Have you accepted that you may never get the answers and how?

[LoopingTwice]

I have a few bitter questions simmering quietly at the back of my 48 year old mind about my parents. How I was treated as a child and still am as an adult, there were / are a lot of mixed extremes and irrational behaviours.

Part of me thinks that it’s the same in many families, don’t try to understand, suck it up by now, you will never get an explanation or acknowledgement without breaking an elderly heart. Maybe it will all get clear in the afterlife if there is one.

I am not going to say more as it’s been an awful week already and not going to drip feed, just wondered how others coped with never getting a closure, I guess.

I’m basically NC with my mum (dad died long ago). She would just play the victim when I asked her anything. I got fed up of being treated badly.

Very much so. But I've also worked out that even if they were alive to tell me, they'd never be honest anyway, so... I'll take my best guess and live with it. Easier some days than others.

Mine are alive and well in their eighties, but are incapable of providing answers, because they appear to have a complete mental block about having done anything wrong, even when the question is ‘Why did t you do anything when we told you were being being abused?’ I suppose it’s too hard to face up to, that you chose to keep sending your eight and ten year olds back to a situation where they experienced CSA, because you didn’t want the hassle of challenging authority. My mother in particular has a line in ‘Oh, that’s what things were like then!’ She’d have said the same about concentration camps.

I think the thing that helped me was that their perspective on it might never be the same as yours. There was a significant event in my childhood that both my sister and I found mortifying and it wasn't something private it was witnessed by school, our friends and no doubt the parents of our classmates when they went home.

Although my childhood had some very horrible things, there were also wonderful things and my siblings and I tend to dwell on those. My parents were fantastic grandparents which may well be a different case with yours. We also all had a great relationship with our parents as adults. When I mentioned the significant event my Mum was genuinely shocked and could not remember it to the point of saying I must have made it up because something so huge would surely have been imprinted on her mind. I messaged my sister who agreed with me and my Mum didn't apologise because even though it was confirmed it happened she didn't remember it.

So even when given all the details, no apology. In an ideal world you would get your apology and answers but you just have to accept that this will never happen. Instead you can play that scenario in your head where you get what you want and let that comfort you. That is the response from them that you deserve so in your head make that as real as possible.