Thanks for your replies, Teller and Reclusive and everyone. I really appreciate all that you've said here. I've been confronted by this thread recently because I thought it conveyed why these people are worth my time... and it doesn't. I read through my first post from the perspective of someone who doesn't know me and my family, and I thought that I must be insane to want anything to do with them or with confronting them. But, the idea of confrontation isn't really mine, or it isn't ONLY mine. I fled from my family when memories of their knowledge started coming back, when I began to see how they crash through life and children ... I ran away. I had to. I hid in my closet. But that was a long time ago, and I have mini confronted my parents and others since then. But they don't understand the following... and I am just beginning to feel it's full impact myself, and to accept it, to come to terms with it, and to seek advice on how best to proceed so I can protect myself and my created family.
What isn't on this thread is that, my family was loving and kind. I was daddy's little girl before visiting dad's abusive extended family. And, here's what I've come to believe about dad... he was traumatized too. He loved his family so much, and especially the ones we went to visit when I was 6. My mom recognized a child molester when she saw one, she instinctively knew that there was sexual abuse in that family. She tried to tell my dad and his mother that THAT family was a risk to me, before I was ever raped. And, my dad and grandma wouldn't hear of it. Like so many people here... may understand this feeling... my mom felt like because she grew up in an abusive home and dad didn't, that she didn't view the world correctly. She was damaged, and didn't know what "normal" people were like. Still she fought for her instincts, but when grandma and dad were firm and even maybe flippant that she's way off base, then she caved and allowed us to go back there the next year. Have you ever been backed down this way? I believe that she even wanted to PROVE that she was right, but again, this isn't a feeling that she would have been proud of... but one that would have contributed to her own freak out when it actually happened.
My dad was confronted by his favorite uncle, his favorite cousin, and her reasonable husband and likely her sister as well although that woman wasn't there when I was brought out to "apologize" for lying about being raped. I told my story. I told them that I didn't call Uncle a rapist, that in fact, this favorite cousin's reasonable husband had found the Uncle's "Sea Men" on my leg. My dad BELIEVED me. But, my dad's reaction was filled with his own loss, societal pressures, self-blame (his wife had tried to warn him), and he did not handle it correctly. He stayed when we should have fled. But he just wanted so desperately what I want now... his family, and he wants them to find a way through this to work it out so we can all be together. But, his Uncle was an abusive person, and my dad was lied to instead. So, when I comforted my dad saying "I'm sorry, dad", I was consoling him for his loss; but his favorite cousin who firmly believed her dad and her husband when they told her I was a liar, said "You see, _____ she's sorry. She's apologizing to you." and this changed my dad. Suddenly he realized how much better it would be if I were just LYING about it. If I hadn't actually been raped, if his family wasn't really abusive, and he hadn't actually brought me back there like a lamb to slaughter. And, he gets to keep his family, he doesn't have to go to the police, he doesn't have to tell his mother that her favorite sister's husband beat and raped her first born granddaughter. Now, all he had to do was to teach a selfish, bratty, insensitive child not to lie about things just to hurt others and manipulate them into leaving when she doesn't want to be somewhere.
How many parents make these kinds of decisions without really thinking them through? My dad made this decision at a very emotionally charged moment in time. And he REFUSED to ever look at it again. It was extremely painful for him. More happened to create more "evidence" for my dad to believe this way, and more happened to cause my dad to feel overwhelmed with guilt and shame of his own for not protecting me... and it became less and less likely that he could look at the facts and be reasonable.
My grandma had a similar experience. She FOUGHT for me. My dad had told her almost 2 years before she turned on me that I was a liar and not to talk to me about her sister's family. My grandma tried to reason with my dad... but this is her favorite sister she'd be losing... and dad was adamant that he was correct and that it almost tore him in two to have to work through that lie and figure out what to believe. He wanted to protect others from such lies. HE CHOSE THE WRONG SIDE. Yes. It was Selfish. Yes. But he was not Evil about it. And it is not Unreasonable to see that he is human and vulnerable.
