Faking it with family
Back in the late 90s I got engaged to someone - let's call her M.

We'd grown up in the same area, I went to school - miles away - with her brother and, partly because we were the only boys from our area to go to that particular school, our parents became friends. Years later, when I met M for the first time as an adult, we clicked straight away.

Our families couldn't have been happier when we got engaged, then a few months later my dad died, and everything went tits up.

The evening before the funeral, at my mum's house, everyone was stressed out and tempers got a bit frayed. M arrived with unfortunate timing just as my older sister was saying some pretty nasty shit about me behind my back. And as my fiancee, she came to my defence.

It kicked off again following the funeral, and after M's father unsuccessfully tried to mediate, I, idiot that I am, wrote my family a letter, trying to put our side of things, which ended up causing a huge rift with my family.

Within a few months I'd lost my job (a blessing, as it turns out), I was on anti-depressants, and slowly but surely my relationship with M became affected too (there were other issues at work there of course but I won't bore you with them). This led to us splitting up in 2000.

After that, surprise, surprise, my family was much warmer to me. I'd still been talking to my mum through all this, but now my siblings seemed happy to have me back in the fold.

My mum passed away last year after a very long illness and made us swear that what happened after my dad's death wouldn't be repeated once she'd gone, and it wasn't.

Now, I know there are things that I could have done differently when my dad died, and I know that looking back, the likelihood is that my relationship with M would have ended anyway.

But what I can't do is forgive my siblings for the way they wrongly vilified M as the person at fault for the rift after my dad died, the way they treated her at the time and the way that one or other of them will now and again (a decade later) still make snide remarks about her or her family and expect me to laugh along (which I never do).

Likewise I refuse to get drawn in to the bitchy comments one of my siblings may make about another one - I just try to keep myself very neutral.

What I do, to respect my mum's wishes, and to avoid WWIII breaking out in the family, is just bite my tongue and pretend that I'm cool with everything, that it doesn't matter.

But it does matter so very much to me. And I am faking my feelings so well with my family on the rare, unavoidable occasions I see them that they do not have the slightest inkling that any of this matters to me, or that I will never forgive them.

It's not anything I could ever raise with them without everything kicking of again, so I keep it bottled up and stick on my fake happy face.

As a PS, a year after splitting up with M, I met a wonderful woman who is now my wife, who (apart from my mum, who she adored), isn't much into my family either, even before she found out about all this. And she does a good job of helping keep the family at arm's length plus helping with excuses for why we can't accept this or that invitation.
(Capo, Fri 11 Jul 2008, 1:10, 1 reply)

Ah fuck
Hugs. Just hugs. Lots of.
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Fri 11 Jul 2008, 5:20, closed)