One year ago, my paternal biological brother and his wife excised my family from their lives.
Before that time, my little family believed we were very close; not just family, but heart friends, the kind that you trust with everything you are and believe they will hold you close through the hardest times. Our kids spent every birthday and holiday together, went on cabin trips together, and often spent at least one, sometimes more, day a week together.
My being unable to write in this blog for the past year was one result of their choice. I have been embarrassed, humiliated, heart-sore, miserable, self-doubting, and C-PTSD trauma-activated. This event is the reason that I could not write about anything; because there has not been a single second of “after” that is not shaded by this experience.
I have agonized over how to share this; and the irony is, it’s short, and simple, and apparently nothing that’s “all that huge” to anyone in the family except me. Certainly, despite the sudden end of family holidays, regular hang-outs, summer pool time, and family cabin trips, my entire paternal biological family continues to act entirely unfazed by it (reinforcing my lifelong belief and understanding – to likely be addressed in other posts over many many years – that I never belonged and was never actually a complete member of that family unit). My brother and his wife cut me and my partner (and as a result, our children) out of their life one year ago. That’s it. That’s the entire everything that has been stuck in my throat, my heart, my fingers, my brain, for a year.
There is a story I could tell about these events which would cause you to judge me even if you promised yourself you would listen to me with compassion and an open heart; one that would call into question the positive and supportive things you have felt about me, and remind you of the times you thought I was harsh, judgmental, rude, overly aggressive, controlling, or simply downright crazy.
There is the same story that I could tell that would cause you to judge my brother and his wife. That story would be told from inside the pain of the main characters; it would have background and information that most people do not know, it would start before and end after the dramatic climax and decision. It might bring you to tears, likely cause you to send me messages of love and support, and it would be painfully raw and absolutely, unshrinkingly honest, hiding nothing. But it would also be manipulative and unfair to my brother and his wife. I am a professional persuasive writer and orator and I have the only platform, and even with the painful choices they made, and the heartrending betrayal of myself, my partner, and my children that I feel, I would never publicly share their secrets.
One year ago, this household was so far beyond struggling it remains impossible to explain. I was passively suicidal, my partner was passively suicidal and simultaneously spiraling out of control, I’m sure my older would have been suicidal if she could have been coherent enough to even think that way, instead she was entirely out of control, and my younger was reeling from the mess of our entire lives and suppressing some of her normal development to be a “pleaser”. I was screaming, literally screaming myself raw, to the universe, to every therapist, OT, paraprofessional, teacher, begging for help. Not because we are weak. Not because this is just what parenting is. Because this household, this life, was unlivable – yet we continued to live it every day. And, there was absolutely nothing we could do during this time. I hated my life. I saw myself falling apart, unable to hold my partner back from self-destruction, unable to hold my older back from regression into terror and chaos and terrorizing the household, unable to protect my younger from the pass-along trauma of her older sister and her two falling apart parents. Unable to stop myself from falling further and further into self-loathing and misery and terror of losing us all. My partner and I snipped at each other non-stop. We were not patient. We were not calm. We never felt joy, or even calm. We had so much less than “nothing left” that it remains amazing we still had food, I kept my job, and we all were “surviving” in that we all stayed alive.
We didn’t become drug addicts, we didn’t hit each other or our children, we didn’t drink every day, or even every other day, our children were clothed, fed, hugged, sang to, read to, and kept generally alive. But no one was thriving; surviving is somewhat questionable.
During this time, in front of my biological paternal family members, during a particularly stressful moment of a particularly stressful day on a particularly stressful weekend my partner and I lost it – first at each other, and then at our children. This included but was not limited to me screaming at the sky while standing next to my children “I need these fucking children to eat these fucking sandwiches”. Many hours later, on the multi-hour drive home, we discussed with our children that my partner I unacceptably lost control, it was not ok, we were sorry and we would work hard not to do it again. We reported the entire weekend of various incidents to our children’s therapists and our oldest’s school support team, reminded our children they could always talk about anything that happened in our family with their therapists or teachers if they felt scared or unsure about what to do, and also participated in reparative therapy work.
48 hours after this event my brother told me it was the worst thing he had ever witnessed and I had traumatized him and his children and his wife. He and his wife told me that my partner and I had been verbally abusive to our children. He also noted that we were “not the same people we used to be”, and were often sharp and unkind to each other. His wife said many similar things, mostly “something has to change”.
I agreed. I told them we agreed entirely, and would work to get better. I told them how ashamed we were. I told them the work we were doing with therapists to overcome our own trauma background, to find ways to survive this awful time, to change our parenting and repair when something like this happened; and how we were barely holding our marriage together, but were fighting hard to get ourselves healthy. I told them I would like their children to attend one or more therapy sessions with us, to do repair work for their experience witnessing this moment with professionals. I made zero excuses. I apologized, took responsibility, explained that we knew we were drowning, and were doing everything we could think of to seek help and support and to heal.
They told me that this was not good enough. I was informed that I needed to either check myself into a psych ward for in-patient treatment; or, we had to rehome our older daughter.
