Oedipus Rex

[Unbekannt]

A tale in 3 parts.

For those with strong nerves.

And I can not express enough how grateful I am for this board and the possibility to tell my tales.

Should the length of it violate any rules, I ask to forgive me, I read the rules, couldn't find a reference so am hoping I'm ok.

If not, please tell me, I have no ambition at all to challenge any authority, I just wish to comply and will do whatever is deemed necessary.

[Unbekannt]

All my life, even during my childhood I was fascinated by Oedipus Rex. How he presents to us that we are not in charge of our destiny but are ruled by the consequences of our actions deeply fascinated me. But there is also the horror of the son who marries his mother and has children with her. It's a bit difficult to name the feeling, horror somewhat describes it but there is also the nausea in the pit of my stomach, that feeling of intense unease that almost prompts me to jump up and move to deal with it.

When I watched the movie Chinatown I broke out in tears of deepest sadness, when Evelyn yells out "She's my sister and my daughter!" and then Gittes has to protect them both from Cross trying to lay his hands on the child, giving them a chance to escape. Yet in the end all was futile, the incestuous pedophile gets the child.

It's pure terror that this evoked in me. And again that nausea in the pit of my stomach.

My grandmother had a knee that couldn't bend. I never understood what had brought that on, she told me that as a little child she had to go to Berlin (this was before the first worldwar) and get surgery at the knee and ever since it was stiff. She was born to a farmer one of the younger children of many, I don't recall how many siblings my grandmother had but somewhere around 15. She was the only girl who was trained in a profession, she became a tailor and managed even to get her Master in Tailoring. My Grandmother was very proud of that and considered herself progressive. When she was older then 30, don't know for sure how old, somewhat older then 30 and somewhat younger then 40 she got married.

My mother's interpretation of that was, that with the stiff knee no farmer would marry my Grandmother because she was not able to do the strenuous physical labor that was necessary in a farmer's household. That's why her father had given her the chance to learn a profession so she had means to support herself once he didn't live anymore. My mother claims that the fact of the late marriage confirms that thought. She also claims that my grandfather married my grandmother only in the expectation of an inheritance that would allow him to get by without working.

The village this took place was catholic. Catholicism ruled every aspect of life. The crosses over every door, the way the bread had to have a cross before cutting it open, the fields and animals were blessed in ritual processions at the days of certain saints, little altars to Marie or another saint set up at certain spots by somebody who had received a deliverance from something bad and did this in thanks (or fulfillment of a promise given to God), the at least once weekly attendance in church, even interpersonal interactions were governed by rules of catholicism with the local priest being the maintainer and enforcer of those rules mostly through confession and the weekly Sunday high-mass sermon (mass during the week usually didn't include a sermon).

Pre-marital sex was clearly forbidden by the rules of the church, yet it happened aplenty. There was a lot of standing jokes about the 6 month baby that was born at full weight. I often wondered why the church didn't put more pressure on the society to implement stronger supervision of the youth to prevent it from happening and came to the conclusion that the church didn't really want to. A great number of children was a necessity at that time for survival. Interference with fertility would probably have cut into this. The shame and blame for this pre-marital conceived child was always with the girl, the boy being the father usually was treated with sympathetic jokes about his fertility (it reminds me a little about the blame that gets nowadays put on girls for having an STD, it really makes me wonder how all the pressure about treatment and discovery of the STD is put on the girls and hardly mentioned in regards to the boys). Usually shame and blame were expiated with marriage of the girl and birth of the child.

And then there were the cases, where the girl got pregnant and didn't have a father to show for and was sent in shame out of the village. Sometimes when the girl came back without child she was admitted back into the community, but she typically wouldn't marry and had to assume a low position within the hierarchy of the village (a little like the pecking order in a hen house, she was the one at the lowest end, the one everybody could pick on).

Usually dark whispers surrounded that pregnancy and it always was to the detriment of the girl, even though some of those whispers included the possibility that the grandfather of the child was also the father of the child, no blame that would have resulted in action was assigned to the patriarch in question.

