Abandonment, Betrayal, and Rejection – Free from Dysfunction.
7/4/2023
7:44 pm
Ironically, today is Independence Day here in the United States. As an indigenous person, I do not celebrate this holiday and with good reason but that is a different story for another day.
Today I write about being let go from a dysfunctional life and finally being set free.
Dysfunctional – “not operating normally or properly…deviating from the norms of social behavior in a way regarded as bad.”
This describes the family that I grew up with and the relationship with my mother, her husband, and my half-sisters. It was a toxic environment and I tried to stay as neutral as possible for most of my life but it just did not work.
My life with them has been the basis of the underlying trauma of my major depressive disorder and anxiety. It is what I have discussed for years with my therapy groups.
After years of discord, abusive behavior, and mistreatment, everything came to an end yesterday after blowing up over the weekend.
Betrayal – “violation of a person’s trust or confidence, of a moral standard.”
I had not talked to my mother since the incident at my apartment complex. In March, she texted my youngest daughter telling her that she thought that my son and I, had been kidnapped. She tried to get the apartment manager involved and asked them to call the police. Thankfully, my daughter who had just had a phone call with us the night before, let us know about the message. I called the apartment manager; she had already seen us when we checked the mail that morning and reassured me that she had not called the police. That whole incident stemmed from me telling my mother “no” when she asked me to help her husband set up his 4th cell phone over the course of a year. I had told her to ask one of her other daughters or her other grandchildren. She had gotten angry that I said “no” to her.
I thought things were smoothing over after she helped me out by driving me to the dealership after my car had been repossessed at the beginning of June. She even brought over some items to give to her grandchildren when we left for Oregon on June 15th. I was following up and checked on her after we got home. There had been a big storm that had moved through the area while we were gone and she had no power. She was staying with her daughter.
She texted me on Saturday “I need to know if you can give me some money…” I had already received a text the previous week saying she needed money for “Rent and car payment…” That is when I told her I did not have any extra money and only get paid once a month. The second text stated she needed money for a water and gas bill.
Since I did not have the funds, I sent a text to her daughters, whom I do not talk with very much either. I sent them a screenshot of the text and explained that it was the second time she had asked for help within a week. I was concerned and thought they should know. I asked them what they wanted to do and I expressed my concern over the fact that both of them, their mother and father, were getting older, they are in their late seventies. We had not discussed anything about them yet.
I also gave them information about a program that I had helped their parents enroll in, towards the end of the previous year, from their dad’s tribe. That program was supposed to pay 6 months of their rent and utilities. I was not sure what happened with that but knew they were supposed to stay on a budget and start a savings account as part of the program.
I thought they needed additional funds but I was not going to be able to help. I thought their daughters might be able to assist. In this text, I also stated to them my plans for not living in this state for very much longer, I plan to move within another year and a half. It was the reason I wanted to talk about their parents and how to handle it going forward.
The conversation they had with their parents after I sent that text did not go well. Instead, there was backlash, directed at me as being the problem.
Abandonment – “an act or instance of leaving a person or thing permanently and completely.”
I received a text on Monday morning from my mother and it said “This is the last text you will receive from me…when you needed help we were there…we depleted our savings to assist you when you needed a car payment…” The rest of the text was so full of inaccurate information and took jabs at my current financial situation insinuating that I was the irresponsible one for having my car repossessed.
Nowhere in my text to their daughters did I state they were being irresponsible; I voiced my concern because they needed additional help as she stated in her texts to me. I screenshot her reply and followed up with a text back to her daughters to clarify and correct what she wrote. The youngest sister knows it was inaccurate because she is the one that helped me last year, not our mother. The youngest sister had also texted me back, before they talked to them, stating that she had no idea about the tribal program or their needing help because they never tell her anything.
Yes, I went to them and asked for help in November of 2022, this occurred after not talking to them for almost four months. There was an incident at my Uncle’s funeral in July of 2022. My mother’s husband tried to embarrass me in front of all our relatives and people I did not know. He talked to me like I was a five-year-old, telling me to “Come in here and sit down, quit talking.” I was 51 years old at that time. The aunt I was talking with laughed and asked what his problem was. I told her that I had no idea.
I did know that my mother and her husband had been arguing that morning when I arrived at their house to ride with them to the funeral. After listening to them for almost 30 minutes, I left and drove on my own. I called and left my mother a voicemail.
My mother then told everyone that I got mad, stormed off, and was not showing up. I was told this story by my cousin when I arrived. The incident with her husband happened shortly afterward. I did not sit with them at the funeral or the meal. My cousins and aunts had me sit by them instead. They put the kids at my mother’s table. That did not go well.
In November of 2022, I had no one else to turn to and called my mother telling her that the finance company wanted more than just my regular car payment, which I did not have, and they were threatening to repossess it. I got to their home and her husband said he would give me $300 to help. I drove my mother to the ATM and she handed me $150 and stated that she brought the wrong ATM card with her. She also put $20 in gas into my car.
She said she would get the rest to me later but that never happened. I offered the additional money to the finance company but they turned it down and wanted more, a double payment. I then asked my youngest sister. My nephew sent me more money instead and it was paid to the finance company. I owe him for that and he told me that I did not have to pay him back but I still intend on doing so when I get some extra money by the end of the summer.
After that, it was still a constant struggle with the payments despite making the monthly payments and trying to add more here and there. The finance company repossessed it at the beginning of June. They stated that they could no longer work with me on the payments. It was perpetually in a negative balance for almost 7 months. Every payment I was making was being put at the end of the previous balance then it would roll over to the new date and never made a dent in the amount due. I had been paying for the car on time for three years before I started getting behind in October of 2022.
