I wonder if my mother ever felt the rejection and pain of her children. Did she ever cry? I can’t recall in this moment, ever seeing my mother cry.
I wonder if she’d care that I love pictures of my family; to document moments of happy, because no one ever did that for me. I have no childhood photos to look back on, laugh and say, “Remember when?”
My childhood is a graveyard of ghosts.
I wonder if she ever knew what she would leave in her wake when she took us to a place where they would dole out nothing but pain.
She could not have known how it all trickles down, settling into behaviors and DNA cells. It leaves behind a hell between which I feel sandwiched; a vice grip of the past and the future. I am a spinning wheel. No matter which direction I turn, it seems it could be the wrong one.
So, I stand still. I take leave. I return to where at least, I can love myself. I no longer wish to falsely smile when I am hurting inside. I’d rather come home and cry.
Tonight, I felt triggered back to being a kid in the cult, wishing the other kids would like me. Until one day I stopped trying. I accepted that they would never really embrace me, and they never did.
It makes a soul feel cold to be alone inside repentance to which I can only give myself. I look in the mirror. For all the times I have failed, I tell myself to let go of regret and live again.
Tonight, I feel damaged. I cannot both mend my heart while trying to make up for the hearts I’ve torn apart. I am a thinly woven web of tangles. I feel fragile. I feel that a slight mistrodden step could be the one which makes everything shatter and break.
Tonight I gained more radical acceptance, that accountability doesn’t matter. I no longer pine for my mother’s lost accountability. I never received it. I thought maybe it would heal me, but accountability as a healing tool is a farce. My accountability has not healed anyone I hurt in my past. It doesn’t matter. It is nothing but a ride in a confessional for which there is no pennance paid to right the wrongs.
Even as I hold ownership of the times I fell, it is received as a mirage. People choose to hate or choose to love. I have no strength to beg or vie for love any longer. I have suffered for it to no avail. I am tired. No… I am exhausted.
I wonder when it will end, the generational cycles of pain. Even as I try and heal my own, I know that no matter how whole I become, I cannot glue together shattered pieces someone else is holding.
I sit alone. I am not lonely. These are the times I take flight; when the pain’s too much to bear; when I need the right people to care, but there’s fleeting shreds of empathy there.
I am gripping gravity like it’s the last string of an ending orchestra performance, hoping to stay tethered for the sake of my love.
venniekocsis.com 
I know exactly how you feel….my accountability never healed anyone I hurt and as for the people who hurt me, their accountability came off as fake and didn’t heal me. And the ones who hold no accountability I can just cut them out and that’s more likely to be healing than actually hearing them admit to the reality of their bs…. I don’t know if I will ever find a way to feel okay with myself and stop hating the way I hurt people in my past. I don’t know if I will ever be okay because the pain others have caused me runs so deep in me and it bled over into my daughter’s life so she suffers without her mom. You may not see it but you are a strong survivor and at least the generational abuse can stop with you. I don’t know what my daughter’s future or situation holds and I am helpless. Today I don’t feel like “putting on a happy face” either and pretending to smile. I just want to break down and cry.
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I deal with the same blowback from my kids sometimes. Actually, for me, accountability would make a huge difference, especially if it contained answers. My mother NEVER admitted to any wrong doing – ever. She was always right. I had one of my abusers who was a teenager at the time he abused me, talk to me. He was abused to. What he did to me he was taught by grown ups. The teenagers often abused the younger ones. I talked with him only because he was a child too. And it took me YEARS to muster the courage. A fellow survivor knew him and urged me to talk with him. He cried and said he will never forget what a bully he was. I must say that a cloud lifted from me in regard to him. It was like he took on the weight of the pain of those experiences with him specifically. It doesn’t take away the flashbacks or left over aches, but it did mend the hate. So, I suppose maybe accountability only works when we accept it and allow it to take back some of the pain. Right now, I feel like a scapegoat, though, for anything that may go wrong in my sons’ lives. It seems like if they make a mistake it’s easy to blame elsewhere instead of being responsible for their behavior. I’m in a very tender space right now. I’m in that moment where usually I run and disappear. I’m tethering myself to not do that. To stand strong. I know that I have come through a lot. What people see online, what I choose to share, is not all of my life. I tend to share the strong moments, and I’m very private about my own struggles. It can give off a severance that life is hunky dory, but there are just some things the world doesn’t need to know. It makes me ache to even think that the curse my mother passed on wouldn’t be ended with my children. 😢
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