On Family

 

Its fall. Things are changing. And aren’t they always. The cold that doesn’t’ set in early enough in the night, but wakes me in the morning with a crispness my body craves. The starlings have started to land in flocks on my front lawn, fifty at a time, taking off in a synchronized emergence that leaves me jealous. My body gets tired sooner, but so sooner does it light up in the morning light with inspiration. 

 I’ve been thinking about family a lot this year. The one I grew up with, that I call my parents and sister and brother now, the one that keeps my stomach in knots yearning for some level of emotional intimacy we never learned to whip up. Also thinking about the one I’ve built, with the ones I truly love, the ones that hold me when I’m crying, laugh with me til I’m crying again, stumble through life with me and help me to refine my edges and move towards where I want to be while remembering right where I am. Then, of course, thinking of the family I might call my own child someday. I dream of her, running around the house. I dream of myself being able to hold space for her, to build a pattern in her that knows love is safe. And maybe dreaming she can help me learn the same. 

 Mom and Dad came to visit last week. After a couple difficult (for all) conversations with me begging for softness and closeness amidst my impending choice to be a single mother, and with my father calling me a ‘snotty little bitch.’ Honestly, it felt good to hear him say it. Masochistic? Or just relieving that finally something was said instead of another layer on the old pile of passive aggressive violence and silent anger in the family. My dad and I will never talk about that again, like all the things we’ve never addressed. My mom, on the other hand, was great. I see her trying, trying to meet her sensitive daughter with the best she’s got. She asked questions, she spent time with me, she said some kind things about my friends. She may never be the mom who could ever hold me hand, or stroke my hair or my face, or look at my sweetly and tell me that I can do it, that I can be a mother, that she is proud of me, that she is here for me. And I’m grieving that, perhaps in a way that’s really going to shift the pain for me for once. 

 Perhaps some of the forgiveness and grace I’m feeling for my mom comes from seeing her brother. 

That’s why she came to Colorado. Her brother, Tim, is dying. Her words not mine. They haven’t spoken in 10 years, since Grandma’s funeral, and they didn’t speak for a good 10 years before that. Her other brother, Mike, no one knows where he is. Apparently he’s got six kids somewhere around Colorado, all my cousins running around this state, but I couldn’t even tell you one of their names. Her sister, Glenna, who has always been good to me when I see her once every 3-4 years, she won’t speak to either of the brothers. Apparently the last time Glenna saw Tim he tried to strangle her, a story my mom just shared with me this trip. 

I watched my body tighten, the tears build in the corners of my eyes, the heart stop itself from showing vulnerability in front of my mom. I watched myself just keep driving, trying to listen to her passively share the violence of her family, and mine. My uncle tried to strangle my aunt after my grandmother died, in the same small, smoky living room in Greeley, Colorado where my dad tried to strangle my brother years ago. We’ve never spoken of that one again either. 

 This, my friends, is America. Northeastern Colorado, rural, staring out the window at a farm that will never feed people, watching the dust billow up on the abandoned old cars on the side of the dirt road. Walking up the old ratty stairs of a house left for dead long ago, crushing the pages of old Buddhism texts beneath my feet as I make my way into my past, into my family’s heirlooms of memories. Breathing in the aroma of cigarettes, speed, rotting fast food bags, pain and tears cried into the carpet, fights that turned violent, things thrown, relationships broken, boys never turning into men – or maybe molding men too fast, too soon. In the background I spot a hole in the wall and I wonder what the story is. But in front of the hole is a box of Pallisade peaches. Owen – my cousin - wants to can some later. Dissolved in all the roughness that’s making me cringe, there is an instinct of sweetness, a common love for, well, good local fruit. Tim is dying, that seems to be true. Owen and Kelton, my other cousins running around Colorado that I don’t know of but can at least say their names, are showing a love I’ve never been able to experience with my parents. I watched Owen’s hands, hurt from heroine addiction and strong from scraping by an existence putting up siding on his dad’s old house, move across Tim’s back rubbing back and forth trying to help him cough out the cancer that will never leave again. I watched Kelton’s eyes, the sensitive searching ones yearning to be seen, tear up as he gives us the update on Tim’s prognosis and what life’s next steps are in life after he dies. He doesn’t know. 

 I am my mother’s daughter. I have her heart, her rebellion. Something made my mom leave this old house, leave this old town, search for something more. Something made my mom believe in goodness, in social work, in helping people. Probably the same people like her family. Something made my mother put herself through a semester of college even though it angered her father. Something made her believe she could figure out how to be a mother, not only of one, but of three. And something made her keep trying to love even though everything she’s known of love, including my father, and her son at times, is scary, hard, distant, violent, substance abusive, harsh, and ultimately leading to not speaking. 

 I am my mother’s daughter, and maybe I can do what she has done.