made me give a statement when I was very young. She’s been saying for months that I accused her of dragging me in to give a statement against my father. I know that wasn’t the context of the conversation she and I had but she seems to think that’s how I meant it. On top of that there doesn’t seem to be anything to be said to make her let go fo that belief and so she continually defends her position when it’s not even necessary.

After the phone call I had such a moment of amazing clarity it was a little scary. I thought about all the years she’s not really known anything about her father and couldn’t really get much out of my grandmother about him. She’s only got memories of him up to a certain age and then she never saw him again. I know that she’s tried to contact his family in the past so she can’t even say that she hadn’t gone through the same feelings herself about her own father.  She’s repeating the same pattern as my grandmother with me. She also portrays herself as the victim and seems to always be the victim of everything in life.  This is something else that my grandmother is famous for.

I can honestly say that for years I’ve seen myself as a victim to the bad behavior of the men who have been in and out of my life. I haven’t really been able to figure this stuff all out but it seems that with all this stuff that keeps revealing itself to me that a lot of the reason that I’ve not had success with the opposite sex and am not in a stable committed relationship has to do with the bastarized view I’ve had of my father all these years and repeating this same sick pattern of being the victim. I refuse to let myself be a victim and fall in line with these two. I’m not going to do it. I’m going to be completely responsible for my life. And while I know that my father was abusive to my mother and I know that for at least half of my childhood I was afraid of him, there were some good things about him. I know that he did in fact love me.  What bothers me the most is that my mother seems perfectly content to let me be alone and not have a man in my life to share my love and a home with.  She doesn’t see anything disturbing about the fact that I’m going to be 36 and have never been in a relationship long enough to even be asked to go out with a guy let alone receive a proposal.

So as of today I’m letting go of everything that made me feel inferior and hurt and abused by every man that I’ve been in any kind of relationship with. Nothing that any of these men did to me had nothing to do with me. They were who they were because of them, not because of me. I was just another person who was caught up in the bullshit of their own messy lives and damage. They don’t deserve the power to destroy my life, not then and not now. Neither does my mother or my grandmother and so now I have to just be me and be happy and forget everyone else. It’s my time now.