Family.

Every now and then I have a craving to see my family. I get an urge to know how they are doing, what they have been up to, what’s new in their lives. I guess this is a normal urge, something that everyone has. I try to satisfy this urge by thinking about them and remembering what it was like the last time I saw them. Sometimes I really want to contact them, to hear their voices, to see them, to tell them what I have been doing and how my life is going.

These are all normal feelings, I guess.

When I want to talk to them, or see them, or hear them, I actually do not have a way to contact them. I found myself doing some searching yesterday, to try and see if I could get in touch with my aunt on my father’s side, if I wanted to. I don’t have her email address, I don’t know where she’s living, I don’t have her phone number. I haven’t seen her since 2006. We didn’t have a falling out, per se, but I’m not in regular contact with her. When I saw her in 2006, it was because the guy I was dating lived in a city near where she was living at that time. Back then, I had her contact info via my mother, another person I don’t have contact with now. I emailed her, or maybe I called her, I can’t remember anymore. I asked if I could come over for a visit, and bring my boyfriend and just see how her and my uncle were, and just catch up.

I have fleeting memories of this visit. Positive ones, but fleeting all the same. I haven’t heard from her since.

I have two cousins that I keep in contact with via Instagram. I don’t use Facebook. I’m on Twitter, but pretty sure no one in my family uses that. I touch base with my cousins about once every couple of months. Just a quick check-in, seeing how they are. For one cousin, for her birthday this year, I sent her a gift and wished her a happy birthday. I know I haven’t done that in years. We last saw her, her husband and her kids at Disney World back in 2017, I think. It was nice to see her. She lives near there. We spent the day together catching up and letting the kids play. I was deathly ill on this trip. I came down with bronchitis and actually had a terrible fever. There was a visit to a strip mall urgent care clinic. I had to cut time short with her. I planned to try and meet her again this year, but not with the pandemic going on. It was nice to send her a birthday gift. I don’t know the birthdays of her husband or her kids, though. I don’t think she knows mine or my husband or my kids’ birthdays either, in all fairness.

I am super stressed at work right now, and in life. I have come to a crossroads, and I need comforting. Maybe this is what drives me to look for this connection to my family. It does make me sad sometimes that I don’t have any connection to them, and it really feels like I am totally alone in this life and on this planet. Utterly alone. That sounds really sad and pathetic, and one might ask, “why don’t you talk to them?” to which I would answer, they are blood but there is no connection there. I have no real family on this planet. No one. No mother, no father, no siblings. No aunts, no uncles, no cousins. No grandparents. No great-grandparents. I have memories of these people, but it feels like another life. They are not a part of the life I lead now.

I am 41 years old, and soon will be 42. My father died when I was 6. My mother is still alive, but she is toxic. The stories of the abuse I faced growing up are for another post. Meanwhile, she’s around and she’s re-married since I was 9. He has 3 daughters, my step-sisters. I don’t talk with them either. Nothing in common at all with them, other than our parents are married and we lived together for a while. In school, I shared some of the same friends, but now I don’t even have those friends.

My mother’s only brother never really connected with me as a child. Him and his wife always gave me the feeling that they didn’t like me. They used to babysit me when I was young, and especially after my dad died, but I have nothing but negative memories of them. Mainly remembering the 3 girls they had as being nasty, mean little girls. The mother encouraging them to treat me badly. I remember the grandmother, Grandma Rose, and have memories of being taken to family events for the wife’s side of the family. I can remember Grandma Rose being a lifetime cocktail bar waitress and smoking those long brown cigarettes, and even her burning me with them on my arm. Hard to say if she had done that accidentally, now that I look back on it.

When the girls were older, I remember them trying to connect with me about 15 years ago. Specifically, the middle daughter. But that fizzled out. I just don’t have anything in common with them, and my uncle doesn’t like me, my aunt doesn’t like me, so I’m not dying to be a part of their lives.

