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.

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