Toxic Birthday Card- and I haven’t even opened it yet!

[DistanceNotDefense]

Until I wrote down their reactions (about my husbands nickname)  - on here- and looked at it- I simply hadn't seen the racism. How did I not?  I had felt very uneasy and upset, but couldn't put my finger on why I was so deeply troubled by it, by not being able to 'see the funny side'.  They dressed their responses up as jokes, as they always have.
😬  I've come to realise, since becoming LC with dad, more or less NC with the rest, that I may have let them subtly patronise him like this for years.😬
I think I may have done that, in order to remain approved of. OMG. Yikes it hurts to write that!   
That's all stopped now. Phew

I'm so sorry you've had that realization nanotech I've had similar dawnings about myself with my own family members, and all that I enabled when I still had fleas.

One of them was racism I didn't want to see. My family was racist. They'd make it into jokes. Jokes that weren't even funny (and they wouldn't stop telling them even though they got no laughs, only discomfort!) And one of the first stones that made the whole situation fall was confronting a PD family member for saying something racist-sounding. (My DH confronted them gently, too - "what do you mean when you say that?" PD punished me for it and told me separately "you need to leash him" more or less).

It's crazy to think that a confrontation about racism was one of the first things that really got the ball rolling toward my scapegoating, smear campaign, and then NC. My family is racist. And deeply, deeply ill to go to war against their own kin over this. It's sad and shocking (though sometimes not shocking) to absorb. But it's only one of the many shocks I type and read out loud and realize is true about my family, and how sick they all are....