Carol, you make a choice to live in such toxicity because you've chosen to keep peace with your family for the sake of unity and grandkids, which is commendable in its own right. I chose the opposite--I chose to put an entire ocean between myself and family members who say nasty things to me and do even worse. My mother has unfriended me on Facebook. This is the same mother who kidnapped my children and made countless police reports about me stalking those children when I was 500 miles away and bankrupt from hiring an attorney to make the court give my kids back. I know, I know...that's water under the bridge from 2004. But even me forgiving my mother and father for what they did to destroy my family wasn't enough to restore the relationship.
They are still critical of every decision I make, disdainful in their appraisal of all my life choices and clearly wish I did not exist at all. For me, though, being unfriended on Facebook and cut off from my family (I will probably never see my grandchildren) is the price I pay for refusing to meekly accept the condemnation of my parents. But the peace I've found is worth it. In your case, it probably wouldn't be. You have an entirely different set of circumstances than I do.
There's always a fear of being totally alone in the world once we take a stand and refuse to allow such horrible treatment of us by those people who are supposed to love us the most. In my case, the opposite happened. Once I put a stop to it, the better half of my life started. But that's me. It's what happened in my own situation. As for you, I recognize a completely different dynamic and it makes my heart break for you, because I know you don't deserve to be treated that way. Especially when the people inflicting the abuse on you are only superficial in all of their accomplishments and living in some pretty fragile glass houses themselves.
Thank you Rhonda for such a thoughtful
response - you are wise and understanding and sooo accomplished and so "with it," in spite of a lifetime of slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. Well, half a lifetime. I'm counting on you to live to a hundred or more. :)