My mother used to talk badly about everybody in the family, no matter what they did. When I was a teenager, she focused her sights on my aunt, my uncle’s wife. It turns out my aunt is a natural leader, and my mother didn’t like this.

I remember them arguing in the kitchen years ago over my grandparent’s will. For years, I secretly believed my mother was jealous that my aunt was a friendly, loving, sensible woman who everyone liked. After all my grandparents passed on, my mother was hoping to be the head of the family, but that was not to be because my aunt’s personality drew in more people than my mother’s personality. It made my mother incredibly jealous, and the jealously leaked in the form of underhanded, passive-aggressive comments about my aunt.

But what my mother didn’t count on is that I would remember those little comments and stitch them all together years later to solve the puzzle that was this unstable mother of mine. My mother, who was manipulating all of her children, was a narcissistic bully who isolated us from the rest of the family with a clever fabric of lies that was very attentively pulled over our eyes for years. And now she’s moved onto the next generation – nieces and nephews.

I would love to try to save my siblings’ kids, but it would take a toll on my sanity, health, and the relationship with my child. So instead, I pray for them that God will show them the light as well. And while I don’t plug God much at all here, I do adamantly insist that this particular passage has indeed helped me tremendously:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change (my mother, and my sibling’s blindness), the courage to change the things I can (leaving the family and ignoring their painful ignorance and abandonment) and the wisdom to know the difference (that I was lied to and manipulated for years).

I’ve since altered the passage to:

God has granted me the serenity to accept the things I couldn’t change, the courage to change the things I could, and the wisdom – My God! thank you for the wisdom! – to know the difference.

What I learned from this extensive lesson is that I didn’t know what was going on in the family – I only knew my mother’s twisted lies. And sometimes, when you don’t know the entire story, it’s because the person telling you the story isn’t telling you the truth.

Years ago, I dated a little surfer dude who had not much of a spine. He had just started a new surf company out on Long Island, New York and thought he was the bomb.

Long after our breakup and my divorce, I contacted him about some gear for my young son. After all, the guy was a decent person, I thought, and probably wouldn’t mind if I support his store and get some insights on what I should buy for my son. It shouldn’t be a big deal if I ask him some questions about equipment.

In the middle of small talk, he apologized for marrying someone else, citing he knew how much I wanted to marry him.

I was absolutely speechless.

You know when your brain can’t wrap itself around someone else’s logic? I mean… what do you say to that? I didn’t want to rebuff the kid – I would have made him feel shorter than his already stunted height. And so I sat – on the other end of the phone – speechless. He must have taken that as a confirmation of my undying love. Lol

It felt cruel to tell him that the thought of being stuck with him for the rest of my life would have been torture, so I let it hang. I let him continue to think that I desired marriage from him.

🤐🤭

Occasionally I ponder the idea of contacting that surfer dude to let him know that he was profoundly incorrect in his assumption, and that it occasionally makes me vurp when I think about his miscalculation. My pride is indeed pricked when I think of his dorkiness walking around telling people that I still wanted him, that he can’t hold a candle to what I’ve loved.

But still, I let it go. I wish I had the heart to tell him, “Omg, are you outta your mind? LOL” So ultimately… yeah, it wasn’t him at all. It was me.

The very first thing I thought when I made that final decision to stop talking to my intensely toxic family was “What dream can I now live because I’m free from them?” It came on like a flash and made me realize I had been imprisoned my entire life. I had no idea what a hold they had.

Free at last. Free at last. Thank God, I’m free at last.