Within the village - and I remember that I still had felt that awareness in my early childhood - children were considered property of the parents. A parent could do with a child as they wished and there was no other instance with a right to interfere. And the wife was the property of the husband so she had to surrender to his wishes and demands and could not protect her children against him. In many ways I thought that the story of Cronus or Kronos depicts this form of patriarchate. I am often thinking that probably Germanic mythology would allow me an even closer form of understanding of the workings of the village of my childhood, but the rape that this mythology encountered during 3rd Reich makes it impossible for me to access it for understanding of the psychological and social truth shown there. The live in the areas of the Mediterranean Sea is quite different then the life in the more northern parts of Europe.

There is one other element to how and why these social structures function. The rules and laws of inheritance in that part of Germany demanded that an even part of the goods to be distributed was given to every child. Imagine a farm that was barely enough to support one family, distributed in even amounts of 10 - 20 pieces. The outcome was insufficient to support the recipient of that inheritance. So usually every family had a score of uncles and aunts that were unmarried and stayed within that household. That allowed their piece of the inheritance to be used by the family for the communal support. Also marriage between cousins of the second degree was fairly common (always with a dispens by the church) which brought some of those pieces back into the family.

Keep also in mind that farming in this part of Germany meant something completely different then over here in the US. I was so amazed at the cheer size of fields that a farmer had and at the fact that a farmer only works on one crop or one kind of animal. Back in that village farmers had cows (for milk, meat, leather and to get oxen to do the heavy field work with), pigs (for meat), the crops they grew were potatoes, turnips, wheat, rye, barley and sometimes corn ("maize" - only as animal food). Even though potatoes had become a staple of nutrition during the 18th century by degree of the King of Prussia, they and corn where very recent additions to what a farmer grew. The responsibility of the farmer's wife where the chicken (eggs and meat), other fowl (mainly geese), the garden (for vegetables, herbs and berries, most of all cabbage and a type of currant that I haven't seen in the US), cooking and everything (including the making) related to clothes and the household. This usually also included the "Maegde" and "Knechte", hard to describe in English. The translation that leo.org offers is "Maidservant" and "Farm Hand", which doesn't completely hit the meaning in German. They were farmers who didn't own their own land, so they hired their labor out to a farmer with land. They were paid in having a home, clothes, food, part of the crop and very little money (to be paid once a year on the day of St. Michael). They were considered part of the family but with limited rights to that family. This to explain the differences between what is known here as farming and what it was back in Germany. It has changed in the meantime significantly because of social restructuring, these ways were no longer able to support a family but also the members of the families were no longer willing to submit themselves to this often rigorous and cruel conditioning that put the welfare of the family far above the welfare of a single member. Also keep in mind - which sometimes is hard for Americans to realize since it doesn't exist yet here - that these social ways had been practiced and enforced under the aegis of Catholic Church for over 2000 years, ever since the Romans had ruled that part of Germany and brought Christianity there.

So all together, here are conditions that were deeply ingrained in every member raised in the village

- to obey the priest as representant of the Catholic Church

- to be fertile

- to put the welfare of the family over personal welfare or emotional need

This was what my grandmother had been raised in.

[David O]

SSSSSSSSSSSSssssssssssssssooooooooooooooooooooooo.... you'd like to retell the ancient Athenian tragedy? Do you have some insights into it... it's been decades since I read the 3-part play.

Nope, no rules to break that I know of, but I'm a mere peasant and servant here.

However, coffee and Danish for all of us may be a requisite, and Irmajean likes only chocolate, no milk.

I look forward to your re-telling.

OOOOpppps, it seems I posted this just after you put in part I. I was wondering what the purpose was, for you, in this telling? By the way, I was raised believing and following rule 3-- family first, community/village 2nd, self 3rd!

