Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald
apart from residual unease, it is with some relief that i'm sitting here more able, than i was before, to express my thoughts on this long days concerns. a day which really extends to other days, like the tendrils of other lifetimes, on a subject that i've closely and heavily guarded: family--with the riot of its immediate, extended and honorary members.
i will not include specifics or names because this is not a book report of what has happened, will happen, continues to happen, to families and the individual. this is only an attempt by me to look upon the questions, griefs, and decisions that can be made by one in the face of so many and so much.. its my attempt to look, take in, understand, and learn what i can, what is best and what is worse.
and though the trouble and concern was for someone else or, rather, a whole string of someone elses, i know that the lingering hurt that was suffered, "real" or perceived, to be universal hurt.
"Instead, filled with dread and pre-programmed to guilt feelings, the "American" ingrate that i'm supposed to be in my old age, and in his, responded with silence--turning the blade of real destruction and heavy blame inward. I felt my face come apart on its own, a voluntary collapse. Without realizing it, trails of molten tears were speedily carving narrow lanes into an already damaged and disappearing skin. Everything stung. I was helpless, upset, wronged. It was difficult to see the road ahead of me and the distance i was still committed to travel with them, mom and dad, baggage and all..."
~me, an excerpt from my travel journal
the above was a palpable violence that i felt erupting on the inside while i attempted to maintain composure on the surface. it was or is, perhaps, being that i am sometimes so completely sensitive and vulnerable to criticism from the two people that i most desperately wanted to please, that my response was so emotional.
todays events, as i witnessed them from the outskirts of a certain worry and a sort of mind-bending trouble,was a day that had been like another reflection, another reminder of how bittersweet it can often be to be bound--either by a word, a choice of action or by grisly nature herself.
Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.
~Elizabeth Stone
this second line appealed to my sense of visceral poetic drama, so i include it here because the heart is not always so easily remembered--buried as it is under the weight of so much pride. and, of course, once a parent always a parent, i suppose. and though i am not (yet?) a parent and can only imagine what it must be like, i am always so baffled and amazed by children and their parents. though days, years, illnesses and wrinkles are collected over time, the dynamic is an unchanging "once a mom, always a mom".
once you care or love or commit your life and your toil, you must always care, love and commit. its that must, that driving compulsion that raises the level of intensity for me. being a parent, available as a parent, stalwart and serious and loving as a parent must be is a concept, i believe, that reaches farther than that of loyalty. for i've never thought of loyalty as a quality that could be intrinsically cemented, firm, permanent. loyalty is learned, family is lodged in the marrow of your bones.
and it should, of course,go without saying that i'm speaking not just about the typical idea of a parent, e.g. mom and dad, i'm also talking about the figure in whom a child looks to for protection, love, discipline, (brutal) honesty, acceptance. you know, home--in whatever shape, age, gender or title that comes in.
the point i think i'm trying to make in this awkward, written/quoted/made-up setup blog is that we're all extended parts belonging to something else that makes us a whole. and instead of being amazed we are always finding ways to peel ourselves apart from them to become distinctly ourselves in the face of this glob and the world. but the fact remains that "we are made of these people". we can no more extract ourselves and our involvment as pry apart our sensation from our life and living memory behind it.
The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
~erma bombeck
12:49 - Wednesday, May. 03, 2006
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