Unlovable…….

It is difficult to look back at ones abuse once the blinders have been removed. Everything is questioned. The lies. The truth, such as it was during that time. The motives. Each memory is removed from the shelves of my mind where they are stored. They are examined thoroughly as if they are now being seen clearly for the first time. It is a painful examination.

Truth hurts. Painfully so.

As I sat talking with my husband a few nights ago, it dawned on me that there was no love in my family. What I had viewed from the eyes of a child are now clear to these adult eyes. I started to cry.

The love that I clung to as the only love I had known as a child was a lie. My grandmother knew what was going on as did my mother. Both turned a blind eye to my grandfather’s abuse. My stepmother had conditioned me through the physical abuse to always assume blame. I was the oldest and therefore was punished and told it was my fault when the younger children misbehaved.

I was a child. The beatings were horrible. The only respite from the beatings were the visits with my grandparents on the weekends and holidays. They even knew about the abuse and neglect while living with my father.

The love and attention showered on me by my grandparents was akin to tossing bread crumbs to a starving child. We were so hungry; we were hungry for love and attention but also for food. We would visit my grandparents and eat continuously. We were treated so kindly, so I thought.

The boys would run about playing. Grandpa made fishing poles for them out of branches and would affix a hook to the end of a string. The boys would spend hours at the little creek that ran beside the house fishing for minnows. I would be told what a good girl I was and how quiet. I would be left alone with my grandfather. I could do what I wanted and not have to bare the burden of being punished for the boys behavior.

My grandmother has always been held in high regard by me. I loved her. I saw her as someone special. Someone who would sit and brush my hair by the fireplace. As a Christian, she had the greatest impact on my life. I attributed what I learned and my subsequent salvation to my grandmother’s devotion to seeing her grandchildren come to know the Lord. For that I am truly grateful. God can use any vessel He chooses to bring one of His children to Him.

It struck me that having both grandparents make a declaration of their own salvation that their children would have at some point come to know the Lord also. This is not the case. What did they see in their parents that made them turn so far away from God. My mother, aunt, and two uncles have all lived lives that are filled with various abusive behavior. Failed relationships. Favoritism. At the time, of my seven siblings, with the exception on one today, none of them know the Lord. Of the thirteen grandchildren, only three. Mine.

I always thought they were trying to make up for what we missed with my father. Unconditional love. What they gave was no more a bribery to keep us quiet. Everyone was able to maintain the status quo of what and who they represented in the community.

I have tried to sit and justify what they did by saying they loved me in their own way. I can’t do it.

Love doesn’t sit back while a small child who is all ready being beat unmercifully, take advantage and abuse the child sexually. He knew what he was doing. I had never known gentleness. I had not known kindness. I did not know a raised hand to be anything but a slap in the face. I did not know it could be a gentle pat on the head. He showed me all of this and more. He used what I so desperately hungered for, love, to keep me quiet.

They never really loved us. They never really loved me. None of them. God only knows how much it hurts to know that I wasn’t really loved. There was no one there to love me. How could they have loved me and yet done such unspeakable things to me. How? Simple…..they didn’t love me to begin with.

Take a child like that, who is so starved for love and looks for it anywhere they can find and one can understand how so many women and men repeat the cycle of what was done to them. Teach a child that this is how a trusted family figure shows love and they will think this is what they must do to be loved.

Why was I so unlovable? Why could no one love me? As I grew older I knew love meant pain. I wouldn’t allow people to get close. I put up a barrier to try to keep people from loving me. The only love I ever knew hurt, abused, suppressed, manipulated and slowly killed that which lives with in us. It stifled and strangled the little girl who only wanted to be loved and protected. Slowly a part of me started to die.

I was the one that no one could love. Not enough to protect. What other possible conclusions could be drawn from such abuse and neglect at the hands of an adult who is supposed to cherish, nurture,encourage and love?

I was taught to hate and despise myself. I was taught to take the blame. Forty years of doing this to myself. Those are hard habits to break.

~ by next44 on September 11, 2008.