David

[Unbekannt]

My grandfather had been raised in a different environment. He had come to the village in his 30's with his brother's family to start a farm of their own. A falling out had happened, my grandfather's portion of the paternal inheritance was held in trust by his brother to enable him to buy the farm and start the business. When my grandfather married my grandmother they started an household of their own. During the years of war my grandmother would go often to her brother in law's farm to get food, milk, eggs other essentials. Her brother in law kept meticulous books about the value of the goods withdrawn until the inheritance was used up and they cut my grandfather and his family off. Which resulted in a lot of bad blood between the families. Both my grandfather and his brother were active Nazis during the 3rd Reich and even in the 70's when I last talked with my grandfather he denied that anything 'wrong' had ever happened in Germany, that all those reports were fakes created by the winners of the war to discredit German soldiers. Siblings of my grandfather hated him, the little I ever talked to two of his brothers (my grandfather was part of a large family, too, he had like 12 or so siblings), which were the only two relatives of his I ever met, talked about how he always had gotten as little child some extra money from their father to run out and buy some sausage for himself while the rest of the family had nothing but potatoes and cabbage to eat. This was a terror of food that my grandfather maintained in rulership over his family till the day of his death.

He claimed to not be a member of religion but only to believe in the ways of nature and that he would find spiritual fulfillment and service to God in walking in the forest and observing those ways of nature - I think part of that is also Nazi ideology and part of it is probably fear of the church that dominated so strongly in that village. He considered himself the offspring of a noble family who had given up the "Adelspraedikat" (a part of the name that indicated nobility but also sometimes a title), due to some shameful deeds in the past of the family they didn't want to be associated with. Some research I did in that regard turned out that there are some old folktales associated with my grandfather's last name that indicate something like that, but that any attempt of archaeologists to find historical evidence has failed. My grandfather tended to have exaggerated opinions of himself (delusions of grandeur) something my mother struggled with very much, she had believed him and then had to come to an understanding that these were all the untruth, cheap exaggerations of little notions.

My Grandparents had two surviving children, my mother and my aunt. My mother once told me, that my grandmother had been expecting twins during 2. worldwar and that she had a miscarriage. My mother thinks it was due to malnutrition, she said that she got to see my grandmother's legs once during that pregnancy (anything related to body and nudity was bad due to catholic indoctrination) and she had seen that my grandmother's legs were thinner then her own legs, which had scared and troubled her as a child.

There was an interesting discrepancy that I noticed in the descriptions of my mother about her relationship to her sister. My aunt was a gorgeous, stunningly beautiful woman. It seems she had been as beautiful as child, too. My mother was plain, at the verge of being overweight. She considered herself the unwanted child, the child not seen next to her sister and thought of her sister as a scheming, manipulative creature who attempted to steal all attention from her. Now the way my mother described it, I always thought that my grandmother pitied her second child and my grandfather favored my mother (my mother being the older of the two). It is a strange discrepancy between my mother's perception and what I seemed to hear from her tales. My aunt committed suicide when she was a little over 30, shortly after she had given birth to her 4th child. I think it was a case of post partem depression. I'm not sure what else contributed, but nobody in the family who knew (my grandmother, my mother and my cousin, the daughter of my aunt) ever would tell me what she had stated in her suicide note. I repeatedly asked each of them to tell me the words and the answer each and every time was "that's none of your business", sometimes said with anger.

The skilled routined ways my grandfather had treated me when he abused me, trained me to not speak of what happened to me, instilled fear and terror in me and the ways he then dealt with my youngest sister - as far as I could see - indicate a routined child molester, somebody who had figured out probably on an intuitive basis the psychology necessary to protect himself, the ways to treat the children and his own family to not even allow awareness of his deeds. This combined with the social factors of the village, the strong emphasis on fertility, at the same time the denial of any incestuous child molestation to the degree of completely invalidating the child/young woman who might make such claims, the strong hold of catholic church who has that devastating history of harboring child molesters within their own ranks, combined with this understanding of children being the possession of the father to be used at his will and the understanding that the welfare of the family outweighed the welfare of the child, seemed to make sexual abuse of children an easy to commit crime.

This combined with the fears of banishment that was routinely instilled in girls to never even hint at her father doing something wrong seem to make it probable that my grandfather indulged his desires with his own daughters as well.

