IF ONLY

When I began this blog over a year ago I was under the impression that there wasn't much out there on the traumas that I had experienced. There was clinical information on Narcissism but that didn't tell the human story of how much it hurt and why it hurt to endure these things. What I wanted to talk about were the attacks and the callous and heinous ways that these marauders of my soul acted toward me. 
I was also on a healing journey of my own. I had been told many times before writing this that writing it down would help me to heal and bring me some peace. Sometimes it did and other times it was a painful process of discovery of the maliciousness of the people that I had loved and their disregard for me. I had put so much into my marriage and had invested my entirety into my children only to come away with wounds and scars that may never be erased and comforted because of who they are. As I wrote it became apparent that these people, my family, did not fit into a mold or a certain grouping of symptoms. And so , I was solving a mystery of sort. What had caused this and what was it? 
As I researched my experiences and their behaviors I think I was hoping that it was "only alcoholism" or "only drug addiction "or only "narcissism" or maybe, " just simple parental alienation". What became obvious was that there were no "onlys". All of these conditions had worked together to form a whole. It had morphed into a gang mentality of three that had nearly destroyed me emotionally, financially, mentally and physically. I had been a loving and giving mother and wife working from a disadvantaged position because I had no idea what they were up to. When I tried harder and they would come up with new ways to throw me off. They were enjoying the game of cat and mouse while I was trying to understand why everything was always going wrong. 
I tried to be strong in the face of teenage rebellion but I would find out later that this was not their problem either. After they reached the age of 20 and their father had died they were still a problem to me. They liked to confuse and humiliate me with their recklessness and lies. OMG The lying! I blamed myself for years thinking I must have done something terrible for them to be so wayward and so full of hate toward me. After considerable soul searching I knew that I had been a dedicated mom and the only thing I had done was to stay too long in a marriage with a man who was absolutely deviously crazy. 
I began to unravel his family tree and look at what they all held in common. Through this lens I saw a link of inherited behaviors or legacies of mental and emotional traits that were the same in all cases. They drank and/or did drugs, They had sexual immorality (his mother being a barmaid and a madam), they were criminals and con artists, they took advantage of people to line their pockets, they ignored their children or put them in less than advantageous situation, they had rage attacks and fought each other not only with words but with fists, they seemed to fit the definition of crazy. I thought that since we lived 900 miles way from them and only visited them occasionally, we were safe from this horror story. But that is not the case. Miles don't matter here. It was carried in their hearts, minds and souls. It was in the DNA of their offspring. It can be planted there at conception and it can be nurtured there in their environment, most likely both, although I can't say how. 
When I was young and getting married I thought it was right not to judge someone on the merits of their parents and family, now I say, take a hard look at what your intended was raised under because it may be served on your plate for the rest of your life. Even if you divorce, having children with this person raises the chance that your children will inherit or emulate this caustic group of cells called a person. You will find yourself in a position of having to leave your family behind so you can live a healthier and more stable life. This is not a natural occurrence for a parent. We bond with our child at birth, but it is not to say that they bond with us, especially if they have this set of genes. 
It is a difficult road as it plays our mile after mile until years have gone by. We face detours, construction and deconstruction, getting lost, no road maps and running out of gas, and broken parts but we press on with love trying to find the destination of family. We may find that this family doesn't work no matter what we do. You know the song, "You Can't Make Someone Love You" and there is a truth in that. If you have followed my blog since the beginning you will remember that I told you that I had attended AA when I was fist married and found that it didn't quite fit. Yes, he drank to excess but there was something else, that something else was what I needed to discover and uncover to fully recover from the seventeen years of a loveless marriage and thirty more years of repercussions of this lunacy through my children. Locked into this reprehensible code of life is the secret of how this is transferred and how this dominant condition prevails against all goodness and love in spite of itself. It can be horrifying. We must dare to look at it and investigate it for ourselves because if we don't we might repeat it. Heaven forbid.
What I will uncover is not what I wished for. Realizing what I had been through was heartbreaking. There is more to it.