Ouch

Just like that boy in the movie Sixth Sense, I see dead people. Well, that’s not entirely true. Mostly, I hear them. They murmur inside my head, chiding me about the noble things I should have done, the selfish things I did instead. They are powerful –– they wield the force of mean and unchangeable facts, colored with a particularly Old World kind of misery and a twist of the agonized-Christ style of Catholicism. But I had begun to hear some nuance in their message. I had begun to think they were setting me free.

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And then today, someone in my family, one of the living, said something cruel to me, unleashing an onslaught of sadness and remorse, and leaving me bereft of the illusion that I had a healthy, viable, mutually affectionate relationship with at least this one survivor. I tried to tell him how I felt but he didn't respond. (It's okay for me to talk about it here; he doesn't read my blog.  

Family: the ones who know you best, the ones who know you least.)So I am thinking today about the way the people you grew up with always know how to hurt you the most. They can customize the cruelty just for you, sharpen that blade and push it through to the very core. But why does it matter so much? Why do we give them such credibility?

I suppose it is because they bore witness to all of it, the whole epic tale. To them you are like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls, maybe a translucent one, with all your former selves nested inside the person you have become, or at least the person you are trying hard to be, and if they want to summon up the confused girl who is cowering somewhere within in order to confront her with her long-ago failures and sins, well, then it’s 1985 all over again, or 1975 (why not) and you are not absolved.

That's my problem. Absolution. A week or two ago, I was kvetching to a friend of mine about how much of my life still seems to be an effort at redemption.  This is a new friend, a kind man and a poet, who sees the current me without the nested dolls inside, and he said, “It’s your lucky day. I am handing out pardons and you happen to be the winner.”

I know it's silly, but I kept that in my metaphorical pocket for some time, and it was a little like magic, and I was feeling like I do my best and I'm really all right.It took the power of The Family to almost undo it.

Family. I don’t mean to undermine the idea of family. Healthy families? I’m all for them, and I think I managed to start one with my husband and our daughter. It’s the family of origin that still brings me torment.

Oh, I do wish that I had honored more fully the good things about it, understood more while it was happening, stayed on board longer. And you can't just be done with it. Even today, I often feel that I am essentially the sum total of my history, and that the stories of my family beat in my heart and course through my blood and make me who I am.

But that’s also why I cannot dance. I am heavy with them.

Oh, I’ll get over this. It just threw me for a loop. It came from an unexpected corner, that's all, and I didn’t know how fragile I still was about this kind of stuff.  I even wonder if this is too petty or personal for a blog post, if it has enough, I don't know, universal applicability. Well, maybe it does for those of us who didn't come from happy homes, the ones still working things out decades later. Anyway, writing always helps, at least for me, and it's cheaper than seeing a shrink.

Meanwhile, a few other things have happened that are far more worthy of space, and I hope to get back and talk about them soon.