I always cringe a little at Mother's Day... it has been a long time since it has been a happy day for us. OK, I cringe a LOT.
While others are celebrating their Hallmark Moments and are having a nice brunch, others are curled up in a ball of misery and pain, weeping and just praying that the dreaded day passes quickly... a day that dredges up the worst pain in their lives...every. single. year. Whether because of loss or something else, it just hurts to be reminded. And that pain can be brutal.
It's particularly painful for us.
When Tracy and I married, my oldest step-daughter was 14, and had been
acting as something of a pseudo-parent to the other kids while my wife
struggled as a single mom with 5 kids... many of whom, we would learn
later, had serious issues. When we married, and this little family had both parents again, this step-daughter felt "replaced" when
she was no longer needed in that role... and became deeply,
sociopathically resentful. She hated me with a passion for "taking her place," and hated her mother for nothing more than loving me. It was like watching a B-grade horror movie where the child experiences some shallow slight and goes seriously off the rails.
Over the next few years, this child pulled apart
from the family and became more and more disruptive, to the point where
we finally had to ask her to leave our home. She had caused such pain and contention that when she left, none of the other kids missed her... they almost wanted to throw a party.
Over the next couple of decades, she would succeed in turning the
entirety of just about all of my wife's family against me... and
then my wife for "staying with me." She decided to punish my wife
for... well... being my wife by cutting off all communication with her,
and forbidding her from ever seeing her children... my wife's only
grandchildren. It's been over 15 years now... and she has never spoken to her mother since.
She lashed out at me and attempted to exact "revenge" by falsely accusing me to being "inappropriate" with her... because,
when her grandfather died (who she was very close to), and she was
sobbing, my wife and I sat next to her on her bed, and I pulled her up
onto my lap and held her while she sobbed, while her mother hugged her
as well.
Desperate to hurt me, and to garner sympathy with her peers and to lash out at us, she
starting leveling false accusations. Behind our backs in a blog she
wrote (that she never thought we would see), that tender moment of grief when her
"papa" died suddenly turned that into a "strange middle-aged man forcing
me on top of him," and she started calling herself a "survivor."
Words
can't describe our feelings of betrayal and hurt on reading the
fabrications she wrote... which she quickly took down when she found out
that we had seen it.. And, quite frankly, it would have been one thing to have a bitter, petulant child do this. But that's not where the story ended.
But my wife's brother, and my mother-in-law, both bought into these lies
(after all, they said, 'why would she lie?'), and were cruel beyond
belief to both my wife and I. They constantly trashed us behind our
backs to anyone that would listen. This very vindictive step-daughter
even began actively trying to indoctrinate our other children and turn
them against us as well, which she succeeded in doing with several of my
other step-children.
In the midst of all of this, my mother-in-law steadfastly sided with
step-daughter in condemning me, leaving my wife without a family,
without any love and support from those who should have been there for
her no matter what... and most hurtfully, without her own
grandchildren. Her own mother cluelessly contributed to all of this
mean-spirited, vindictive evil, apparently not even being cognizant of
the consequences her actions were having.
It's been very difficult for me to wrap my arms around this emotionally,
spiritually, mentally, and every other way. How can someone who is supposed to
be there for you... your own family... be so unbelievably cold, callous,
cruel and hurtful? I'll never understand it.
So. Every single year, the scab is ripped violently off this perpetual wound anew, and the suffering never gets a chance to heal. The pain never abates. The hurt never stops throbbing.
This is not how it's supposed to be. This is not how any of this is supposed to be.