My mother often told me that because she had become pregnant with me, she had to give up her career and couldn't reach the independence she always had desired and instead had to marry my father. It instilled a lot of guilt in me but also a very intense desire about finding out how it had happened. The stories of my mother don't make sense. She told me that on the day before her departure she had sex with my father, in the sense of a good bye gift but also with the wish to ensure his continued interest in her and with some revengeful feelings about having had a fight and she wanting him to know what he was going to miss out on. She left to go to a town moderately far away to become a household employee there. Now there I got confused. Sometimes she told me that she was working at that time in an accounting department of a big department store in the town close by. Sometimes she told me that this going to that other town was her running away without letting her parents know where she had gone to. But if it was such a sudden running away how could she plan all that having sex with my father? Also how could she get to know about that family that far away needing an employee? Things don't add up, not in an emotional sense and not in regards to simple facts. Also when I asked her about the sequence of events she usually distracted or got mad at me for being so inquisitive, something I have learned to recognize as the behavior of a liar who is afraid of getting caught in a lie.

While I'm writing this I'm baking cinnamon buns and the sweet smell of cinnamon combined with sugar and hazelnuts, together with the light fragrance of yeast is drifting through the house. It is as if this gives me a stable anchor in the here and now, the independence of my adult being who is able to face the monsters in that dark pit down there and putting it all into words to finally, finally get that fear out in the open, to not have to face it alone or in the secrecy of therapy, but openly, freed from the force to maintain silence and put up a 'normal' face to the world.

When I was 19 my father tried to rape me. A few years later within an argument where my mother tried to insist on my father always having been so good and how I could want to get away from that I yelled at her, "you have no clue about him! you don't know what he did." She immediately concluded that he had sexually approached me and started to say "but I went to my mother and told her" to then interrupt herself and yell at me "you slut, what did you do to cause this? how could you?"

Which later - after having dealt with the devastation of both, the fact of my father having done it and the fact of my mother blaming me - gave me cause for a lot of thought. That half uttered sentence to then be immediately stifled seems to indicate sexual conflict/activity between my mother and her father and considering the context once she was an adult or adolescent.

I had seen the feet of my grandfather once. I forgot the context. It was when I was a little child, preschooler, probably still during the time when he abused me. And I remember having seen that he had at one foot a liver spot, on the inside of the heel, right at the same place where I have a liver spot about the size and shape of my thumbnail.

I remember how I was proud and declared to the whole family, that I had inherited something from my grandfather, that I had the same liver spot he had. And I remember how angry my mother got and forbade me to talk about this and at the same time completely denied any truth, that I had seen nothing of the kind ever and was making up things. That had been in the presence of my grandfather, who didn't say a word.

[Unbekannt]

Then there was my grandmother. She had told me about the experiments that Mendel had done and what he had learned from peas and rabbits. I don't remember if she already used the german term for "genes" or if she just spoke about Mendel's laws. Anyway, she told me that I had bad traits or genes that would be passed on to my children and that I never, never should have any children. I was a young child and it deeply disturbed me that she told me that. I clung to her for support in the devastation I felt, I tried to inquire and find out about genes and the meaning (or traits) and that she tried to comfort me, telling me over and over again at the same time, that there was no fault of mine, that I hadn't done any wrong. She also implored on me, that if I ever should have a child, that I needed to see a physician immediately so that I would have tests done to find out if the child was alright. I remember the strength of that imperative and how I was haunted by it, when I was suspecting that I was pregnant when I expected my daughter and how that finally got me to the doctor (first time I ever saw a gynecologist) who confirmed that I was pregnant but also that as far as he could see it was a healthy fetus.

She also would pretty regularly actually tell me that she had comitted deadly sins and that she had acted in full knowledge of it being sinful and that so she would after purgatory be condemmed to hell and that there never would be a way out for her. And that yet she had to live her life as pious as possible for the rest of her days. I never, never understood that. My grandmother seemed so kind, so willing to give anything she had to somebody she thought to have less then her, that I never could understand how she could feel so intensly about the seriousness of the sins she had comitted.

After remembering what my grandfather had done to me, it became possible to think about incest within my family. So many of the oddities that I had struggled for so long with got an explanation, made sense now. Yet those I have described above haven't been explained by his actions against me.

