It is hard for me to stand by and watch my siblings in pain, any kind of emotional or physical pain.  I am the big sister and it has always been my job to protect them, to save them from themselves, to teach them what they should and shouldn’t do and be there to help them up off the ground when they fall.

My sisters and my brother all went through similar feelings and beliefs I did as we grew up.  We all went through the same divorce and we all have suppressed feeling pertaining to the way our parents went about  the ending of their marriage and the perplexing situation we lived through in the 18 months prior to our father walking out with his live in mistress. Being a kid and trying to wrap your head around your parents consensual 3 way relationship being held in the home we mostly grew up in was difficult. It is only now as adults that we can attempt to understand all the complexities but even still as adults now we still can’t seem to close the wound that our father chose himself  another family. A father that to this day still can’t offer any emotional support or take any responsibility for his part in our screwed up view on our childhood and the residual pain that threatens to derail our whole view on a happy life.

It is a shame, and a shame that my siblings and I have when we try to get our father to understand that we still hurt, and that his dismissive comments regarding his life with our mother plunge the knife in deeper. He has said that our mother trapped him into staying with her by having children and that if it wasn’t his “love” for us he would have gone back to my stepmother many times over. So now it is not his fault he had 6 children, and it is because of us he stayed in a loveless marriage. He thinks this is reasonable, to offload on to his children.  How do you think this makes us feel?

I have been the most vocal about the crushing relationship I have with him and in my attempts to reconcile it has always been made worse by the fact that he hasn’t taken any responsibility and has only been able to advise us that his wife has been the one looking after him. She built the house that they lived in (to this day it is still only referred to as her house) She has always been the bread winner so in all his honesty he hasn’t contributed to her home. He has never earned enough if any money to assist his children. His standards between is old family and his new family are still exceptionally visible to all that surround us.

I’m still so very hurt.

*after this post prior to the failing of my back of house….I was asked not to speak on behalf of my siblings although my father has not read my blog he felt ok to comment on it again.