It is done.

 I bit the bullet and dropped all but one aunt and my nieces from my FB list. I'm still in passing phone contact with another aunt but I expect nothing to come of it. She's more interested in her son's wedding. I'm not going to blame here, it's a big event. But to only contact me to say that there's a wedding and then later that the wedding has been postponed in the course of 16 years, that's pretty clear that there isn't any real desire to talk to me.

My anxiety has been high over the last three days as I struggled with the decision. Now that I've made it, I thought that I'd have some kind of feeling of peace or catharsis. My anxiety remains high. I find myself expecting my Mom to show up on my door step to scream at me about how I've abandoned the family. But, honestly, the phone works both ways. I've been eyeballs deep in home schooling / distance learning with the kids since March. Before the pandemic set in, they could have called me to let me know that they were doing things. The burden of contact, however, has always remained on me.

I've got better things to do than chase around toxic people and try to court their good favor. I'm sure that I made the right decision. At the same time, I feel tremendous guilt and anxiety. I know that it is the programming from how I was raised. I was taught that family was everything, and the only family that mattered were my blood relations. I was taught that I was nothing if I wasn't placed in context of my parents' household dynamic. I was treated like chattle and when it became clear that I had some skill and talent for writing they tried to take that over and make me do what they thought was the most profitable. They all but disowned me at the wedding. My parents are not good people. And they've only gotten worse since my paternal grandparents died.

On my mother's side, the guilt trips from my grandmother are frequent and she loves to paint her daughter as the martyr. I got sick of that, so I stopped writing her letters or calling. The social pressure from my maternal relatives to "forgive and make up" with my parents is strong. And I just can't do it. They keep hurting me. Given a chance, they'd hurt my children. So, I cut off ties with them. I have literally nothing in common with my maternal side of the family but genetics. So, now, I suppose I am officially an adult orphan by choice.

I am not going to allow the cycle of abuse to continue. I have stepped away from them to prevent it. I'm struggling with having made that choice because I was basically raised with a cult mindset that the family was everything and that I had to prove myself worthy to be family and please my parents. But they changed the rules on me (and my brothers) everytime we accomplished something. Once, I thought my father was an honest man. But, looking at his pattern of behavior, he's a poor man who aspires to be a grifter like Donald Trump with out the work of the hustle to do it. My mother's a narcissist and either a sociopath or psychopath. I'm not sure which term fits best for someone who would hold their three year old kid out over a three story drop and scream at them to behave with the impled threat that they were going to kill them if they didn't. Shit like that didn't happen once or twice. It was on a daily basis.

The trauma is such that I struggle to remember things from my early childhood up to the beginning of junior high. Most people have some kind of memories of elementary school. Mine are a patchwork of bullying that happened on the bus and abuse that happened in the home. And I'm the one who remembers those years. My father asked me at one point in time if they beat us. I lied and said I didn't remember. He doesn't remember those years, but as I work through therapy and do my writing exercises, more comes clear and it's just all ugly. I have a quarter of my life that I don't remember clearly and that disturbs me on a fundamental level. 

The psychologist who evaluated me at one point said that I had trauma equivalent to combat veterans. He expressed amazement that I was semi-functional. I replied that I had no choice. A therapist expressed astonishment at the abbreviated description of the horrors I have lived through. She asked me how I got through it. My answer was simple: I don't die. That grim, battlefield mentality has carried me through a lot of shit. It will get me through whatever fall out comes from cutting off everyone. Keep your shield up and push forward, eventually you'll grind your foes under your heels.