The terrible thought that occures to me was that may be I'm also my mother's sister and my grandfather's daughter.

That my mother in conspiracy with my grandmother constructed that trap to catch the man who I have believed most of my life to be my father to have him be the father of the baby, since my mother needed a father. I sometimes wondered why they didn't pay a doctor to abort me. For one I think that the imperatives of the catholic church against abortion are way stronger then those against incest, but also that it probably wasn't easy in the early 60's to find a doctor willing to do that against the law and that it would have cost more then my mother and grandmother would have been able to come up with.

It is difficult to describe the feelings that are with me now that I wrote it, said it and re-read it. I'm trembling all over and my fingers hesitate to hit the keys. Lots of little black dots dance in front of my eyes. Still I'm aware of the sweet smell of cinnamon. I feel very lonly. Outcast. An odditity in a normal world. Surprizingly almost there isn't much sadness attached to the thought, it seems that sadness has all been used up with the realization of my grandfather molesting me and the whole family holding still in silence. May be that even is part of it, may be my grandmother and mother barely considered me worth saving considering the faultiness of my conception, so why not let him have fun with the offspring of his illegitimate desires and buy peace for the family? At least no danger of the law prosecuting him if he gets caught in abusing a child not belonging to the family.

Then I'm thinking, that as Allan pointed out and as so many of us have experienced, that part of depression is the way we are thinking and start to obsess about one thought and continue to build up on it more and more until it gains independence and becomes a force beyond rationality in our mind. Am I obsessed with the thought of having been conceived by my grandfather and mother? Am I incapable of seeing truth because of that? Am I escaping into one of the worst possible realizations due to the fact that I'm neurotic, am thinking to be so worthless that even the origin of my existence has to be imbued with flaws?

But most of the more measurable symptoms of depression have gone, I'm having a regular sleep/wake cycle again, I've started to partake in social activities, I'm don't feel that terrible insecurity within me anymore, I do not feel that overwhelming sadness anymore that keeps me in tears more and more. I only rarely touched at this thought in therapy, it simply seemed so speculative and at that time it indeed had little to no importance.

I have several courses of action now.

One of my main thoughts is to get a genetic analysis done. They are suprizingly cheap and well within the possibilities of what I can afford. There are several questions still open. What is described by labs who do such tests is to have either paternity tests (for childsupport) done or for people who want to find out more in regards to what their genes show to be the origin of their family. None of the places I looked up (not daring to get in touch with anybody cause I'm actually afraid of somebody asking 'and why would you want to know?') offered any information about what is needed to find out if a person is conceived between grandfather and mother. I do not know if I need a genetic sample of my mother (which she never will give me) and my grandfather (which is dead since so many years that I doubt an exhumation would provide usable DNA) or if a DNA sample of myself will be sufficient to give clarification about this thought.

It is a question what I would gain from knowing. I am the same person, I will not be different for knowing or not knowing. But truth matters to me so very much. At least I would know, be free of doubt. And quite honest my hopes are, that those things that I listed are co-incidence born more of the knowledge of my grandmother about what happened to me and the denial of my mother not wishing ever to know what happened to me. Is it worth to take the risk of my worst fears being confirmed in attempting to get a negative answer? If I'm not the offspring of incest, which I think still has a higher probability wouldn't it be truly worth to have those doubts silenced?

I attempted to talk with my husband about this. But as verbal as I'm here, I have problems expressing all this in spoken language. Also even though he is usually very attentive and a very able listener he doesn't follow the full extent of my thoughts and usually distracts or avoids. I don't want to push the full realization of this thought on him. I'm actually not afraid (Surprize! I hadn't realized this before I wrote here) that he suddenly would look at me as a monster or deformation or odditity or display in a freak show, my husband loves me and that includes the whole me. But I am afraid of the pain that it would cause to him, to fully accept the whole truth and walk through it with me. I know I'm doing it in a way to all of you who read. But chances are that due to the length of my explorations not all might follow to the end. The other thing is, I think most of you have experienced a lot of awful stuff as well, there is such a thing of enabling compassion through those kind of experiences that doesn't cause additional suffering to us, it at times surprizes me when I notice it in myself. Another thing is that telling a tale such like this gives a chance of distancing, the reader can take a step back and read the tale without direct application to themselves that allows as I hope a softening of the blow. A little like my experience in reading Oedipus Rex or watching Chinatown.

