Thank Goodness for Friends

I haven't blogged in a bit - too busy renegotiating office leases for 3 of the offices and talking buy-out of an office with the doctor that we went in with last year. He wants it. We are tired and to us that's fine. Now we are working out the details.

So bet you are wondering why the title now............

Well, if not for friends I wouldn't have anyone but my husband and kids and animals. Family? Can take a flying leap. There has always been a tentative relationship between me and my family and what was there, vanished after my mother died. Seems I can't do anything right since then. I didn't realize how much of a buffer she was.

I realize that as each decade passes, I tweak my understanding and memories. Our minds find explanations that a younger age probably I would have seen it in a different way. The claims that two people being witness or seeing the same thing happen 10, 20, or even 50 years later will remember it totally different is absolutely true. In some ways, I wish my mother had not been the buffer. I look back and realize that my dad was abusive - some physical but mostly verbal, emotional, and mental. Loving and forgiving someone though doesn't protect us from who they are, how they behave, or any danger they pose to us. I have a right to protect myself from that abuse no matter how the abuser is related to me.

My mom acted as the buffer between my father and I. I didn't realize just how much until after she died. The abusive personality that my father has will always be there. He will never ever accept personal responsibility for his behavior.

This past weekend was my family's family reunion - 3 days of hell cooped up in a 10 bedroom farmhouse my parents rented out for a 3 day weekend for the next 10 years. I wasn't supposed to be at this one. I was supposed to be in Boston at a seminar and taking a vacation of 5 days with my husband. My husband and I decided to postpone not only the trip to Boston but the extra 5 days. This way we could attend both of our family's reunions - mine on Saturday and his on Sunday.

Last Thursday plans got changed when a patient came in with a really bad broken toe - she needed surgery. The only time I could get was Saturday morning. So we said fine - we would just leave and drive the 3 hours to the reunion after the surgery and although we wouldn't be there by lunch it would be close.

Best laid plans.....a perfect storm set up across Chicago and our town. It dumped 7.71 total inches of rain on us, leaving us without power and gas. No power also meant no water or toilets for those on well and septic which we are. It took my husband an hour to drive the 10 minute usual drive to the hospital to do the surgery. Everyone there was late. We had already been up all night without power running our generator. The absolute last thing we wanted to do was drive 3 hours. Plus there were more storms coming in. Now who in their right mind would leave their house to flood just to attend a reunion?

I didn't. I couldn't do the drive by myself and hubs needed to be here to run the generator. So I called my dad and told him how much rain we got and how we didn't have power and how more thunderstorms were coming in. He called me a liar and to come up with a better excuse than that.

I very politely told my father to go borrow one of his grandkids computers and look up either The Chicago Tribune or The Daily Herald and verify that info himself and then I thanked him. Yep I thanked him for showing me his true colors and how far we really haven't gone and how far we would ever go.

The family's decision for Christmas because I wasn't there for the vote: they are having Christmas on Monday the 27th and I am to make my usual turkeys and hams and dressing.

I think they will be going hungry. I won't be there.

Family? I have none except my husband and kids. Friends? I have in abundance and they are more family to me than my own family ever thought of being.

I.Heart.My.Friends.