Vindication

I'm cleaning out my emotional closet - so to speak - on these last few days of 2012.
I'm writing small snippets about big things that are a negative force in my life, in the hopes that this will clear the way for more positive posts in the coming new year.  

fam·i·ly

[fam-uh-lee, fam-lee] noun

All those persons considered as descendants of a common progenitor

Lately, it seems popular opinion has come to consider family as our most important institution.

But think of your own family. You play several different roles within it, and each person in it plays several different roles.  Son, Father, Brother.  Daughter, Mother, Sister.  Etc. Etc. Etc.
  
You are, in effect, many separate people, in a relationship with many different people, all of whom have differing interpretations of how, or WHO the others are, or should be.

Even with rules, laws and institutions in place to keep things on track, this is potentially a recipe for disaster.

I found out last year around this time that my own lifelong supposedly unfounded sense of mistrust, and fears about my father, were in fact, founded.

I write this here and now, mostly as backstory, so that I can link to it someday when I'm ready to write more deeply.  

Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that my two older half sisters, daughters of my father and his first wife, twenty odd years older than my full sister and I, had been carrying a dark secret between them since before the two of us were born.  They chose the night after our Thanksgiving family reunion last year, once they had seen for themselves that our mother's Alzheimers had progressed to the point where she could no longer comprehend or communicate, to share this dark secret with us.

The funny thing is, that knowing as we do now, or not knowing as we did, just a few short minutes beforehand, really doesn't make any difference.  

I thought it would.  I was proven right all along about this man I never trusted, or respected. I was vindicated for all of the times I didn't show up for gatherings, or picked the company of my chosen family, my friends, over the ones who happened to be descendants of a common progenitor. 

But vindication, and the truth, as cleansing and freeing as they were, made absolutely no difference - that night, nor any night since then.