The next possibility is to schedule an appointment with my therapist to figure things out. The point there is, I am not suffering as I suffered when I remembered the sexual abuse. This realization has a strong emotional impact. But the feelings are more of intense fury, of the demand for justice, of feeling the strong necessity to never allow wherever I have an impact social circumstances to come together as they did in the case of that village I grew up in. It isn't devastating sadness. I'm not sure if my therapist is the right one to explore this with.

But part of my attempt to decide the correct course of action is putting things up here. I'm hoping on some responses that will allow me to see which course to take, additional input for analysis, for decisionmaking.

Well, my cinnamon buns and sticky buns are done too. They look delicious, but I got to wait a little longer for them to cool out until I can taste one or two of them!

[Unbekannt]

However, coffee and Danish for all of us may be a requisite, and Irmajean likes only chocolate, no milk.

*laughing*

I wish I could hand you a cinnamon roll or bun!

I hope the unfolding tale will answer the questions you had as of yet.

[LaLa]

Hi, Unbekannt,

I "discovered" this tale only today :) ... So I'm looking forward to read it (perhaps this weekend)!

Thanks for sharing your "tales"!

L.

[Guest ASchwartz]

Hi Unbekannt,

I am finding myself very ambivalent about how to advise you about this, the genetic testing. First, I am not sure you can get any accurate result without DNA from your grandfather. Second, I am not sure what good it would do you even if you could get results. In other words, there is a lot to be said for letting the past go and living your life now. You are married, have children and have lots of self understanding. I know it is easier said than done, but, can you let the past go?

Believe me when I tell you that too many families are willing to admit that incest occurred. In that way you are not alone. But all that really matters now is that you know it we know it so, perhaps, you could put this to rest.

It is also said that the best revenge is success. In making this success would be to leave your depression behind and live happily.

Perhaps this is stuff you need to talk over with your therapist.

Wow, your story is quite a read. Thank you.

Allan:)

[Symora]

Hi Unbekannt, I read all of your Oedipus story, you are a good writer... I too feel ambivalent about it since I don't know what good it would do you to know one way or the other. It could answer some questions for you, things that are probably going around and around in your head, but beyond that what??? I don't like your grandfather, not at all ! :mad: He was a selfish man who obviously had a warped sense of right and wrong. That man was the tragedy for the women in your family, and now he's dead, and that's a good thing seems to me....

I think you may want to explore what you are living with a therapist, just because it is twirling inside of you and you don't seem to have found a comfortable place about it.

Thank you for sharing you story with us. I'm sure it was not easy for you, but my experience is that when the ghosts are let out of the closet, then the true spring cleaning can happen...

I wish I could have shared a cinnamon bun with you, and just hugged you and offered support. You have proven your worth in your own life. Be proud of who you have become, notwithstanding a challenging past .. to me you are a warrior, a smart and conscious warrior, who is willing to stand against those demons of the past ... My instinct is to say 'Be gone nasty grandfather, leave those women in your family alone. You've done enough damage, now disappear!'

[Unbekannt]

Hi Unbekannt,

I am finding myself very ambivalent about how to advise you about this, the genetic testing. First, I am not sure you can get any accurate result without DNA from your grandfather. Second, I am not sure what good it would do you even if you could get results. In other words, there is a lot to be said for letting the past go and living your life now. You are married, have children and have lots of self understanding. I know it is easier said than done, but, can you let the past go?

I've asked myself that question, too. Especially when those memories of him sexually abusing me so completely overwhelmed me. I know by now that I can. But it is a slow process. I also noticed that I need to be quite careful and attentive to detail (not in an obsessive way). It is the only way of truly settling the issues and incorporate and accept them. That way they become part of my personality and not a force that lives some existence within yet outside of me. Truth has been my liberation. Whenever I answered a question, found a piece of truth as oppossed to doubt and confusion, I could rid myself of it's forceful presence.

