My family situation really is nuts. The short of it is that my niece (my sister’s kid) was being abused and neglected when she was about four years old, so I called Child Protective Services and reported the abuse and neglect. I tried to get my family to change before I took that step, but that was a total no-go.
Naturally, my family was more than a little upset. I can’t think of a single thing, other than my disease, which has affected my life more in the last two years, or which has been a more consistent, unrelenting factor in my life.
I’m estranged from every member of my family now. They will never understand what I did. They do not have the awareness necessary to understand it. And it’s easier for them to not understand. It’s easier to just blame me than it is to recognize that, by your actions or lack thereof, you have robbed an innocent child of her sense of worth and stability. It’s easier to just blame someone else than it is to admit that you’ve made serious mistakes.
This whole thing is such a mess now. My family believes that I just want to steal my niece from my sister because (supposedly) I cannot have children. Until recently, I’ve been unable to figure out where they got this impossibly ridiculous idea, but now I think I have it figured out.
I used to be someone who could do that…who could call CPS on my sister in order to acquire a child and satisfy my own selfish desires. I used to be this unbelievably crazy person. I used to be this horridly manipulative freak.
I used to covet my sister’s child, big time. That coveting ended before Niece was two, when I started realizing how much work being a mother is. It’s not easy by any means. It might be rewarding, but it’s not always fun.
I may have stopped coveting her child and settled into being an aunt who just basically enjoyed her niece, but I was still manipulative, selfish, and just plain crazy. That’s the person that my sister and the rest of my family are used to. They’re used to someone who only thinks of herself, who hasn’t built a loving relationship with them. They’re used to someone who doesn’t know how to love or how to receive love, really. They’re used to someone who talks down to them, who looks down her nose at how they live their life. That person looked down her nose at them because she believed she was sooo superior, so much better than they.
I don’t look down at them like that anymore, I just wish that they could know a better way to live so they’d be happier, but I no longer feel it is my job to be their knight in shining armor and lead them to this happier place. I don’t have a need to fix them anymore.
I do feel sorrow for my sister and my mom. I wish I could help them, but I’m not someone they could ever accept help from. Plus, who am I to try and fix anyone? Really? I’m still crazy. Granted, I’m much, much less crazy than I have ever been, but the crazyness is still there, lurking. It hasn’t all been rooted out. Just a little over a year ago, I was lording it over my sister that I was taking her daughter to church and didn’t care what her objections were. How arrogant and asinine. I wish I could take it back.
So I can finally see why they would think that I called CPS simply in order to steal my sister’s child.
However, that’s not the truth. I didn’t call CPS for that reason. I called CPS because my niece was being abused and neglected. My sister’s written this crazy timeline of her case that states all kinds of stuff – that I can’t have children without a special operation (not true), that I whited-out my niece’s name on the birth certificate (I did?)…and so on. She conveniently left out a few details relating to her own behavior.
No group that my sister belongs to, no one who reads her blog, will ever see any admissions from her about her mistakes. She will never admit that, yes, she did tie her kid’s ankles together with a sock, she did let the child sit for extended periods in her own waste, her child was underweight and didn’t go outside, her child was unbathed and the house was filthy. No one will ever hear her admit these things. All they’ll ever hear is that I called CPS to steal her child because I am an evil, avaricious, grasping b*tch.
She’s even said that her child was taken away by CPS because of reasons related to poverty. I guess people are expected to believe that being poor is what causes your house to be filthy, causes you to yell at your child all the time, causes you to let a drunk old man (who used to beat the h*ll out of you when you were a kid) watch your child for hours at a time, causes you to not bathe your kid, and causes you to tie her ankles together with a sock so she can’t climb out of her crib that she spends most of each day in.
God, this stuff sounds like a broken record.
My dad was an alcoholic, and when he was in his cups, he abused the heck out of my sister. I still feel pangs of regret about my actions back then…trying to defend my sister but then telling CPS nothing was wrong. How I wish I had been honest and accused those who deserved to be accused so that my sister could have gotten some help! Instead I kept silent, even lied to protect our parents and the life that I was comfortable with.
My mom was addicted to the addict and didn’t do anything to stop the abuse. Can you imagine how worthless that made my sister feel? I just recently realized what that kind of failure from a parent does to a child. It’s devastating.
Their diseases created my sister…a person who still believes she’s worthless and doesn’t deserve anything better than what she’s got, a person who, having been neglected and abused during her own childhood, knows little more than a life of neglect and continued abuse. It’s only been a little over a year since she moved out of that situation (which CPS helped her to do).
And their diseases created me. I inherited my dad’s addictive personality, but chose food as my drug of choice. That disease, that method of survival adopted in the midst of neglect and abuse, helped create the horrible, manipulative, selfish personality that I used to have. I thank God that I have been able to shed that personality. I remember being so proud of it; now I am ashamed of those things that I said and did back then.
But the problem, of course, is that you cannot take these things back once they are done. All you can do is try to act right going forward, apologize for what you've done wrong, and try to stop being crazy.
Good luck to me.
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