From Tracie: The Last Phone Call We Shared

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Last Phone Call We Shared

I am an only child, but I have many cousins on both sides of my family. I have written about some of my them in the past, most notably the cousin on my father's side that I reconnected with last year. Today I have another cousin on my heart, Felix*, who is also from my father's side of the family.

Felix is three years older than I am.  We grew up together, but we were not close. His family moved away when I was in Junior High, but came back to town often to visit our grandparents. He was clearly the favorite grandchild in our family.  Firstborn and a male on top of it, the rest of us never had a chance. I despised him for this, and other things. At the same time I tried terribly to earn his approval. It makes me sick to admit that, even to myself, but I am committed to speaking and writing truth, so that truth must be acknowledged.

After our grandparents died, our relationship grew apart in a very natural way. No big fight or conscious decision to part ways, just life and circumstances. I never gave it much thought.  I described my relationship with Felix as not close, but the relationship between me and his brother Peter was completely different. Peter was the closest thing to a brother I ever had. I would have loved to have been able to stay in touch with him, but it just wasn't possible.  He went to college and moved around. I never knew a phone number or even what city he was living in most of the time. I did maintain contact with their mother, my father's sister.  There was a time when she and I became very close.

Three years ago I had one last conversation with Felix. He knew through his mother that I no longer had a relationship with my father. I don't know exactly how much of my personal story she chose to share with him (because I had certainly never shared a single word of my story with this man) but he clearly had some indication of what was going on from things his mother had told him.

He knew, also, that my family was going through a serious crisis (something totally unrelated to him, my father, or anything stemming from my childhood) and he called me to speak about it. I was surprised to hear from him, and totally unprepared for what he was going to say.

He immediately brought up my father and our relationship. He told me in no uncertain terms that it was very possible this crisis my family was in was because of my choice to cut off the relationship with my father. I was in total shock. He started probing and trying to get me to explain to him how I could make such a decision. It was an hour long conversation. He did most of the talking.

I felt like a small child being berated, and powerless to make it stop. I also felt angry. There was a part of me that wanted to scream at him all the things that my father had done and allowed to be done to me as a child. I wanted to pour out every horrid detail, some of which he was a witness to when we were children. I wanted to ask Felix how dare he make judgments about things of which he did not have full knowledge. Another part of me felt that I didn't owe Felix any explanation for a situation that had nothing to do with him. I wanted to hang up on him and make the conversation stop.  I wanted to make him eat his judgmental words........I wanted to crawl under the covers and hide.......I wanted to........but all I did was silently cry, and listen as he continued to criticize me and the lack of a relationship with my father.

I stayed silent throughout all of this. I wish I could say that I stayed silent because I made a conscious decision to not share myself and my story with someone who had such little regard for me or my feelings. That wouldn't be the truth. The truth is that I was so dissociated by the end of that conversation that I had very little control over my mind or my body. I physically shook for two hours after I hung up the phone.

I got in the shower and played the conversation over and over again in my mind. I intended to call him when I got out, and really let him have it. This time around I would be the one who was prepared.  I would be the one to make him listen.

I didn't make that call. I could never come up with just the right words. I couldn't balance my anger and sadness. Because I was so new in my healing, I couldn't (at that time) talk about the abuse without breaking down and there was no way I was going to give him that satisfaction. On that day, when I chose not to call him back, I knew that was probably the last time we would ever speak.

Last week I got an email with some third-hand news. Felix and his wife had a baby. When I first read that, I had a moment of excitement. Then sadness. I realized that I will probably never see this child. A whole little person out there I am related to, who might never even know I exist. It seems so strange. I don't fully understand my sadness, Felix and I never had a good relationship, I don't know why him having a baby would change that.

His brother, Peter, is the family member who I was closest to. I thought Peter and I would live near each other when we grew up, and if we had kids they would grow up together. I'm sad those things didn't happen.

I now have a feeling that I didn't expect to have......there is some part of me that is sad that Felix and I never really got a chance to know each other as adults. Maybe things would have been different, we might have talked and found that there was a relationship there to build on.

My family thinks that I am hard, calloused, ultimately unfeeling.  Even the ones who are very supportive of me wonder at my ability to just cut someone out of my life, and move forward. They seem to think it must be easy for me. It isn't. I mourn the loss of my family. These are the cousins, and aunt, and father that I grew up with. We share the same stories, the same history. I talk about the bad things from my childhood, but there were good things, and so many of my good childhood memories have these people in them.

