You can't choose your family

Theres a saying, you can love your family but you dont have to like them, i wonder how many of us have pondered this from time to time. My family has problems. And I know in this day and age you would be inclined to say yeah right, whose doesn't? Mine is a little bit unique. My paternal grandparents are jewish immigrants who left behind all family and friends, who had one child, a son, my father. He died just before my 9th birthday. My mother comes from an irish catholic background and neither side could relate to each other. call it a 1970s Romeo and Juliet if you will, except Romeo and Juliet were grown up enough to say stuff the lot of you. My mother is better at this one to be honest. The romance died quickly when Juliet realised the pressure of being involved with a highly family community based Romeo where family dinners are a pre-requisite and family means extended friends, as long as they are jewish. Otherwise you can play house but you will never be one of them. So you become bored, your life resembles Stepford and your only excitement is the promise of presents, travel, a better life, the 80s dream. Romeo desperately tries to fulfill Juliets fantasies while maintaining the necessity of his culture and family. he works with his father, he runs himself into the ground, he can not provide everything juliet desires nor can he work to the standard required by his father, he is made to feel a dissapointment by all around. His greatest pleasure is his little princess and prince but this is not enough when he is reminded of his failings all around, maybe he is failing his children too? And one fateful summer, the taxman came calling, juliet so bored with her life takes their children away for 6 weeks, and Romeo is left home alone with his world crashing around, about to lose everything, the ultimate dissapointment to all. And he decides that the world will be better without him. The little princess was a week away from her 9th birthday, the prince soon to turn 6.
And instead of thinking of those children, Juliet and the mob (lets call them for now) turn on each other, the events that occured are not their fault but each others. No one held their hands up to feel guilt or remorse, only anger and vengeance. yes vengeance, the ultimate weapon between them, the children. that prince and princess were plied with promises, goodies, twisted words to buy their loyalty, and when that failed, cut off from the mob, temporarily of course because the mob were too clever for that. Not to help the children, but to cause hurt. And as the children grew, they wanted for nothing, given a life and experiences no child can possibly imagine, the little girl actually responded to the name princess.
Juliet to this day remains frustrated with her life, she works hard for what she has, but her desires and needs always were higher priority than her children, they are upside down in fact, and somehwere along the way the children outgrew her, recognised she would never give them a love they associated with a motherand grew to protect themselves from her. because to take in the hurt that she caused would be pointless, Juliet would never recognise her faults, only the life she never got and was robbed of, she couldnt see past herself, apologies would be empty with no realisation of the damage.
The mob, by whatever means they acheived it, became surrogate parents and may in their minds have adopted those children. they had money and means to give the children their every need and most of the time their every whim, beleiveing this was the way to show their love. The prince grew accustomed to this life and to this day lives it by these principles, the more it costs, the more worth it has. 5* lifestyles of the rich and famous. yet he is desperately unhappy, after all no one can be worthy or equal to a prince.
The princess on the other hand chose a different path, she chose affection and kindness over money and power, she valued presents of course, but those that had been thought of with the heart. And what she longed for more than anything was to have her fairytale come true, to have one true love, to live happily ever after, where a mother knew how to love, where children were loved for all their qualities good or bad and not upon condition of conforming, and where she would be loved by a prince with his whole heart, who made her feel like nothing on earth could matter more than her for she had so much love to give, that she had saved all this time, waiting for the one true love who would be worthy of it, who would never break her heart or leave, for he would adore her the way she was and want her to be all she could be. Then and only then would she be free to open her heart, be free of pains past, be safe and secure, be told its ok to be her.