Situationship

You know how people say that after a break up you may not just be grieving the relationship and/or the person that you are no longer with, but you may also be grieving the person that you were in that relationship?

Yeah.

Though I’ve heard this and have even said it to other people I never actually took the time to look at this for myself. And since I have been DEEP in the shadow and inner child work I decided to take a stroll down this lane of healing. What I discovered opened up a whole new world. I’ve talked in previous posts about having this idealized self that I was trying to uphold. Naturally I would bring that idealized self into my relationships. I think what I am grieving is not just the idealized self that I created but also this “picture perfect” family life. Somewhere along the lines of my life I had made it up in my mind that I wanted to have children, have a partner (when I was younger I didn’t want to get married, go figure), have the nice house and be a doting mother and romantic partner.

For a moment I thought that would be possible but unfortunately that never came to fruition. And to honest I’m not sure that dream would have come true even if my old boyfriend hasn’t passed away. I can’t say that the dream would have materialized but at least with him it felt like a possibility. And the fact that I was even considering the dream with him meant that he had unlocked something within me that I had not even noticed within myself. But this isn’t even about him.

I believe that my intention to have this idealized self and family was born from not having it as a child. My biological mother was a single parent. I had no relationship with my biological father. My grandmother lived with me and also raised me and then eventually my mother got married and I had a step-father. He wasn’t mean or nasty to me but I didn’t feel that he wanted to be a part of my life. I never got the vibe that he cared about me enough to call me his daughter one day and I didn’t feel close enough to him to want to call him dad.

I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was going to have kids. In fact I wanted five. Yes, FIVE! I didn’t care about gender I just knew that having a lot of kids meant that I would have a lot of family. Though I have four older half brothers I am the only child of my mother and father and I never met my brothers until later on. Like many kids in the 80’s and 90’s I loved watching sitcoms with my family. We would gather around the television and watch all sorts of show with families who were all going through complex issues and in thirty minutes would magically solve all the problems that they had.

With the loss of my biological mother, experiencing sexual trauma at a young age and then uprooting myself to move to a completely new state my life felt chaotic. Seeing a family dynamic that I did not have made me yearn for it. Maybe if I have a family like the ones I see on tv then nothing bad will happen and all of my problems will be solved in thirty minutes. Each relationship was an attempt at coming as close to that “picture perfect” family that I desired, only to discover that once I came close to it, I didn’t feel happy. This was a hard pill to swallow.

My plan felt sure fire when I was younger and while I wouldn’t have admitted it in my teens and twenties, I longed for that traditional, fictional family model. So when I left my last relationship I was fraught with the now crushing reality that fairytales were not in the cards for me. And not only that, even the image of the fairytale that I was trying to uphold didn’t make me happy. So what was I doing all of this for? Not to mention that after years of living up to a standard that I had set for myself as a child, I was completely clueless as to who I am.

I know relationships teach us something about ourselves and nothing is by coincidence or chance. All of my relationships were intentional and I had great love for each person I was with. But I was trying to fit other people into a model that I had created for them that they weren’t living up to. And I didn’t even tell them that I was doing that. Honestly I didn’t even know I was doing it at the time. I would like to apologize to those people and I want to apologize to myself.

I’ve already written a letter to my younger self asking for forgiveness for a multitude of things that I dropped the ball on when it came to keeping her safe and protected. I think I will start writing another letter forgiving her. As difficult as that is to say (or type) I think I need to forgive myself for thinking that the idealized self is what I needed for love and connection rather than my true authentic self.