Letting go of your parents and other crazy fantasies.

How does one let go of their parents? It was hard enough for me to let go of my husband. Yes I have a hard time letting go of bad things. I cling onto people who hurt me. Its the little girl in me who wants to be loved at any cost. I ignore all the bad and focus on anything good; like panning for gold in a sea of gravel. I convince myself of things and live in my head to escape the reality of the bad right in front of me. In my fantasies, the world is a good place where people smile and laugh and children are mothered and protected.  I see now that this false illusion is akin to madness.

My journey in the last year has been essentially, a journey back to ME but it’s also been about seeing things as they are and not the way I wanted them to be or the way they were in my head. It was lovely to live in my head; where I could dream and fantasize about magical things happening. I think I have always worn those rose tinted glasses and have been unwilling to take them off. That is…. until now.

Yesterday I went for my counselling session and cried through most of it. I realized yesterday that for the first time in my life I am seeing my parents with adult eyes.  I don’t trust them anymore. All this time ……even up until recently I had the illusion that somehow my mother would grab me in her arms and give me the love that she didn’t give me back then. She would apologize for not protecting me and promise to stand by me from now on.

Yes that is definitely not going to happen. She stands firmly by her husband then and now. She lost me twice; once when I was five and now again. So that illusion of being mothered has been crushed. i have to mother myself.

The illusion that my husband would somehow come round and be accountable for his part in the marriage and that somehow we could co-parent as friends has gone too. The divorce papers are in process and I realize now. more than ever, how I need to distance myself from him and not confide in him or rely on him emotionally. I shared everything with him for the past 15 years and he knows about what my father did, so it’s hard to resist the urge sometimes to talk about how I am feeling. I want to reach out….to people who know me well. But the problem is that those who know me well are the most dangerous and toxic. So there you go, another bubble bursts. I have lost a husband and friend. I am a single mum.

The other bubble burst a while ago but a small part of me holds on stubbornly. I had a huge crush on a work colleague and in my head believed he felt the same. When I started actually communicating with him, I discovered how one-sided the attraction is and I have since stopped emailing him.There is no knight who will rescue me and I cannot escape into a dreamy romantic landscape. He is not waiting for me to get divorced so that he can walk into my life again. He has long forgotten me. He never fancied me.

I think all of these fantasies were the little girl in me who escaped from reality by imagining beautiful possibilities; she lived somewhere in Enid Blyton’s Magical Faraway Tree with fairies and gnomes. I guess it is the same as my mother is doing now; living in a fantasy world where the man she goes to bed with every night didn’t touch her daughter. After all…my mother and I are not so different in that sense. We both built our lives around fantasies.

I am mourning the loss of all these fantasies and finding out that life as an adult isn’t much fun! It is lonely and hard and painful and real!