“I accepted my father’s dislike”: the path from trauma to self-acceptance

“Daughter, we will not communicate”

My parents divorced when I was not even three. I have nothing left of my father, except for the patronymic. The last time he came was when I went to first grade.

10 years later, in the first year of the institute, I came to him. Without having time to say anything, I heard that he was not needed and he would not communicate with me. Everything. To say that I was in pain is to say nothing. Then there were many years of silence, two attempts to communicate with my brother and sister, other relatives living with me in the same city, and again the same answer.

I thought for a long time about how I deserved such an attitude, what was the reason that I was rejected. At first, I wanted to reach out. Then prove that good and successful.

Then she got angry. Hated. Cursed. Sometimes she cried, then she got angry again. I tried to persuade them in my head, to explain everything. Hoped-hoped-hoped. She was proving something to herself. Time passed and nothing changed.

“You are all like your father, but we will fix you”

When I tried to talk about my father, my mother only got angry. If I did something that was inconvenient for her, she said that I was all into him, and they would correct me, make me “normal”, like they are – my mother and her parents.

I was not “them” and not “him”. I was on my own. Completely unnecessary either there or here. I’m used to taking care of myself. I became strong. I have learned to live alone.

“Do you need a husband?”

One day, on the first of January, my mother came to visit and with one question brought me back to childhood trauma. So much so that I almost lost everything. That day in my kitchen, my mother quietly asked: “Do you need a husband? It’s easier to live with mom, mom will always help. ” Why is she? After all, I lived separately from her for 20 years and did not see any help from her.

I was happy with my husband, our daughter was about to turn two years old. I was indignant: how dare she come to me and hope that I will unreasonably destroy my marriage with my beloved man, leave the child without a father. It was the script of her life, not mine. But these words of the mother seemed to break something in me.

Return to trauma

The next day I started coughing. Terrible – I couldn’t sleep. They did various tests and found nothing. I was fed antibiotics, no one could understand why I was suffocating and not sleeping. The cough went away only after a lot of medication, including sedatives, and a couple of weeks of lying in silence.

And then my hands dropped, although I did not immediately understand this and attributed my poor health to anything, not seeing the main thing. I let my work drift, canceled appointments, and just sat at home.

During this period, my main occupation was to look at my husband and daughter. A million times to be convinced that my child has a father. And tremble in fear that he will disappear. I saw myself in my daughter, a little one. Again and again experienced rejection from the one who gave me life.

By summer, I was already completely exhausted. Any plans seemed dangerous to me, any movement – a fluctuation of the existing foundations. I hung in suffocating anxiety. My strength and resources have dried up. I felt like I was heading towards depression. Although in reality nothing happened.

One thing was pleasing – this is the ability of my husband to love and accept me in different states. So we lived for eight months, with small rare bursts of my activity, which subsided faster and faster.

Finding an exit

By the end of August, I was going crazy with a sense of hopelessness. And, comparing her condition with what it was before, she went to a psychologist. One meeting was enough to understand that at that moment in the kitchen, when my mother turned to me, I “failed” into my childhood, into my main fear: to be left without a father.

She lived in fear and through it she saw the world. All my strength went into keeping the family together. Although nothing threatened her, except for one phrase spoken by her mother. But who cares about logic when it comes to trauma?

Adoption

For 40 years I have been looking for a way to accept the situation. Accept that my parents separated, that my mother did not accept me as I am, that my father rejected me. I even got a degree in psychology to better understand how I feel.

All these years, I thought: if I come to terms with the moment in which they parted, then I will feel relief. But that did not happen. Now I realized that the meaning of all my searches is in the moment where they met and decided to live happily … Although this turned out to be what happened.

The place of agreement with my fate, with my past was … a restaurant. Many years ago my parents played a wedding in it. I came to sit in this place to understand how one day two people came to an agreement and I appeared.

After many years, I was finally able to feel peace within myself. Unfortunately, I cannot show my daughter to my father. But I can show her the place where my whole family once gathered together, where they loved and appreciated each other, planned my birth.

And now I can say to mom and dad: thank you for life. I’m already an adult. Then I myself.