nothing comes from nothing

The WOW feeling, shifting through a cache of letters dating back almost 45 years with the eye of maturity, just keeps getting stronger.

The great constant in the 1998 back & forth between myself & the Clanlocks was the same one stressed by Mim & Peter - the one issue they'd address was where Mom would live.  That, to them, was the only issue.  Her well being.  The fact that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown - that wasn't going to get any attention, discussion.  Get over it.  Praise be Kerry was crystal clear in her letters - whatever I needed to do to allow Mom to stay put was what I needed to do.  My mental health didn't come into it.  Which made sense, if you can put your brain in a convoluted enough place.  It didn't come into it because I simply wasn't then, never was, a factor to them.  It wasn't that they ignored me, for which I could get upset.  I simply wasn't.  There is no ignoring what isn't there.

Which also might explain why Kerry found me so insufferably rude.  I kept inexplicably butting into her life, acting like I had some sort of place in it.  Am not being facetious about this - it how it seems to me.  Imagine there was someone who kept acting like she had a place in your life & kept barging into your most personal space & private moments.  My guess is you'd be pretty bent out of shape by that, too.  I can't feel upset at Kerry, because she wasn't ignoring me or dissing me or cutting me dead - there was no me in her life.  

 

 

That's what I have not been able to get friends & people whose help I need to get my life onto a sane, satisfying & wildly successful track to accept in their repulsed heart of hearts - it wasn't that they disliked me or treated me poorly.  On a seriously important level, I was just never there.  

That explains Peter asking John every week what sort of hoagie he wanted & never ever asking me - the person he was talking to on the phone - what I wanted.  To him, someone was on the other side of the phone, but it was just the order taker.

It explains why he stood in front of hundreds of wedding guests & said, "You're not here for John & Elsa.  You're here for Mom," and proceeded to talk about HER for 10 minutes.  He only got back to mentioning us when he proposed a toast to the new husband & wife.  Put yourself in his place - it was important to him that he speak as the brother of the bride, but how could he talk about someone who didn't register?

Kerry, Mim & Peter spoke with one voice in saying that the only issue they were willing to talk about was where Mom would live, which was clearly presupposed by all of them to be 450 Pheasant Run, aka Squirrel Haven, aka OUR house.  They were not willing to talk about the thing that I'd contacted them all about, that I was rapidly falling to pieces due to over extension & emotional distress.  That was something I was expected to resolve on my own, because it was getting in the way of what they wanted.  They weren't being mean or unfeeling.  Impossible to register the needs of someone who just doesn't register.  That wasn't personal - it was just their reality.

It's 43 years since Kerry mentioned in a letter to Mom that she was so shaken by what she experienced as my rudeness to her, she a) wanted to leave a room as soon as I entered it and b) I could no longer hurt her once she moved to Australia.  And one thing is perfectly clear, at least to me.  I still don't register on her radar.  

It was just six months ago that she & Mike didn't give me a call, send me an e-mail, drop me a note after Mim died.  No word - other than through their daughter - about Mim's online memorial tribute.  Nothing.  What's the song from Tne Sound of Music?  Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.  THAT describes my relationship within my family to a T.