Dear Abba,
I am so very angry.
You are my father. Aren't you supposed to be taking care of me? A parent, unconditional love.. what happened to all that?
So much has happened over the past two years. I got so tired of you telling me that I talked too much, so I stopped talking. Then I didn't talk enough, so apparently to you, I must have had something chemically wrong with me.
Why couldn't it just have been that I was working on myself as you had been harping on me to do all those years earlier?
I am 35 years old. Thirty-Five!! And for all that I am, for all that I have done, I have nothing to show for it, at least according to you.
You treat me as though I am a status symbol, giving me little to no attention unless you need to shine me up and put me on display. And when something doesn't look pretty enough, you cover me with something to cover up the real me. Any cover will do, a son-in-law, a grandchild, but as long as it makes you look good.
What about making ME look good? When does my life become what is important?
I struggle daily. I wish I could tell you how much pain I am in. The miscarriages have nearly torn my apart. The loss of the twins in November came about as close to killing me, physically and spiritually as anything I have ever experienced in my entire life; and somewhere down the line, those became about you, too.
To you, the miscarriages became about G-d. G-d did not want me to have those babies. G-d did not want me to have sick children. *I* could not have handled a sick child, and G-d did me a toiva (favor) by allowing those children to not enter the world.
To me: I lost my children, and nowhere did I have to go to grieve. With no one was I able to mourn, and at no time was I given the understanding, the compassion, or the tools to do what I needed to do to move on.
And then, I began to lose my husband, to of all things, the family. That is what became the most important thing in his life. Never again was *I* as his wife to be important. No, you as his father, Mommy as his mother and the boys as his brothers became more important than me, as his wife.
Every decision that was made became a "Family" decision. Even when the decisions had little to nothing to do with family. Should we move for the health of the marriage; a family decision. Should he keep his job; a family decision. Everything was family, nothing was marriage minded. And you act surprised when I began to emotionally separate myself from you?
if I did not life my life exactly according to the way you thought I was to life my life, something was wrong. To the point where you broke into my house, using keys for emergencies only, went through my mail, phone messages, drawers, and personal life, looking for evidence of drug use that was not there.
You really thought I was a drug addict. You had others attempt to get me committed because you did not like my life or religious choices... and worst of all, you betrayed my trust with my husband.
You convinced anyone you could that I could not be trusted. You tried to "gaslight" me into making myself think that I was crazy, and you had my husband steal things from me, including mail and other things to insure that I would think I was going crazy.
The doctors and psychologists told you that I was not crazy. They told you that I was not mentally unbalanced, they told you that I was not the problem. Rather, they told you that perhaps the level of invasiveness and intrusiveness into my life was not healthy. They told you that perhaps the type of parenting that was being implemented was not prudent for a good healthy child/parent relationship...
And still, you truly believe that I am mentally unbalanced.
And, after your Son-In-Law brutally assaulted me in front of your granddaughter, you took him in, and left me to rot out in the cold...
Are you feeling proud of yourself?
Do you feel that you have used the word of G-d to justify what He intended you, as a man of G-d to do with his children?
We are supposed to mimic how we believe He would behave. Who are you mimicking?
And so... I move on. I'm sure, dear Father.. that though we haven't spoken in a few months.. that we will "speak" again.
Dear Mommy...
