I drag my marriage
through childhood,
past my mother’s critiques
and sister’s insanity,
expose the woman
my father longed to be,
strip them all down
and parade them
full monty,
our sordidness
splayed across the floor
like shepherd’s pie
smashed into linoleum –
a mess of madness
and emotion and
cranked out fables:
denial served up
as acceptable fare.
I am obsessed –
driven by compulsion
to cleanse the sticky,
rotting muck oozing
through the cracks
of our faulty foundation,
need to sanitize floorboards,
unearth explanations
salvage what thread
of sensibility remains
before this orgy
of dysfunction
derails progress
drags my childhood
through marriage.
The old way put me at the center of the family (even though I was fifth born), listening to and attempting to resolve every family issue: 
I was gifted with new objectivity. I realized that even though my own life had come to a screaming stop, everyone else’s went on without me. The chaos and drama of my family continued, and for the first time in my life, I recognized that I had no ability to control it. Never had. My need to feel important and responsible in the midst of that whirlwind was my own sick way of coping. Nothing I said, did, or sweat over was going to change the outcomes. I learned to detach and stop interfering.
My family, I came to understand, dealt with dilemma’s by creating more distractions: new problems. Our momentum came from the next crisis and there was never any shortage of those. The problem with this way of living is that the underlying message is that there is something so wrong, so unmentionable, that it is not safe to relax, and so we hang on until the next cliff hanger. The only control I had in all of this was to no longer choose to be part of it. Peace, I discovered, was an inner journey and not an outer destination. Boy, had I been on the wrong track!
One Woman's Quest 