There is this thing about ripping off scabs. You start to bleed again. You feel the pain fresh again. Your body feels the shocks again, the hurt, the pain again. And then your body has to set about healing again. But before the healing process starts to take affect, your entire body pulses in pain.
And it’s funny how people can unintentionally pick at scabs that they aren’t aware have already healed.
I had already forgiven my aunt and uncle for the hurtful things they said about me. The names they called me behind my back. The horrible things they said about my partner. The accusations and slandering. The assumptions. I’d let it all go. It took a lot to do that because when people who you think love you and understand you can do something like that, such a 180, it shocks you and hurts quite painfully. What they did was the first instance of being hurt by a family member.
My family has always believed in standing by your family, treating you as they’d want to be treated, protecting them, sharing love. Respect. Trust. The desire to help. To grow.
For a family member, for two family members to go completely opposite was something I never would have expected. But it happened. And it hurt. And I had gotten over it.
Until tonight.
And now I’m wondering why I ever forgave them in the first place. They never asked me for forgiveness themselves. I only heard it through a third party. They never talked to us. Apologized to us.
Apologized for calling me a whore.
Not to mention the horrible things that they called him and insinuated about him that were not true at all. But to demean my choices of being with someone I loved as being a slut. For thinking that I was some weak spined person that was going to spiral into some white trash crack urchin prostitute. It’s like they’d never met me at all. Seen me. Talked to me. I may be a soft spoken person but people who know me know about the core of strength that I have. My own morals and intelligence which guides my life. I am not some weak little horny girl who jumped in the sack the minute she left her parents home.
Andy and I had a bond. We had something special and we had acknowledged that. We made plans for life together. The fact that our relationship turned physical after is something that I chose. That he chose. That we chose together. It wasn’t some tiny thing. It was our special bonding. I’m not saying hormones weren’t involved, but for me to take such a huge step, I had a certain list of things I wanted to happen first. And they happened. That was that. And I shouldn’t have to validate our love or relationship to anyone.
But whenever we were around them, we had to. I was forever asking Andy to be the bigger person, to not fight with them. To let it go. And the whole time they said such hateful things about us, then bitched to my grandma about how we didn’t grovel at their feet for an apology.
Do you know what it feels like to be so horribly demeaned like that? It was the sort of thing I would have expected from high schoolers, not adults and certainly not family members. I remember when we found out I was pregnant how afraid I was to tell everyone because I was afraid of the judgements. Of everything that my aunt and uncle poured towards us coming from my friends that I had grown up with. I have some deeply religious friends and it was the hardest thing to tell some of them. But to have such HATRED and DISGUST and ANIMOSITY come from my family, who acted in our company like it was nothing? I can’t even describe how that hurt.
I should know. I’ve been trying this whole time.
It hurts. Even though the wound was old and healed. I had found peace.
But now I don’t want peace. I just want an apology.
All the apologies we gave them, so many, for being late to an event, for not being the people they believed us to be. That’s all we did was apologize. And I have no desire to apologize to them ever again.
They even tainted our marriage and made it seem like less than it was. It was one of the reasons that I demeaned the whole event, because we had already bound our souls to each other. I deeply regret that they were even present because it removed a lot of the love from our ceremony. There was an underlying… I don’t even know the word. It was a smug thing. There was a vile smugness that now our relationship was validated, like it hadn’t mattered before. I wish they had never come. I honestly wish none of our relatives had come.
I wish we had been married, just the three of us.
Jasbaz, Andy and myself.
Just us.
Because apparently we’re the only ones who understand. And it’s a really hard thing to try to build a new family when you are constantly being attacked.
But would you know it, we’ve been doing fine. Hell, I’d go as far as to say that we are a thriving success. That we are living our revenge in proving them wrong. And that’s what we’ve always wanted to do. Take the high road and prove them wrong. And that is exactly what we’re doing. It just hurts, is all, being reminded of it all of the sudden, out of the blue.
I hope that they win the lottery and put all the money towards therapy because I sincerely believe that they need a lot of it. People can’t be that twisted, that horrible and still be healthy functioning adults.
