When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Lemonade!

Last Easter, we were down in New Jersey. It was cold and rainy, as I recall, and we paid a boatload of money for an Easter brunch at the hotel we stayed at because I couldn't decided whether or not I wanted pancakes from the diner across the road or something else. I didn't have much of an appetite, and felt bad that we'd paid so much for a buffett where I certainly didn't eat my money's worth...

We were in NJ because my Mother was in the hospital, dying from a stroke, and I had to be there.

This year, we were home. We broke the brunch tradition and ate dinner at the Munich House.

My Father ate dinner with some friends he's made over the past couple of months. He told me that he hadn't heard from anyone of the extended family.

I wasn't surprised to hear that. I never hear from any of them either. We were never much of a family anyway.

Around Christmas I was feeling something of a disconnect from the general world--mostly because of all the family hype around the holiday. I think, though, that I'm feeling that disconnect more profoundly at Easter because the reason I was at my parents last year was because my mother was dying.

It wasn't because anyone in the family really wanted to see me, or that there was any real burning desire to see any of them.

Yesterday, and during our walk in Arcadia today, I ruminated over the idea of family. I asked Steady Eddie if his mother and father ever said anything bad about his aunts, uncles or cousins in front of him when he was a kid. "No," he answered, "they'd say that someone was acting a bit funny, or something like that, but no, nothing really bad..."

Because I kept remembering all the things my mother would tell me about memebers of the family that poisoned any relationships I could ever have with any of them. No one was any good--everyone had done *something* to *someone* somewhere that made them undesirable. Family members visited out of some strange obligation of kinship, but not our of love or a real desire to see my mother or any of the rest of us.

We were, for most of my life, a weddings-and-funerals family. That's pretty much the only times we got together.

And I think, too, of all my inadequacies that my mother always made sure to point out to me...how I could never take care of a pet, so how could I ever take care of a child. How I couldn't keep house (she ran around re-doing every chore I did) and that I was never going to be able to have a house because I couldn't keep it clean. How no man would ever marry me because I didn't know how to keep house. How I should never have children. Ever.

In her mind, we children--my sister and myself--were to stay at my mother's side until she died. We were never to have our own lives, and she did and said what she could to stop us from having lives. She never thought much about what our futures needed to be, how we needed to have our own healthy families and our own lives and that just because we had them did not mean we would leave her to die alone.

My sister had tried to have a family, and I think my mother said what she did, and so often, because she didn't have my sister the way she wanted--always by *her* side. So she would fix me in a certain way whereby I would never leave.

We were props--objects--dolls to her. We weren't people, really. Just figurines.

Steady Eddie and I went to the movies this evening, and saw a Russian film titled Night Watch. One of the characters is a young physician who curses herself because her mother, for whom the young woman had given up much, rejected her. Her mother would rather have died than have her daughter save her life.

I kept thinking of my Mother--feeling like my Mother, with all her negatives, had cursed me.

Because of what she said to me, and the way the family had so many horrible secrets, and so many lies (some of which I am still sorting through now) I feared ever having a family. I feared having a child in that I might destroy that child's life in a similar manner. I feared getting close to anyone.

In many ways, I still do.

I kept thinking as we were walking about all the lives I've lived in so many different little subcultures all over the place--changing mates and friends ever 5 or 7 years or so for most of my life. Subcultures are great because one really doesn't have to establish any real connections with people. Subcultures are stop-overs for rebellious young adults on their way to family-building and responsible adulthood. Young people need to peer over at the Dark Side and taste a bit of the wild life before settling into productive adulthood.

No one's really supposed to *live* in subcultures.

My father talked about his lady-friend Linda, and how she broke one of her bones so bad that she had to have pins put in it, and has trouble when the weather's damp and cold. I reminded my father that I had a similar problem--a plate and screws--in my right ankle, and that I had to wear wool socks and sometimes even boots to keep my ankle warm.

He acted like he hadn't heard about my ankle. And I reminded him not just of my ankle, but of my chronic fatigue and other problems. He'd forgotten.

I told him that the reason I went to school wasn't because I didn't want to work--a common belief in my family, and one I'm sure was propigated by my mother--but because I was very ill with chronic fatigue and couldn't work. I got grant money to go back to school because of my illness, but no disability.

This all seemed to be news to him. I don't know if it was that he'd forgotten about that part of my life, or if no one ever told him, including me.

I tended not to tell my parents much about my life. Maybe because I didn't want to hear how I was a screw-up. It was easier just not to bring up chronic illness and injury and emotional abuse and a lot of other stuff...

Maybe it was just better to keep them out of it rather than risk any more negativity.

I told him all that stuff because he thought it kind of strange that I laughed at bit sardonically about the trouble I'm having with my eyes. "Well, Dad," I said, "when you've been fighting one thing or another for most of your adulthood, you tend not take another physical problem too seriously."

It's just another obstable to brush away. Another lemon available for another batch of lemonade.

There are, after all, bigger things to worry about....the disconnect within me, the way I tend to slip away from people and places, shed relationships the way a snake sheds its skin, move along so that I don't disappoint others or myself, never contact family members because there's no way that I can extract all the poisonous rumors about them or about me and where will I be when I'm old and dying....

I try not to think too much about that, really. After all, the sourist lemons make the best lemonade, don't they?