I had to go through layers and layers of added trauma. My life choices have been carried by a lot of conditioning of the past and that way caused new pain - which was one of the motiviations for the original first therapy I underwent.

But in that process I experienced how finding the truth, realizing the truth, accepting the truth enables me. It is knowledge that allows me to be in charge of self instead of being driven by the unknown - in the course of these discoveries my life choices have become much wiser and beneficial.

So yes, I can let the past go, but at this point I'm still disputing if I need first to gain additional knowledge or if I can let it go as is. I do not want another lingering piece of past to remain within me and then rear it's head unexpected.

Believe me when I tell you that too many families are willing to admit that incest occurred. In that way you are not alone. But all that really matters now is that you know it we know it so, perhaps, you could put this to rest.

Yes, the peace I experienced in the aftermath of telling my story, this sweat relaxed feeling of just being without being driven is a very precious feeling. And indeed, that probably means I can put it to rest. That feeling doesn't come if the issue isn't settled.

I have a strong hunger for life. Not as in the pursuit of feverish activity, but more in the way a little pear tree is my husband planted. We thought the poor little guy was dead. It is a crafted tree, 4 different types of pears crafted on the same stem, so we were very curious how that would turn out. When it then didn't show any activity last year we thought it was dead. Only the fact that it still had some elasticity to it, didn't dry out completely made us think "we leave it in till after spring next year and see". And at first we thought this year "nope, not going to make it, little guy is dead". But my husband was busy with other things and didn't get around to take it out.

Suddenly it started budding and exploded into life, within only a few days it grew leaves and started to burst into blooms. The bartlet pear twig was the one to show no activity and we thought "3 out of 4 is still a good score", but it just is a bit slower, I saw today a lot of green in the buds that seemed to have been there since last year unchanged.

That little guy had been quite shocked by being replanted. And its reaction was to completely withdraw and grow roots and collect its strength. When it felt the time to be right it exploded into green and white, a beauty to watch, a fighter to cheer at. See, I've been shocked into total withdrawal. And I'm building roots now, collecting my strength to satisfy that hunger for live, so that I might errupt into green and white myself to bear fruit, fruit that shall be deliciously nourishing and free of a rotten core, free of the taint that has been imposed on me without having had a choice.

So the presence is my goal, not the past. But to get the presence I wish it to be I need to make darn sure the past is settled.

It is also said that the best revenge is success. In making this success would be to leave your depression behind and live happily.

Yeah, I do have that - how to correctly put it - consideration of revenge may be? There is a thought or two, almost a day dream, of just putting the facts in front of them, and let them (may-be-father and mother) play out the events in the fashion they always do and cause suffering for themselves. It's such a sweet experience of not being a victim anymore but to be for once the one in charge of their lives.

But it's not a very heavily visited daydream, and usually when I wake up from it, it more feels like "nah, isn't worth it, I don't really want to be in charge of their lives, those are pretty miserable lives".

My life has been and still is rich in the extraordinary. It's the 'normal' that always eluded me. But I am thinking that may be that extraordinary part might allow me to give something to others that's worth to be shared, that might enrich and enable them. I was thinking that perhaps that's the correct way to channel those energies, though I'm not at all sure as of yet, what it actually would be I should do.

Perhaps this is stuff you need to talk over with your therapist.

I will call and schedule an appointment.

Thank you for giving me this forum and thank you for your support in thinking this through and come to a conclusion.

Unbekannt

[Unbekannt]

I don't like your grandfather, not at all ! :mad: He was a selfish man who obviously had a warped sense of right and wrong. That man was the tragedy for the women in your family, and now he's dead, and that's a good thing seems to me....

You know I never thought of him in that way, I mean the damage he did to all the women, my grandmother, my mother, my aunt, myself, my little sister...

I don't like him either. He was a really nasty person.

And yes, it's a good thing he's dead. Can't do anymore damage to anybody.

Thank you, Symora!