My scapegoat aunt died this week. She was one of 7, the rest are various levels of enmeshed, my mother being the most so. My mother was the eldest daughter and painted the most rosy, holy-god version of their childhood, how their mother was a saint, their father was the life and soul of the party. What I know is there was a lot of parentification, repression, alcoholism, religious trauma, sexual abuse by a priest that was ignored for decades, kids scapegoated for not followed a very narrow, prescribed idea of life that landed my aunt on the outside long before I was born. I never really knew her as a result, and listened to them all bitch about her relentlessly my whole childhood. From what I can glean, her worst sin was moving abroad, having a son out of wedlock, and marrying without tell their Dad. I'm sure she had her reasons.
She lived in UK (rest of the family in Ireland) and when I lived there, I took a train to visit her and her son once with my ex. She had loads of friends in the house, she made us white russians and tapas and we smoked weed on the terrace. It was so much fun, but I remember thinking how different she was from her conservative, god-fearing siblings. And how she seemed to have built this huge chosen family full of friends from different backgrounds and ethnicities and different walks of life. And I envied the close relationship she had with her son, they were proper mates, hanging out with each other's friends. She really KNEW her son, in a way that has always been impossible with my own mother, who has projected onto me her whole life and refused to get to know the adult I became.
My mother went to visit her late last year. They had a difficult relationship, but my mother has this "family first" thing where she'll never grant you empathy, vulnerability or a conversation about the elephant in the room; but she's text and visit once in a blue moon. I was going through a NC phase with my mother at the time because of her complete failure to support me during some hard things, and during one of our rare phone calls, she told me she visited (aunt) in a sort of, "if (aunt) can forgive me, then you can, too" kind of way. I felt a real, silent affinity with my aunt, I guess as if we were both forceably on the outside, in a sort of invisible way, maybe because we could actually see the bs. I always wanted to have a conversation with her about it, but her cancer became terminal last year and I knew that would be impossible. I know for sure her lifetime of trauma and conflict with her own family will have contributed to her health issues.
Rest in peace, R xx