Of course it took this many years to put things together.
I was so surprised to hear from my daughter that she was having her wedding the very next day. She hadn’t even told me about any plans for it recently.
She’d responded with offense when I gave her $3000 for her wedding dress, throwing it across the table with a grunt. I didn’t understand the resentment. My own parents didn’t spend a dime on my wedding and I never felt resentment over it. I made my own wedding dress with fabric that I’d bought for eight dollars.
I’d told her that I wanted to help long ago. But she surprised me and did it without my participation. Of course it broke my heart to learn my daughter hadn’t included me while making her wedding plans, but I swallowed it down as I’d learned to do. My son and I watched on zoom, from beginning to end, with big smiles on our faces, enjoying every second. I sent her an email telling her they all looked great. I never heard back from her. I didn’t push.
A few weeks later my grandson sent me a message, asking for financial help. It was covid and I was living paranoid, not even setting foot in the post office while it was open for business. I had only one stamp, so I told my grandson I would be sending a check along with a wedding gift check for his mother, all in one envelope.
Again, I didn’t hear anything for a couple of months. So, I finally sent my daughter an email and asked her if she had received it.
She exploded on me and told me that both she and her husband were deeply offended that I had sent them a check without a card. This outrage, from a woman who had not sent me a single card for decades, for any holiday, birthday or mother’s day. Not so much as a text, much less a card. Ignoring the fact that I never missed a birthday or holiday. She always received a check, larger than my mother sent me. And rarely did I hear a thankyou.
Now that she has told me she’s been working for years to make my opinion mean nothing to her, and I recall her statement “you and me against the family, mom, that’s the way I always wanted it”, showing me the way she works for the umpteenth time, I realize that she did intentionally leave me out of her wedding plans. She has been mean spirited toward me in so many ways, and I have not spoken out, never written it down until now.
I hope it will be healing to shine a light in the dark corners that have worried me for years.
At one point during the wedding, a very angry expression crossed my daughter’s brow out of the blue, and I wondered what was wrong. She stepped out of frame for a moment and came back with her arms wrapped around a big white teddy bear. This must be the bear that represented her grandmother, who had passed. It was the grandmother who made her come to expect more than could ever be sustained in the way of financial support. But, why the anger?, I wondered to myself, as if I didn’t know.
Now that she’s told me that my big, bully sister wouldn’t let her use the china that she stole from me, years after the fact, I realize she made her wedding plans with others who took great pleasure in her ostracizing me. I realize now that it was intentional, it was her typical way of ganging up on me and being cruel. Who would not be fearful of a child as hateful and hurtful as this?
Why would I support this kind of hatred in any way?
Oikos 