Confusion

I don’t know exactly what’s happening right now.  I feel this inexplicable sadness.  I don’t know where it’s coming from, why it’s here, or what to do about it.  

In spite of the enormous changes in my life the last six years, I feel like I’m being shown some really wonderful things.  Things that will make me smarter, wiser, happier, more well-adjusted…..so why do I feel like I don’t DESERVE these things?

It irritates my mother when I say I was carefully trained to doubt and hate myself.  She takes it personally, even though I’ve told her it is certainly NOT aimed her direction.  She tried to teach me to be happy with myself.  It was the paternal side of my family that taught me these things.  

This is not about whining or playing victim.  It’s just an explanation.

Daddy and I had a very difficult relationship.  Had it been only him that I had to deal with, accidentally teaching me that I was not a good person, maybe it would have been okay….because now I know it was accidental.  But after he died, his mother turned so bitter and hostile, and she hurt me terribly….and I know SHE did it on purpose.  

It’s confusing.  She would tell me great things about myself, such as how smart I was or how honest I was, but every time I would voice any opinion, her response was, "Des is stoopid!" or "You lyin’!"  How is everything I say so stupid if I am a smart person?  How am I lying all the time if I’m an honest person?  I think the worst thing that happened was that I didn’t know, at the time, how bigoted and skewed Nanny’s perspective on things could be.  Because she was older, plus the fact that she was my own grandmother, I more or less accepted the things she taught me.  From age 14 on, she became the dominant influence over me.  

I know she loved me.  I have zero doubt of that.  And I loved her….very very much.  I think she knew that, too.  I guess that’s where the confusion steps in.  WHY did she hurt me so much, when she loved me as much as she did?  

Some things, I’ve boiled down to that she was trying, in a warped way, to protect me.  Not by calling me stupid or a liar.  Things like telling me that ANYONE in my life, besides her and my siblings, of course, didn’t truly love me or even "give a shit" about me at all.  All that ever taught me was that I wasn’t WORTHY of being loved.  I always thought, "Who can love the unlovable?"  Everyone was using me, taking advantage of me, and I, of course, wasn’t being generous or kind.  No, I was being too stupid to say "no".

Nanny LOVED to put my mother and her side of the family down.  She told me, after my mother got involved with my stepfather, that "no decent woman would do what your mother did!  Your Daddy wasn’t even COLD yet!"  She called Mama a whore, a bitch, and she seemingly gladly slandered my mother’s name to anyone who would listen, even going so far as to visit my mother’s school (Mama was a teacher) and telling the principal what a whore Mama was.

The worst part of all this…..I accepted her viewpoint.  I turned on my own mother.  

There are more things, unfortunately.  I’m coming to realize some of the things I USED TO accept as "fact", which I learned from Nanny, are only bigoted beliefs with no grounding in reality.

For example, I had a great-aunt named Bobbie, once upon a time.  She was Papaw’s sister, so my mother’s aunt.  Bobbie was one very sweet lady.  In the "tradition" of my family, she was heavy-set.  Nanny used to say that every single time she saw Aunt Bobbie, Bobbie had something to eat in her hand.  She would say, "No wonder she’s so fat!"  She never seemed to consider that a) she might be wrong or b) Aunt Bobbie might be diabetic, so she’d NEED things to eat more often than Nanny would.  That’s really ironic, anyway, since Nanny’s husband, my Grandpa, was diabetic and VERY fat!  She never once put HIM down for it!  Not that I would want her to.

From all this (and plenty more, trust me), I learned the hard way to fight fire with fire.  There was a time when I was at my breaking point from the series of "no decent woman" comments, so I told a family member that the next time Nanny said it, I was going to reply, "No, a REALLY decent woman would get pregnant from whoring around with American soldiers in wartime Germany, then make sure her son grew up without a father.  And when her son was almost grown, she’d meet and fall in love with a married man, wait impatiently for him to divorce his wife and desert his children and marry HER, accept HER son as his.  THAT’s what a REALLY decent woman would do!"

I guess word leaked back to Nanny, because after I told my family member that, Nanny NEVER said those words about Mama again.

I disrespected my grandmother, my mother, my father, and myself, all in one fell swoop, back then.  That’s not easy to live with.  

I fear teaching my own grandchildren any of the negative lessons I learned from Nanny.  That’s why I rant about things HERE, and not to my kids.  I don’t want them to be unhappy with themselves, the way I’ve been.  I want my girls and my grandkids to know how special they are, and that they deserve to be happy and loved.  The only requirement to receive all that, in my view, is to GIVE all that.  I want my daughters to be themselves.  If anyone else is unhappy with that, that’s THEIR problem, not my girls’ problem.  

Why can’t I apply those same rules to me?

 

 

 

Herman Forstmann

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