Grief is a funny thing.
It really hits you when you least expect it. You think you're doing better. You start living your life somewhat normally. Then all of a sudden an ugly reminder comes along and you're a broken mess again. What's worse... Even if someone else is grieving the same THING as you, they aren't grieving the same WAY as you. Your triggers aren't their triggers, and in that sense, you're alone. No one quite gets why you're upset about this or that, because everyone's perspectives are different.
Recently, news that would have been happy news under any other circumstances decimated me. We're talking crying all night and much the next day kinda bad. Wanna be dead kinda bad. Can't imagine how you live with this kinda shit fucking bad. My husband understood how I felt, but I knew he didn't feel quite the same way. In fact, he was more angry. Not angry at me, but that our family is collectively going through this grief.
You see, we bought a house. We tried to start a homestead. We shared our home with other family members who we thought shared our vision. Only they didn't.
They left the house work to us. The childcare to us. The outdoor work to us. They came in to a lot of money, and shared little of it with us, choosing instead to lavish themselves while my family had less and less. We tried to talk to them. Tried to work with them. Tried to get them to see we needed to change things. They refused to communicate. Told us we were making much ado about nothing, and that we couldn't "force" anything to happen.
Things came to a head when I lost my temper and let one of them have it. This was after nearly a year of enduring all of this, mind you. At the time it felt like I was being disrespected, again, and even being dared to have a meltdown in front of everyone. So I did.
I apologized afterward. Tried to show that just because I was frustrated, I still cared. They still stopped talking to us for a week. Imagine! We're living in the same house and they won't speak to us. They left my son unsupervised without telling me. They deserted us at dinnertime when my husband bought pizzas for our combined families. The day of their eldest daughter's birthday party, they made no effort to coordinate how my son could join his cousin for the festivities.
When they finally agreed to sit down to a talk, the person whom I lost my temper with told me what I did was hateful and unwarranted. It completely skirted any and all responsibility they had for what they did to our family and the decisions they made that led to my outburst. They felt justified in neglecting their children, and the housework, and the homestead work because they had PTSD and they were going through their own grief. But... see here's the thing. Grief and PTSD doesn't give you a blank check to just abandon your responsibilities. It may give you a pass for not being cheerful, and energetic, and doing the utmost, but you still have to show up and fucking try. Especially when you make people essentially lay down their livelihood in a major commitment. ESPECIALLY when you have kids.
I took their refusal to accept any responsibility in stride. I didn't expect them to. From the get go they had proved to lack maturity and honest self-reflection. All I asked was that the communication be improved going forward. I lost my temper because I had nowhere to air my grievances. The climate that had been created was one that discouraged honesty.
My husband and I were stunned when this was met with flat out refusal. So I did the only thing I could at that point.
I left. They could have the house. It was filled with bad memories, and we couldn't afford it on our own anyway.
Whenever I explain my experience to people, even in great detail, the usual criticism is, "Why did you ever agree to live with such people?" To which I usually just respond, "It was beyond complicated, and I was desperate to do something with my life."
And I really was. Before buying that house, I was suffering from post-partum depression. I wanted to be dead. I was stuck in a job I hated, in a house that we were only ever supposed to be in for a short while, and we had no sense of autonomy. There's lots of other factors I'm not mentioning, but suffice it to say, it wasn't so black and white. Oh sure, looking back with 20/20 vision, I can see the red flags. But again. I was desperate. The attempt to start the homestead was a hail-mary...and we lost.
So we've been spending all this time just trying to recover, emotionally and financially.
The news I got recently, I won't expound on. But it was an ugly reminder of the life we'd hoped to live, but can't. At least, not now. I'm not sure when we'll be able to try to make our dreams happen again, but some aspects of it I may have to let go. Like expanding our family. And that hurts. In so many ways, hearing about how our estranged family members are doing is like hearing about the life we should've had. It's like a life stolen, and it's fucking devastating.
And not everyone gets that. My mother-in-law still cheerily shares news about them like I actually want to hear it. I'm not looking forward to the holidays, when I may have to share a space with them for a short while at a gathering. I'm trying to forgive, trying to let go, trying to move on. I actually think I'm doing better now than I was four months ago. I just still have a long way to go.
I'm feeling better now from the recent bad news. I was lucky. Two weeks ago I'd scheduled an appointment with my counselor. I couldn't have known how badly I'd need it. After our session today, I felt a lot better. I'm hoping I can stay at or above this level of emotional well-being for awhile, but it's hard to tell.
Grief is like an accordion, and I don't know when it's going to expand or contract. I think the next few weeks will be hard. I have new things I have to navigate now. I wanted this post to just be about my upcoming projects. The work on the website. Heck, the crap I've been watching on TV. But I think I needed to type this up.
If you got this far, thanks for reading. I'll try to write a more lighthearted post next time.