Rejection – “to refuse to accept, use, or believe something or someone.”
Since that happened, in November of last year, I had already paid my mother back $100 and still owed her $50 but she stated in her text that I owed her “…$400 for the car payment back in November and had only paid her $50…” That was untrue as I stated in my text to her daughters but it did not matter though to my middle sister.
The middle sister texted back “Of course we spoke to her. That was your suggestion. I’m not worried about them, their finances. They are adults & can handle themselves, but if they need assistance here & there so be it. You’ve benefited from that act of kindness and generosity & now you want to complain…”. She also stated that I told them more than once that we are not a family anymore and to leave it at that.
That part was true, I had stated before that we were not a family anymore, every time I got bashed or mistreated by them. I have never been a part of or treated like their family only when they needed something from me or they expected me to do something for them.
Yet, every time they asked for help, I never asked for anything in return or reciprocation for help. I never expected to be paid back and was just trying to do the right thing by them despite the way I got treated.
I thought I was just trying to help them out by letting their daughters know there was a problem. I thought they were just helping me as well when I asked but it was never like that. Any time I asked, if they helped, then my return on their favor required strings to be attached or for me to give back double or more. That is why I said it was a toxic environment.
I could go on and on about all the different incidents that happened over the last 30 years and why we would come to blows resulting in us not talking to one another for months or even years.
There was the incident when I had to go away for training for 8 weeks and my mother volunteered to be my babysitter while I was gone…for $250 a week. I had no other choice because it was summer time and daycare costs were almost double. She quit on me after 2 weeks and I had to scramble to find someone.
Thankfully, my cousin’s daughter stepped in and took over. Then when I was down to my last 3 weeks I got this call one late night. It was my mother begging to be the babysitter again. I told her I would have to talk to my cousin’s daughter first and that’s when she asked for an additional $250 a week because she couldn’t live on that small of an amount, I could hear her husband in the background asking if I was going to give them the money or not. I told her “no”. She didn’t talk to me for a month.
There was the time when an argument occurred over “a man” that my sister was interested in and my parents supported her in that pursuit even though she was engaged. They found out that I had already been talking and texting with him for over a month.
I was in the middle of a separation and had met him at my sister’s 40th birthday party. That incident resulted in later being barraged with 30 years of hate through 80 text messages, one right after another, and angry voicemails from both my mother and sisters. This happened while I was waiting for my evening class to start. My classmates in college saw the texts and heard the voicemail beeps as they were occurring. My oldest son saw them and heard the voicemails when he picked me up from school. I then showed my then-soon-to-be ex-husband so he was aware of what was going on.
Then some of my relatives on Facebook heard about how “terrible” I was to my mother and were asking me questions. I made a public statement on Facebook about the years of abuse that had been inflicted on me at the hands of her and her husband and that they did not know the truth about us. That shut down my mother trying to get people on her side. We did not talk to one another for a little over a year after that but came back together when my niece was in a terrible accident.
Then my ex-husband passed away the following year and there was an incident at his funeral involving money from my Aunts and Uncles that was supposed to be given to us but it never was. My mother had held on to the card that was for us that had the money in it. When I finally got the card, it had been in her purse for a while and she hesitated to give it to me. She shuffled around things in her purse and handed me $50 that she said was in the envelope. I stopped talking to them for almost a year because of that one. We were struggling to pay bills and the kids had just started back to school after their father passed away. I to this day do not know how much money we had been given.
There are also countless items that I made for my mother as gifts, only to find out later that she had sold them not only to strangers but to my relatives as well. I would usually find that out by accident when I would see someone wearing something that I had made or someone showing me what they bought from her.
Every incident would make me feel bad because I did not want my children to feel like they could not be involved with them. They were their aunts, cousins, and grandparents, they were still their relatives. The issues I had with that family were for me to deal with and did not involve my kids. My kids have always known that. They are adults now and I have left any interactions with their relatives up to them.
Per the last text from my mother, she has decided that I and my children are not to be talked to again. She made that decision. I have never told my children to reject them, that is not for me to say, even as a parent. They are capable of making their own decisions about whom they want or do not want in their lives. All I can do is respect those decisions.
Today is my independence day and the first day of freedom.
I felt so rejected yesterday and have cried more than once today but not because I am sad. Because I am mad.
I am mad at myself for trying to hold onto a person that never wanted me in the first place, my mother. I knew this but kept hoping it would change and that she would have some sort of respect or appreciation for me one day.
I am mad because I wasted so much time trying to develop some sort of friendship with her daughters knowing they did not feel that way about me.
I am mad because I let myself become mentally and emotionally distrustful of others because of trying to forgive and forget the abuse her husband inflicted on me.
I guess the dream I had about them on Sunday night was foretelling me it was all coming to an end. In that dream, I was a very successful person surrounded by my kids, their families, the online person I talk to, and the relatives that I trust. We were all at my beautiful house in the mountains when my mother and her daughters showed up, trying to come and see me. I rejected them and told my security people to send them away. I never saw them in the dream, they were only mentioned by one of my uncles. In the dream, my uncle said he was going to deal with them later. Nowhere in the dream was my uncle’s brother, my mother’s husband mentioned. I assumed it meant he was no longer around.
Then I woke up to that text from my mother on Monday morning.
The universe has its own way of correcting a course.
Thank you so much for stopping by and supporting my blog.
Have a wonderful week ahead!
Peace, Love, Happiness, and Good Vibes, always!
Suzanne
love to bake 