I know that sometimes family is the group of people that you choose to surround yourself with, and I am blessed with a chosen family.....but there is still something about the family that I was born into. They are in my blood, they are in my head, they are a part of my life and who I was...and they are even a part of who I am now.

I make the hard decisions, but does that make me hard? I know the right thing to do to protect my daughter, but it doesn't mean that it is easy for me to do it. I know how to protect myself and my mental stability, but that doesn't mean that I always want to. Just because I wasn't able to speak up three years ago during that phone call and tell my side of the story, it doesn't mean that I don't still imagine how that conversation might have gone if I had been in a place of strength that day. It doesn't mean that on Father's day I don't hurt. It doesn't mean that on Christmas and birthdays I don't think about presents I will never buy, cards I will never send, and family I may never see again.

I'm not really hard at all.....but I am strong.

*The names of my cousins have been changed.


  1. Though I think our most important families are the ones we create--whether by friendship, marriage, or birth and especially when our blood family chooses to not be the caring people they need to be to make that relationship healthy--the family we're born into is always important in so many ways.

    I cut my Dad out of my life for a few years and it's hard when you have to deal with the fall out from the rest of your family. They don't get it--they can't, because they aren't you. You know that the choices you made are the right ones; doing something to protect yourself or your child doesn't make you hard. Not at all. It makes you a good parent. It makes you a person who understands what's important. It makes you, as you said, strong.

    I'm sorry that your cousin did that to you. I hope that one day in the future the two of you can reconcile in some way, if that's something that you would want.

  2. I just never get how someone who doesn't know the full story can make such judgements.

    I, too, have cut my father out of my life. Honestly, I thought about him earlier tonight for the first time in months. And how I know people say that I'll be sorry when he passes. And I realized that yes, I will be sorry. Sorry for the things he's done, sorry he wasn't a good father. But, that's it.

    Call me hard, but I like your word better, strong.

    I'm so glad that you linked up.

  3. Baby don't let him get to you like that. It sickens me that he might have known even PART of what happened to you and still made that conversation. What is even sadder is his child may grow up and be taught by him that regardless of what is done to you you cannot disconnect from family because they are family. Toxic is Toxic and no matter how you put it danger in our mental stability during our healing is NOT ok..

  4. Beautiful conclusion. Coming from a place of strength.

    Of course, you didn't know what to do when he blindsided you like that. Especially as you were just beginning to heal.

    Some days I have the emotional strength and stability to face things like that in a way that I'm pleased with. Other days my world is just too heavy and something like that makes me crumble.

    Way to take care of you.

  5. I agree with strong. Sometime you just have to eliminate certain people from your life in order to survive. Its difficult and unpleasant but you have to be your own priority!

  6. I totally get where you are coming from. Since the incident with the Bastard, I know I will never see my niece and nephew. It makes me sad, but I just can't do it, because of their father. Although he and I were generally at odds and not very close, he was still a part of our family, and now he is not.

  7. I know what its like to be considered the hard and unfeeling one - but I have long since learned that we need to do we must to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm - be it physical or emotional.
    I know how strong you need to be to make that decision, and I know how much it can hurt.

  8. If you are hard I must be stone. I have totally removed many family from my life. Guess what, it doesn't phase me at all to hear news about them. I could care less one way or another.

    You still have some feelings so you can't be that hard.

  9. It never ceases to amaze me that family wants to be so judgmental when they don't know the whole story. Then I think that it might not make any difference since they're so judgmental in the first place. I am very sorry for what your cousin did to you and the abuse that you had to endure. I wouldn't call you hard, I would call you strong and brave to make such a decision.

  10. From Diana (Georgia)
    Kathi gave me the best advice when I first met her when one of my family members was criticizing me on the phone:

    just hang up the phone

    It's my mantra now for when the simplest solution escapes me. Just hang up the phone.

    If I were by him, I'd punch him in the nose for you! I would! And then I'd kick him in the shin and dot his eye! I would!


  11. I love you, Traci! HUGS! Big ones!

  12. What a powerful post!

    I too am strong, not hard. Sometimes people don't understand that.

    I learned very early that I was the ONLY one that was going to take care of me. Steve is having a very hard time with that this week, I think. But, I just can't take the chance that those who should step up, WILL step up.

  13. Tracie, your last line ... that is you. So glad that you poured your heart out here, what a wonderful haven Shell has opened here for people to share what weighs heavily on their hearts.
    But your last line, that is the one that matters most of all xxx

  14. I can't really get into it, but I know what you're feeling. We're having family issues now, too, which may or may not resolve....and I think about my kids and how they'll be affected. But they are my priority. And? you ARE strong. And loved.