It’s been nearly two years since I started this blog. Or maybe it has been two years.
The issue has never gone away. Since I last wrote, my husband decided to cut off contact with his father, but then this week they made contact again with the father’s birthday. The family love birthdays. It’s always around this time of the year that they make a big deal to celebrate everyone’s birth. It’s around this time of the year that I make terrible jokes such as, “well just as well the sperm that ended up being you, ended up in your mother.” It’s also approaching my son’s birthday and it will be another small birthday with just my little family. However, I do have a sister flying in from the US for the occasion, so it will be an occasion. I felt a little down same time last year. It’s winter here. Initially, I concealed my identity by situating myself fictitiously in the Northern Hemisphere, but I’m in Australia, Southern Hemisphere.
Around this time we get more phone calls. It’s anxiety over birthdays. Will we attend everyone’s birthdays? Anyone’s birthdays.
I decided not to work this semester and focus on finishing my studies. Had I worked, studied and parented, it would have taken me another couple of years, but I’m finding that not having that outside distraction gives me too much time to think. Thinking too much is futile. Which is why I lavishly divide myself on-line and have three or four blogs to dump various thoughts that clutter my mind.
But this is the situation.
In January, one of the sister in laws is getting married. Her husband to be is converting to Catholicism and I suppose as the newest member of the family accepts them as they are, my stance is seemingly more ridiculous. I am still the only one on the outer who is not shouting, but in my silence and absence am saying, “there’s something wrong with you lot and I don’t want to be a part of it.”
Am I stubborn?
I’m going to see a counselor about all of this come Monday. Some weeks and months, I find it a lot easier because things are less stressful in other aspects of my life. The sun is out, there are less pressures from other areas of my life and I’m able to deal with this better. But the past couple of months, I’ve not been coping very well with the juggling all my different roles. Even though it’s been a while since I’ve worked full time, I think it’s important for me to have a professional identity – so there’s all that usual stuff a young mum has to deal with. On top of this, the second child question, where to live, long term goals, what do we do with our savings – do we go and get a mortgage, do we throw it into a holiday fund, education fund – all these life questions we suburbanites have to deal with.
Then there’s incest.
I understand that because the abuse was dealt with within the church, everyone is cultish in their reactions. I understand that people need to do what they needed to do to survive. What I am not at peace with is the fact I have to be a part of this.
I feel terrible because I sense that my husband would like some token relationship with the cult. How can he not? He’s grown up within it and leaving it has been difficult. I know everyone has just learnt how to perform in different scenarios, but I’m just not okay with incest because I already have to perform so many different roles in my life. I resent having to perform the one of the good daughter in law.
I read some of my old entries and I forget most of what has happened. I forgot that the incest perpetrator said, “why do you want to cause more pain?”
What I would like is for him to disappear, but it’s not going to happen. I dislike his arrogance, his misogynistic attitudes, his woe is me piousness. He takes part every year in the Easter rituals at church, always plays the role of one of the apostles getting his feet washed by Jesus. Sin softens the toe callous.
I suppose when I can’t get the time to see a counselor regularly, this is what I have to do. I have to come here, to my little nook in cyberspace and just purge.