My grandma argued with a roomful of her relatives who had 2 vacations worth of "evidence" against me. The boy had never raped anyone before he met me. (True, he was only 10 years old when he raped me. I doubt it was physically possible.) And he was in there telling them that I'd wanted it, and that he had witnesses to me volunteering to be raped instead of letting the neighbor girl be raped. When that wasn't enough, and it WASN'T enough to convince my grandma, he snuck out of the house, ran around to the porch where I was on the phone terrified to talk to all of them in person and giving my grandma my story, and he bent my arm behind my back, painfully forcing me to say things that weren't true. I said them. He was going to pull my arm out of socket. I SAID what he TOLD me to SAY! I was 9 years old. It was unbelievable. It seemed obviously a lie. But I said it. He ran back to where they were and before I could even convince them that he was there making me tell them lies by twisting my arm, he was back inside standing where he had been before. In the middle of such a crisis, adults are just as vulnerable to confusion and shock.
My family isn't EVIL. My family is HUMAN. And I would bet there are many people on this site who have made really awful choices in the face of trauma, while they are feeling traumatized, that they are ashamed of and would never repeat. And I bet those same people, ON THIS SITE even, don't remember it all and don't WANT to remember it all. They just want it to go away. Would you think my grandma human if you also knew that her dad died suddenly when she was 11 and at some point in her childhood her brother raped her? Would you understand that when a child is traumatized that they grow up and make bad choices in the face of being retraumatized?
These are the two main characters in my family, they are the most outspoken, the most adhered to, the most... followed. These are the two people that I consider confronting. And the reason is simple.
My dad called me last fall to tell me he was coming to the festival in my community, and he wondered if he and his new wife could stop by and visit with us. He calls me after years of me being unable to even speak to him because these memories have been flooding back out of order, and making little sense, and all I could have done was SCREAM at him. "HOW COULD YOU?!?!" and I calmly told him that he couldn't come over. After a long-ish conversation, he said "You're choosing this". And the truth is so far from that, that it makes me really want to spell it out for him. "No, dad, you chose this, when I was 7 years old. And I didn't build this f*cking wall, YOU did. And, you continue to build it around me, isolating me from everyone I've ever known. And I don't know how to take it down, and I'm afraid of what all of you will do to me if I could take it down."
My dad believes that he has done everything that he could, and he did do everything that he could within the parameters of keeping his family together, of believing in his favorite uncle. Hindsight is 20/20, and we have the privilege of seeing his choices, his actions for what they were, but he is still in denial. And so, he feels like I'm punishing him, and the last time I was in therapy, my therapist suggested IN FRONT OF HIM that maybe I am stillpunishing him. This was before he went on to prove how selfish he is by making another choice to destroy my family.
My desire to confront is based on his complete belief that he has done all he could, that I am wrong to avoid him and the rest of the family, that I am punishing him by keeping him away from his grandchildren, that he PROVES regularly that he is a good grandpa to my niece and nephew and his new wife's grandchildren, and that HE ISN'T the one who raped me and it doesn't make sense to him that I would blame him for what he couldn't know in my childhood. So, I picture him intruding on my children's lives in the future. The way he called me up out of the blue to find out if I would let him visit with us... as if he has done NOTHING wrong... I picture him calling my kids when they are in college and asking to visit with them.
I picture my daughter, especially, wanting to see him again and agreeing to meet with him. I picture him buying things for her, telling her that he's so happy to do that for her because he missed out on so much of her life, that her mother wouldn't let him give her gifts, her mother wouldn't let him see her and that it broke his heart... blah blah blah... do you see the heartstrings he will manipulate here? Do you see the position he puts me in? And, I just want to CONFRONT them all because SO MANY of them have a piece of the puzzle but will not lay it on the table to be put together. I feel like I need to protect my children by making it really clear to my dad's family that they f*ckED up royally, and that they are only reaping the effects of their own choices. So, they will feel shame when they try to tell my children that I chose this... so they will glance away or give some other indication to my daughter that they aren't being entirely honest with her about why her mother kept them away from her during her childhood.
My children have now seen enough evidence that this "decision" of mine has caused me a lot of pain, that I miss my family, but that I cannot accept them.
And, my grandparents are dying of old age... and they love me and my children... they're just in denial and quite selfish in many typical ways. But, those typical ways are quite traumatic to me because they were part of what kept every adult in my life... confused and "waiting" to see what I would be like as an adult... if I might be more "reasonable" when I'm grown. I'm not, I'm not more reasonable to them now. I am still stubborn, and unwilling to yield to their denial.
I'm sorry this post is so long, I really wanted to convey the intricacies of family life so that it's out there that I am not cold hearted, I understand them better than they understand me, but that doesn't change the end result. Even confrontation would not change that I cannot allow them access to my children. I know that no matter how they respond to me at first... they will find ways of making my children doubt me and I will be fighting this battle with my children. god, will family ever be a comfort to me?
