InsaneJournal

Obviously my dad is important to me.  He was always interested in my life.  He has always exhibited many of the strange habits that I also show.  That slight inability to relate to other people, to pick up on the social cues, and to always keep other people at an arm's length...  I suspect that is where he and my mother had such difficulties in pretending to be the classic, suburban family.  Certainly, my father was technically proficient at the law he interpreted.  His business was in defense and he was highly successful at this job.  My mother was highly skilled in running the office for a female surgeon.  Both were never lacking in financial rewards.  The emotion of the household was always tepid, at its warmest.

When my parents separated, I was disillusioned.  The business they ran with the family turned out to be a complete illusion.  Neither were very good at family, when you get to the heart.  It is only now that I've seen other happy couples that I understand that the family doesn't have to work like a mechanical object.

Sure, in my heart, I've longed for the romance of the artists and poets.  I hope for it, and desire this meaning behind all the mechanics of these feelings I have.  However, I always assumed family was something done for the children, and maintained in an orderly fashion on behalf of the kids.

I'm the only child of their union.  It is unlikely that the two of them had sex much further into their marriage than a couple years.  It is even less likely that either one wanted more than one child.  The passionless existence just was, to me.  I didn't think about it much until the day came, when I was 15, and we were visiting our condo on the island (that's Captiva, just so you know...) that they announced that at the end of our trip my mother would move back north, to Ohio, and I would stay in Miami with my father.  Then, I began to obsess over their marriage.  I blamed myself for the fifteen years of passionless existence they had to live.  I managed, in time, to see that they made the choice to pursue this life, and that I was not the cause nor the blame for any of their unhappiness in life.

However, it was family in the north to which my main maladies can be attributed.

How does one confess, after waiting fifteen years to speak it out loud, that one was abused quite thoughtlessly by a member of my own family?  Oh, and yes, I did actually confess it once, at the time it was happening.  I confessed it to the wrong person.  I didn't think much about who she was, by way of blood relation to my abuser.  She was his sister, though.  I didn't know, at 9 years of age, that this blood tie might prove more powerful than the budding camaraderie I shared with her.  She took my tentative hints at what was happening as a mortal sin against her family.  She made it her duty and mission to make sure I was ignored and invisible to the rest of the family.

My relief when my father contracted his partnership in Florida, away from my mom's family and the icy northern winters when I was 11 cannot be properly described.

My mother spoke little to me after the separation and divorce.  When I chose a college near her family, mostly because I knew the reputation of the school and area and agreed with it, and not anything to do with it being near her, she still chose to mostly ignore my existence.  She focused on the life she always wished she'd had.  Yeah, she came to all the important events.  My father did too.

However, once I was an adult, the both of them seemed to think it was time to push me out of the nest, so to speak.  I have little contact with either, now.  I don't feel like either would care to know about the depth of my unhappiness, at times.  Family remains something of a mystery to me.