This came across my Tumblr and I have thoughts.
I can not remember a time in my life when I felt like my father loved me. He spent my entire childhood, indeed he spent every day until I ended contact with both my parents when I was 46, bullying and hurting me. Nothing I ever did was good enough for him, and he made sure I knew it.
And my mother, who stole my childhood from me and forced me to work when I was seven, always made me apologize to him when he hurt me.
The very few times I spoke up to defend myself, or tried to say this wasn't okay, or ever challenged his endless cruelty to me, he would blow up at me, fly into a rage, while she stood by and said nothing. By the time I was in my teens, I recognized this impotent rage for what it was, and I learned how to not react to it. It turns out that passive resistance was effective, I guess, because after he ran out of rage energy, he would pout and sulk. Then he would ignore me for a blissful day or two, before my mother would start the campaign of manipulation to make me apologize to him, because I'd upset him so much. And don't I love my dad? Nothing is more important than family, Wil. Don't you love your family?
The thing is, I never did anything wrong. I was never the aggressor. I was a child, reacting to cruelty and bullying from a man I desperately wanted to love me. I never broke any bonds between us, because he never built them in the first place.
I wasted three decades of my life trying to figure out the right way to apologize to that motherfucker so he would finally love me, before I figured out that he will never love me. He made that choice about 50 years ago and nothing I can do will change that, because it was never about me in the first place.
I know I'm not the only person in the world who has felt or feels this way, and I wonder if I could have saved myself at least some suffering and pain if I'd figured out sooner than I did that he was never going to love me, doesn't even like me, never made an effort to get to know me, and that none of that has anything to do with me.
It's hard not to take it personally, but what other choice do I have? I can not repair a bond I never broke, that probably wasn't even there in the first place, and THAT has nothing to do with me. It's just extremely bad luck to be born to a narcissist and his codependent enabler.
I guess I need to remind myself, and anyone else who needs to hear it today, that it isn't, wasn't, and will never be about me as a person. He doesn't even know me, because he never made the effort.
It sucks so much, and it'll never not hurt at least a little bit. But it is so important to remember that it's not my fault. I didn't do anything. He made a choice, she made a choice, and they're both so selfish and emotionally immature, they don't care how it affected me.
Because it wasn't and isn't about me, and I'm going to keep saying that until it stops hurting.
