Dear Sherry:

You are welcome and thank you for your kindness.

“My grandfather passed away recently… it pains me that whatever image he had of me, I will never  be able to change it. I do miss him, for I loved him, his honesty and hard work and simplicity. But I just feel like a failure. I was never the granddaughter he wanted”-

– I wish he told you that he had a good image of you and that you were the granddaughter he wanted. If he told you these things, the legacy he would have left behind was that of a granddaughter who feels good about herself, instead of a granddaughter who feels like a failure.

I am sure you loved him and that it was easy for anyone to see that you had a very good image of him (“honesty and hard work and simplicity”). I wish he cared to show you that he noticed that you thought so well of him and that he thought well of you too.

Your grandmother taunts you, your mother cares about her image way more than she cares- if she cares- about you. No wonder you are miserable, living with these people.

You expressed it very well in your previous post: “My own family.. exploit me.. in a space that was supposed to be safe, my own home, and I am withering, without the love, the attention, the support that I seek from them”-

– I am so sorry this is the case for you. I am no stranger to living in a home that isn’t safe, with no love. I too withered. And I tried to hard, the hardest possible for me to get the love that wasn’t there for me. I never succeeded. Decades after, I finally gave up trying to get love where it is not.

Oh, how I wish my mother thought highly of me, how I wished she considered me valuable, that she cared to know what I think and feel.. I wish she looked at me with those eyes of appreciation, the way she looked at others (but not at me).

If  you are in a desert and you are very thirsty, if you stand by a rock and hit it with a stick, you will never get water out of that rock, so you have to move away from that rock and look for water elsewhere. Maybe there  is a little lake you can reach if you start walking away from that rock aka family. Maybe there is water for you elsewhere, if you start walking away.

anita

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