Good Tuesday afternoon, Nea:

Raining here 😽🙀😿 and 🙉🙊🙉 (no dogs emojis available on the phone), all.. night and all day.. long.

Bogart, a bit wet from the shortest little walk outside, is comfortably situated on my lap as I’m typing into the phone whatever comes to mind.

You mentioned before, quite a few times, how you’ve been playing future family gathering in your mind (after you move to your own home). I can sense a strong flavor of nostalgia: memories of good times, warm, safe, however temporary.

Maybe those memories are so sweet, endearing and enduring because they were much needed breaks from unpredictability and tension.

I remember similar breaks perhaps growing up when visiting aunt Susi during holidays. There my mother seemed happy, never violent, never abusive.. the mother I wish she was at home, the place that felt like a war zone.

I’ve read many hundreds of members, here in the forums, over the 11+ years of my participation here (it used to be much busier here, with new members appearing sometimes every day. Now there hasn’t been a new member posting in over a month),

And of all the hundreds, the descriptions of only a handful of members felt close to the severity or longevity of my mother’s abuse, and your father is one of them.

It’s the combination of physical violence, the threat of physical violence (when not actually being violent), the name calling and other verbal abuses, the unapologetic domination, the victim blaming, and the lack of expressed accountability or regret.

The incident with your husband- that’s part of your father’s pattern over at least 3 decades (right?), not an exception.

“I’m still trying to figure out what the healthiest middle ground looks like”-

Hmm. Let me get the monkeys emojis back.. 🙈🙉- see no evil, hear no evil.

I’ll stop here (the unplanned reuse of the monkeys emojis amazes me).

Anita