I had a saying that sat on my stove for years on a trivet, "Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall inherit the Earth."
I was a young unmarried girl at the time I had gotten this as a gift, and the way I viewed it was that if you were the one to back down first or retract your wishes, it was a good thing, for it kept the peace.
If you made things peaceful outwardly and held inside or covered up your true feelings, YOU Were a Peacemaker...for relationships settled back down.
What I had failed to see at the time, was that while I was making outward peace, my insides were being crammed full of 'unexpressed true emotions', that I had 'settled' to calm things down.
I had given up what I really needed to have peace.
I had silenced my truth feelings in order to get along.
What I was doing was being a False Peacemaker, I was pretending to pretend that things were okay with me, when they were not.
Oh, I can recall this feeling so perfectly, how the other person would be so happy to have her peacefulness restored, as I inwardly glowered in silence...while pasting on a happy face.
As I continued on into adult life, into married life I often times left arguments half done....my half was not resolved, but tucked away.
My greatest fear was that IF I didn't acquiesce, all Holy Hell would break lose, that it was my job to keep the peace.
Acquiesce - To accept something reluctantly, but without protest. I had to look that up to make sure I had it right. RIGHT, OMG, that is the flavor of my first 46 years.
Acquiesce is the perfect word to describe how I viewed being peaceful. And here is the deal, I was the one who always had to give up 'something' AND do so without putting up a protest, to swallow silently....in order to maintain peace within our relationship.
You have no idea how often I swallowed bitterness without protest.
With a belly full of resentment and unspoken words and feelings I walked around 'believing' I was keeping the peace.
What I was instead holding onto was a belly full of bitterness.
Is that Love?
Is that peaceful?
Was I being even a bit authentic in my relations as I was waddling around chuck full of unresolved differences?
When I stopped swallowing, but instead spit back my thoughts, my feelings and what I saw were our differences, my inner world began to lighten up, to feel so peaceful, while my outer world began to swirl in consternation.
Where my mother used to see The Peacemaker, I became her Holy Hellion.
For you see, all the peacemaking efforts I had painfully swallowed in order to keep a loving mother and father, never produced that. It was all for naught. All I had done was to act in a play of pretending we all got along.
I was the one who had made it worse.
I was the one who hadn't spoken up.
I was the one who kept it all a secret.
I was the greatest pretender of all.
I pretended that all the abuse didn't matter to me.
I pretended to be unhurt, so we could have a family that didn't hurt.
Yet, in the end....sadly and regretfully, all my siblings were hurt anyway. All I had done was put a happy face on hurt...
