I feel so broken...

Years ago all the red flags were there, but it's so complicated now. I've been played, and the perpetrators are mostly dead, unrepentant of their actions and games, and/or still at it. I walked in all their moccasins and in the end made excuses for their fearfully wounding treachery. In that sense, I just wasn't a deserving priority needing assistance. I tried being a trusting wife, I tried being a caring aunt and finally tried being the obedient daughter. All this trying wasn't enough to fix relationship, so I allowed self-protective measures for my kids' sake from what I viewed as toxic. God knows they've been wounded enough by my less than helpful responses to what should have been my own challenge. It was worse than toxic; it is still cruel and unusual punishment though AFAICT not criminal that goes beyond their graves, but I still feel conned and exploited because I am both vulnerable and determined to be adequate to my own challenge nor want a piece of my sister's, having made lots of interim choices, just in case. In the end, it's likely we are both alone and inadequate for that challenge. Between action and inaction, there is no peace just charade and half-truths. Neither do we have crystal balls, just semi-educated best guesses at the future.

Surely, no challenge has been as difficult as that faced by my younger sister which requires the fortunes of the uber-rich which none of us could claim. She has a severely developmentally delayed child who is 32 years old. So she has played her superior education, her occupation; she even played the race card and purposely created distance between who she deems inadequate for assistance. She warned me, but I failed to hear the context though I felt it nonetheless. Her child deserved all family resources, including the intangible ones; mine deserved nothing!

Yup, crap happens beyond one's control and post-choice circumstances are rarely the same as the present ones! It's hard to realize that I should never have had that healthy dose of misplaced responsibility for my mother or internalized a really bad documentary of familial, emotional, and financial abuse that surrounded and became my life. Yeah, there is sadness accompanied by paralyzing white-hot anger at the living and the dead! I've obviously failed at being in any way adequate to help her meet her challenge! What an adventure -- NOT!

We're encouraged to be vulnerable, though, so there's that and I feel that challenge more acutely every day. Feeling that challenge should probably hold a much higher status in our lives. We need much better "social safety nets" for victims and innocents because there are so many willfully ignorant yet uber-wealthy adults playing games over their own over-filled "plates" so that victims can recover a trust that anyone at all has their back. I'm reminded TFG called dead soldiers "unworthy" and we the People labeled suckers for memorializing them. It's so easy to be manipulated and continuously deceived by players that step over the line of decency to get what they need to meet their own selfish agendas and challenges.

Thanks for listening...