During the pandemic, our older was so dissociative, enraged, terrified, and just generally out of control that her therapists had repeatedly suggested that she may need to be placed in a residential treatment facility. Our case management team had looked into temporary hospitalization for her; there were no beds for in-hospital treatment of traumatized youth. There were no placements in residential treatment centers. (I also know far far far too much about the abuse that happens to children in residential treatment centers, so that was a non-starter – I would keep her with me until we all literally died before I let her face that abuse potential.) We were told the single, sole, option for when things were out of control, was to call the police. My older had terrifying police interactions before she came to us; she also knows some of the news about the police; she is absolutely terrified of the police. Again, she would have to literally burn down our house before I called the police; nothing we could do as parents struggling and failing during even our worst moments would be as traumatizing as calling the police and having her taken from us – even temporarily, much less permanently.
Demanding rehoming is also just…funny, cause it’s not funny how not an option it is. There are no homes waiting for traumatized behavior children spiraling out of control at the best of times; and, trauma children absolutely lost their minds during the pandemic. (No. You do not know what it was like to go through that. You just do not, unless you were raising children with trauma histories or other special needs – although trauma histories in particular were reactivated specially by the pandemic experience.) The problems faced by our family were so overwhelming, and help so entirely non-existent, that people literally started abandoning their children at ERs. In short, “rehoming” our older was not actually an option; even if we were willing to consider it. Which we were not, because it is also the absolute most awful, most traumatizing thing that someone could suggest for her, with absolutely no trauma-informed education or information behind it, and would have been the worst thing that could have been done by us to our older (and likely younger) daughter. The idea of rehoming our daughter was vociferously objected to as an option when I discussed this ultimatum option with my older’s therapist and care team to be sure that I should not be listening to this outside voice that maybe was seeing or understanding something I was willfully blind to. I declined to take that option.
I also declined to check myself into the psych ward of a hospital – in part because no one would commit me despite how badly I could have used the alone and down time. I spent the pandemic literally dreaming of being diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening disease so I could have time in the hospital free from the overwhelming pressure and feelings of failure that encompassed every second of both work and home. And, at the same time, absolutely terrified of any accident or illness that incapacitated me for even a day because I was afraid the people at my home might actually die if I was gone for more 24+ hours. But practically, there was no psych ward that would take me even if anyone would commit me; they were already overflowing, plus limited by Covid protocols, and only accepting active self-harming others – and not like, a little self-harm. I would have had to be basically bleeding from both wrists while waiving a loaded gun – and I don’t even own a gun. Because I simply wanted to be dead, but would never act on it because I had too much to do and too many people counting on me and would never, ever, leave the people around me to clean up my messy life, or deal with the after-effects of that choice, there was no way for me to complete a residential in-patient psychiatric treatment. And no doctor would commit me – I wasn’t actually a true danger to anyone, just an overwhelmed, exhausted, way less than excellent parent – like plenty of other parents at that point. By report from the professionals we worked with during and after the pandemic, we were “average” to “better than average” for parents in similar circumstances – when analyzed honestly, that’s a real bummer for every other family with similar circumstances.
Because I would not do one of these two things, my brother and his wife entirely cut off our family. We have not seen or spoken to them in a year. My niece and nephew are not allowed to play at our house or attend any events we will be present at – we get to give them a hug every once in a while in passing. They cannot come to my children’s birthdays. My children are not invited to their cousin’s birthdays. I have to repeatedly explain to my children – especially my older – why more adults who said they loved them, and would always be there for them, suddenly vanished – and I have to do it while ignoring and just moving around the squeaky step absurdity of those adults saying “you are so abusive to your children, and their lives are so bad because of you, that I am removing two adults who may show them another way to live, entirely abandoning your children, and further isolating your family”.
There is a silver lining, if a very dark shade of a grey impenetrable fog made out of sorrow can be considered a shade of silver. First, it is a very good reminder that real trauma and pain is held layers deep. Even though she is more specifically triggered by this event and suddenly losing a purported family group, my older doesn’t speak about it at all. I try to talk to her about it gently, once in a while, to make sure she knows the doors are open if she has questions or needs help navigating the sudden loss; but I see the wall behind her eyes – the knowledge they have reinforced that people will say they love you but make directly hurtful and damaging choices for you, without ever working with you; and that adults who are supposed to keep her safe and have promised to do that job, simply vanish, over, and over. I can only hope she sees every day that we never vanish. And we keep every promise we make, even when it is the hardest thing we have ever done.
In contrast, my younger asks me about this constantly (especially near her birthday because her fourth birthday party was the first event they did not attend), trying to understand how and why adults who were her main family for her entire memory could simply be gone, even though she knows they are right over there. And, she’s sassy and savvy, and and she is not buying what I am selling with my statements that they are making the best choices they can for their family, trying to raise their children without experiencing our family’s hard times, and keeping their children safe, and that being a parent and making choices about how to keep your kids safe is hard.
For me, I’m using this endless discussion as practice for when my daughters ask the harder questions about their birth parents. Right now, they are mostly asking soft-balls that I have lots of pre-planned honest but somewhat vague answers for. But there will soon come a time when giving only positive statements and explaining that things that truly hurt them, that could easily have been avoided, were done by someone that loves them, gets messy and hard and it is my job to have a good plan to navigate that complexity.
These children are a gift; they are sweet, and kind, and loving, and I am still hopeful that even these crappy experiences, when faced squarely and processed, will grow their social-emotional well of knowledge. I want so much to be ready to help them weather the unavoidable chaos of identity, self, adoption, and abandonment – in all its forms. As they grow, my inner glow of hope is also growing that they will, (with the usual stumbling blocks of early adulthood) grow into adults with both strong boundaries of self-protection and a deep capacity for love and compassion.