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, and I used to get along. At least I think that’s what it was. I’m never really sure anymore. When I was little, I have memories of being dressed up like a doll, paraded around and shown off. My hair and clothes were to be “just so” and my mother was basically trying to be in her good graces so I was expected to fall in line. My grandmother was no tyrant by any means. She was nice, but just always gave me a feeling like her love was dependent on what I was capable of. She wanted me to get good grades, look a certain way, act a certain way. Like a “good girl” all the time, wearing trendy fashions and dressing in nice brands. Name brands. But later on, she saw that I smoked cigarettes and would buy them for me. She let me drink alcohol at a young age. She definitely contributed to things that did not make a “good girl” and then complained at the result. The final insult for me was, when I told her about all the abuse going on at home with my mother and stepfather, she ignored it. She chalked it up to me being a teenager, she believed my mother’s lies about me being bad or incorrigible, and that things were not really as bad as I had led her to believe. She herself was a bit of a gold digger, and a spender. Really a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of person. Trying to pretend she led a better life than what she did. She would have white carpet and pristine matching furniture, expensive wood floors, in a cheap downriver house. She would get the expensive trim on the mid-price car and then drive it around town like she was important and special. She divorced my grandfather when I was 5, and I’m totally convinced it was because he was never going to make enough money for her. I also think he was not a great person, but it didn’t matter. He was a steel worker, a blue collar guy, not too smart and he definitely did not make enough for her.

I never really got to the root of how she ended up meeting her 2nd husband, and if she in fact left my grandfather for him or not. It’s something I never really talked about with her. I think about it sometimes, because the 2nd husband worked in steel also, just like my grandfather. He was in Michigan at some point, so I’m really wondering how they met. It seems suspect if I look back on it now.

What I’m trying to say is, the people I am related to, I don’t really like them as people. I don’t feel like I come from good people. I don’t feel like I’m related to good people. I feel like if my ancestors, the ones who came over here from Czechoslovakia, could see us now… they would be highly disappointed.

I had 2 uncles on my father’s side. One is dead, and I had never met him. He has multiple illegitimate daughters all over the place. They keep finding more. I think there are 7 in total. The other uncle is divorced from my aunt, who’s daughter (my cousin) I am still in contact with. She hates him. So, I hate him. Her brother and I are not friends.

My aunt that I mentioned above, has a sister, my other aunt. I’m still in touch with one of her daughters, and that’s who I visited at Disney World. The aunt does not speak to me. The last time I saw her was when the other aunt’s son killed himself. The other aunt has a daughter who is still alive, and I have no contact with her, her husband or her two sons. She is my cousin and her kids would be my 2nd cousins. We wouldn’t know each other if we met on the street.

So, in case you’re counting: I have a mother, we don’t speak. My father is dead. I have no siblings by my mother or my father. My grandmother and I don’t speak. Her ex-husband, my grandfather (these are my mother’s parents) he’s dead. My father’s parents, both dead. One of his brothers is dead, the other is a deadbeat. The two sisters don’t talk to me, but the daughter of one of the brothers does and the daughter of one of the sisters does. The other children do not talk to me, or each other. The son of one of the sisters killed himself back in 2003. That’s the last time I saw one of my aunts, and the last time I saw the other was 2006. My mother’s brother, his wife, and his kids do not speak to me. My great-grandparents are gone, long gone from my father’s side.

I do not have family.

I’ve been married three times. My first marriage lasted four years. I don’t have any contact to my ex or his family. We have no kids together. My second husband and I have a son together, he lives with me here in Seattle. I deal with him because I have a son with him. I don’t have contact to him, we’re not friends, and I don’t talk with his parents, his family or his friends at all. It was not a good breakup. My current husband, we have a daughter together. His parents are divorced, and his mother is crazy. We don’t get along. His father is crazy. We don’t get along. His father doesn’t get along with his family, and so they don’t talk. My husband talks to some of them, but it’s really few and far between. His grandmother, his father’s mother, and his father do not speak. She is of totally different political beliefs than us and than my father-in-law, and so we don’t really talk to her either. My husband talks to his aunts sometimes, he has two. Things are not great between them. His grandfather is divorced from his grandmother (father’s side) since a long time, and that was a bitter divorce. That man is also (allegedly) on his death bed now. Him and my husband don’t talk and him and my father-in-law don’t speak at all. He’s an alcoholic. My husband says he will go to the funeral, though.

