The more time I spend talk­ing to oth­ers, the more I real­ize that every fam­ily is severely dys­func­tional, extremely fucked up, or at least a lit­tle nuts in their own spe­cial way. Every fam­ily has at least one mem­ber that's inten­tion­ally not dis­cussed, con­spic­u­ously absent at fam­ily gath­er­ings, or is just gen­er­ally ignored. They become a pariah within their own family.

Their own family.

What makes a fam­ily, as a whole, do this? Turn their col­lec­tive back on one of their own? Some invari­ably say, "it's for their own good," or "they need to learn on their own," or "it was their choice." Peo­ple think they're doing the right thing. They may even think that they're being sup­port­ive by cut­ting a loved one off — and as ashamed as I am to admit it, I'm guilty of that as well.

For me, it wasn't about sta­tus or embar­rass­ment or pride. Put sim­ply, my excuse was anger. Because the per­son was not here to vent my frus­tra­tions to, I inter­nal­ized my feel­ings until they were so strong that I had a great excuse to aban­don this per­son. But it was just that — an excuse — and it doesn't absolve me of this behavior.

Noth­ing will. I can't go back and change how things have hap­pened. I can only go for­ward and do my best to take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ties I have to repair things and heal. I'm tired of liv­ing with this pain in my heart, but more impor­tantly, I'm tired of caus­ing pain in the heart of this person.

It's about blood and it's about fam­ily. But it's also about being a decent human being — because for me, this per­son is my mother.  And that first oppor­tu­nity is tomorrow.