(no subject)

In some book somewhere, it has been said that we should honor our parents.  They gave us life. We exist because of them.

Somewhere sometime as a young kid, even though I probably couldn't have articulated it as such at the time, I came to understand that even parents need to earn that honor.  There isn't a participation trophy that gives you a free pass.  When you are the subject of abuse and collective trauma due to one or more parent, all the good works in the world and all the external accolades mean absolutely nothing to you.  Nor should it. It doesn't matter what others think. Maybe they see the abuser as the best at their job, or the most friendly person they know or whatever it is that sets them apart.  In fact it is highly likely and deliberate that a narcissist would build those achievements to stand in stark contrast to who they really are.  "You can't possibly say I do those things because look at who everybody knows that I am."

Bullshit.  Complete and utter bullshit.

Honor is earned.  Every fucking millimeter.  

No free passes.
They are people too.  And they fuck up. And they also have the ability to reconcile and make amends if they really want to do so and if we choose to let them. We can choose to rebuild that trust. We can equally choose to honor our own trauma and not allow them back in our lives.

Again, we get to choose, no free passes.  No participation trophies. 

In honoring ourselves, we owe it to ourselves to acknowledge their failures as theirs. It doesn't matter what we think we could have done differently to make things better. It was never up to us. And it's not our job to fill the gaps they left. And maybe we tried anyways because we didn't want to see others hurt like we were. Or maybe we regret that in dealing with our own trauma, we couldn't help fill those gaps to help others from getting hurt. But the failure isn't ours. It is theirs. We did the best we could with what we had while dealing with our own pile of shit.

Honor as they deserve to be honored.