My mother-in-law is adopted. She and her adopted brother do not get along and don’t speak. She’s an alcoholic. She and my father-in-law are divorced. They don’t speak and they don’t get along. My brother-in-law doesn’t talk to anyone, if he can help it. He moved to the Upper Peninsula a few years ago, trying to get away from everyone, but he broke up with his girlfriend recently so now he’s moving back to the area where they grew up. My mother-in-law’s adoptive parents are both dead. They were much older when they adopted her and her brother. I met them a few times, and I liked them a lot.

I have no one. So sometimes I crave someone. I have accomplished things in my life and I want to share them with people. People who care about me. I don’t have any close friends, and maybe that’s by design, but it’s mostly because I have had the worst time with people. I feel like I can trust them, but in the end I can’t trust them. It’s the same with my family. I put a lot of trust in people, but I didn’t get that back. I could not continue putting trust into those people any longer. It was hurting me. Not just mentally, but financially. It’s really bad when your own mother is keeping you from succeeding in life, mainly because she is jealous and lonely.

So, last night I was craving family. I started to research how I could get in touch with people. I thought maybe it makes sense to reach out to my aunt, the older one. The one I last saw in 2006. I tried searching for her email address, but I didn’t find it. I found some phone numbers, but I don’t really feel like calling her. Whenever I call her, she only talks about all the people who have died in our family. Maybe that’s why I stopped calling her and she stopped calling me.

I finally thought to try Facebook. I don’t really have an account, meaning I had an account and I deleted every single thing off of it. I have no friends no posts, no photos, no likes, no nothing. Not even a profile picture. I do this to keep my identity secure. I used to use Facebook, but I stopped in 2016. It no longer served me. Facebook is a treasure trove of fake news, people who share too much and information harvesters. There’s nothing good there anymore. I went to my empty account and used it to search for my aunt. Sure enough, she was on there. I looked over her profile, and felt the familiar feeling of not really wanting to talk to her again. I went to her friends list and found her daughter. I had a look on her profile, and saw some hints of political views that really don’t agree with mine. I clicked on the profiles of her sons and saw radically different political views that definitely do not agree with mine, and felt pangs of disgust and a reminder of why I do not talk to these people.

I closed Facebook and thought about what I really wanted. I just wanted someone to be proud of me. I’ve worked really hard, and I don’t have any family that is proud of me. It’s easy to tell me in that moment, “be proud of yourself”, but it’s not easy to feel satisfied with that. Especially when you know there’s people out there who should be proud of me. It wasn’t easy to get here, but here I am. In spite of everything. In spite of these people who all let their own hang-ups and problems rule my life when I was a child, I still got here. I did it by myself, really alone. I didn’t have people lifting me up. In fact, most people were actively trying to keep me down. I cannot look back on any teacher, professor, counselor, friend or family member and say that they really helped me or enabled me or told me I could do it. They in fact, did the opposite. They told me I wasn’t good enough, or that I wasn’t applying myself well enough. I wasn’t doing as good as I could, or they were disappointed in me, and they expected better. They didn’t try to understand how I was feeling, or what I was going through. Instead of being my friend, they were my bully. Bullying me into being afraid to go out to new people and trust that they wouldn’t hurt me. They used me, either to get something they wanted from me or to hurt other people. They stole from me, beat me up, humiliated me or belittled me. They abandoned me.

When I have these cravings to see family, I have to remind myself every single time that these are not the people who care about me or about anything I have done. I have to remind myself to let these feelings dissipate, fade and completely go away. Don’t contact them. It won’t bring anything good or happy, only more disappointment. More sadness. More hurt.

So, I also used Classmates to go look for the high school yearbook where my father went to school. I found his homeroom photos and screen capped those, and that’s all I did. I don’t have any family photos, of any kind, so it was something. It took the edge off. I did that, and then I went to sleep.