"For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
from the poem "Maud Miller" by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)<\/p>\n
My father died in October of 1988. He died the day before my mother’s birthday. They had been divorced for twenty years. They had been married for twenty-five years prior to the divorce.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At his memorial service I wept and spoke about my sadness and about not
\nhaving been able to get to know him because of his addictions. I have
\nhad more negative feelings about my mother than my father because she
\nacts with deliberate malevolence from time to time and it is hard for
\nme to get past that even though I know that she is mentally ill. It is
\npossible that I don’t know the real person who is my mother because of
\nthe mental illness. I’ve never known what she would be like without the
\nmental illness. It has always been there.<\/p>\n
\nI have questions about life that remain unanswered. What is the real
\ncore identity of a person? Is it the personality that they present to
\nthe world every day? Is that the real person? What if they are addicted
\nto something or are mentally ill and they never succeed in overcoming
\ntheir addictions or mental illness? Is that whom they are? Or is their
\nreal person buried under the layers of addiction and\/or mental illness?
\nIf they are cruel, is their cruelty their own responsibility or is it a
\nsymptom of their illness? Who is the person at their core? Could it be
\nthat they aren’t so nice and that they also are mentally ill? Is the
\ncruelty a symptom or is it something that was there already and would
\nbe there even if they weren’t ill?<\/p>\n
\nI know that it is a rare person who is all good or all bad. (Although I
\nam convinced that there are people who are truly evil.) All of us have
\nshades of grey in between our light sides and our dark sides. No one is
\nperfect. In fact I am convinced that the condition of being human means
\nthat everyone has a bit of insanity somewhere in themselves because we
\nare born with these large brains and no one’s brain operates perfectly
\nall the time. We get overtired, hungry, depressed, stressed, physically
\nill, out of balance and that all affects our minds. Even the best of us
\ndo stupid and hurtful things on occasion.<\/p>\n
\nI’ve met people who were truly sweet people who later did horrific
\nthings that no one who knew them expected them to do or understood how
\nit was possible that they could have done them. Of the ones who did
\nthese things and who are still alive, I don’t know how they can stand
\nto remember what they did. In the one case that I am thinking of, the
\nperson is incarcerated and goes back and forth between prison and a
\npsychiatric facility. For her I think that the mental illness may offer
\na haven of escape from the memory as well as being the reason why she
\ncommitted a horrible crime.<\/p>\n
\nLife is not fair! Have you noticed that? It is so blasted unfair. I
\nhave been told stories of estrangement in families that were so painful
\nthat it is a wonder to me how some people manage to go on. I hurt for
\nthem hearing their stories.<\/p>\n
\nThe words of the Whittier poem occurred to me today when I witnessed someone being deliberately hurtful. <\/p>\n
\nThe saddest words truly are "it might have been". But the truth is that
\n"it" never was possible. It couldn’t have been. It wasn’t in the cards.
\nSome things I have accepted, even though they make me very sad. It
\ncouldn’t have been. I could wish that "it might have been" but it
\ncouldn’t and it isn’t. Some people are their own worst enemies and you
\nknow they are mentally ill because they hurt themselves as much or more
\nthan anyone else and they are clueless what they do to themselves.
\nSometimes they are friends you know. Sometimes they are family. It’s
\nhard to accept that the only person who has it within their power to
\nget them to a better place is themselves.<\/p>\n
\nI see people do these things and then I say the Serenity Prayer.<\/p>\n
Ginny<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
"For of all sad words of tongue or pen,The saddest are these: "It might have been!" from the poem "Maud Miller" by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) My father died in October of 1988. He died the day before…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,69],"tags":[54,41,91,246],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-therapeutic","category-weblogs","tag-estrangement","tag-family","tag-mental-illness","tag-serenity-prayer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrangements.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}