Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda
I wish I had a post relating to some event or at least a response to somebody else’s posting, but I don’t. This is just for the sake of posting, to break the long hiatus and for some anonymous catharsis.
It’s been hard to write for the past few weeks because my energies have been so consumed by a family drama, this one more explosive than usual. It’s been two weeks since my return from the ancestral plot, but the days crawl by so slowly that it feels much longer (and more exhausting) than that. Each day wedges a single hooked claw into the ground before dragging itself forward, its jagged belly ripping a wake of gashes in the earth. (There is refuge in melodrama. Making mountains out of molehills affirms that the obstacle in question is, in fact, a molehill. Besides, if every calamity is an apocalypse, there is no more terror in apocalypses — even the real ones.) I returned to Chicago on July 6, and just when I thought I was safe the screaming, hurling, horn-locking drama that is my mother’s legacy whizzed and sparked across fiber optic lines, fled the Northeast, and spilled into my Midwestern refuge.
It’s true: A person’s home should be their castle. But the digital age has slain that fine thought. The digital age and my own cowardice. The thought crossed my mind, as my mobile and land line rang simultaneously in a series of calls that would recur until they were answered, that I could turn off the one and unplug the other. In retrospect that is exactly what I should have done: I should have sat this round out. It wasn’t really my fight to begin with, and I didn’t have the physical or emotional energy to sustain a level counseling mode. But, ah, hindsight is 20/20. Ever have I been poor Epimetheus, enthused and then baffled, foolish enough to open the box and then too stupid to shut it.
It’s the waiting that’s killing me. The not knowing. Of course, I have strong suspicions about what she’s thinking, about what they’re all thinking, but I want to know where I stand. Yes, this suspense is purely selfish. They don’t want my help and I’m tired of efforts that go nowhere. I just want to know where I stand so I can figure out what to do next.
*sigh* The next thing to do is to wait for them to go away, fly home, rent a car, and collect my remaining belongings. Mostly I want my books. But I probably won’t do that. Instead the money should go to a vacation that doesn’t require me to play family counselor.
I wish I knew where I stood. And I wish I had known when to walk away.
An Exhortation
Don’t marry. You’ll always wonder what might have been and there will always be someone to blame.
For the same reason, don’t have kids.
Now you’re thinking smarmily to yourself, Well, hotshot, if somebody didn’t do just that you wouldn’t be typing these words at all. Well, you’re right, but 1) I had no say in the circumstances that produced me, or whether I got produced at all; 2) I’m not sure it was an entirely good idea; and 3) If it hadn’t happened, it’s not like I’d know I was missing out on anything. I’m not silly enough to think my existence — let alone this blog — is of critical importance to the world. That is, my occasional need to continue to exist does not assume the world ever needed me to exist at all. (I do figure since I’m here I might as well make a contribution.) Existence and parenting are not for everyone, and if you don’t make babies — well, it’s not like they’ll know they’re missing anything. Just because they can’t thank you from across the void of non-existence doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want to. So if you do decide to have kids, don’t pretend you’re doing them any favors. Reproduction — intentional reproduction, anyway — is an affirmation of self and nothing else. It can be a cheap shot at immortality, an attempt to relive lost dreams or glory days, or even an attempt to prove that you could raise kids without repeating your parents’ mistakes. But if you decide to have kids, understand that it is about you; maybe that’s why the price of parenting is so much of your own life. Gratifying the self that much doesn’t come cheap. Whether it’s long colicky nights or screaming matches 20 years after you started patting yourself on the back for a job well done, you will have to face the same self-denial as the most austere of ascetics. That austerity should be one of your primary considerations. Go to Little League games. Sit with screaming 9-year-olds at a birthday party. Skip a few random days at work and see what your boss thinks of you afterward. Try to confront a clumsy 5-year-old without feeling the urge to tip a piece of furniture on top of her. If the prospect of facing such situations leaves you squeamish, uneasy, or impatient, don’t do it. Don’t have kids.
Marriage and family make selfishness so tempting and blame so easy. There’s always somebody in the house who deserves your ire. In singlehood you choose your company, your activities, even your work. You have very few real moral responsibilities. And when such things are a matter of choice, dedication comes naturally, sans resentment. You only resent that which is imposed upon you by choice or circumstance. You resent Lumberg asking for yet another Saturday at the office but you wouldn’t be violating a sacred trust if you quit. Not so with marriage or child-rearing. And before long your regret festers into resentment and maybe even hatred; you will be haunted constantly by the decisions you made, the roads you lost, the demands born of those decisions. You took the road well-traveled and still managed to miss the warning signs, forget the pitfalls and lurking dangers and weariness of that beaten track. Somehow at the beginning the road seemed as appealing to you as it had to every traveler who preceded you, before the great shrubs parted and the trees fell bare and the road wound endlessly into rocky, rutted, muddy oblivion.
Don’t marry. Don’t have kids. Listen. Someday you’ll thank me.
Return from the Desert
I didn’t give up on this blog. I was just marooned on a desert island, a.k.a. my childhood home, with my family and without internet access. Please be nice. I’m dangerously close to a breakdown.
In the Beginning
The way marriage is promoted you’d think partners had never disappointed each other, that no life union had ever disintegrated without egregious and sinister interference. Marriage advocates have never felt the silent resentment build in the car until it clogs the air like London fog; or maybe they have, and their misery wants company.
Wait, let me start at the beginning.
See, in the beginning my parents hadn’t met. No, wait, in the beginning my father was married to someone else. Hrm, in the beginning my grandmother and my grandfather fought.
Yes. In the beginning our forebears fought. Or maybe one harangued and the other drank, fighting noise with silence. There is a silence that lets things pass like water and a silence that hurls things back, like a drink or an ashtray or a handful of kitchen scraps.
Disbelieve those who tell you silence is passive. Children can still hear the cacophony between you. Their memories are more easily graven than your own, and harder to scour.
In one beginning my grandparents fought and in the other I have no grandparents. Between the forebears of the latter beginning there was only the silence of abandonment. That was the silence my grandmother heard. There is nobody left who knows or remembers what my grandfather said.
In the beginning his name was blotted out from the earth. Cast from Eden, my grandmother was not allowed to take it with her. (Does the avenging angel cut the apple from the sinners’ hands? Is that why we come into knowledge feeling so maimed?) Did he know of my father? Does he suspect we exist? Without a name there is no provenance. Without provenance, there is possession but no ownership. In the beginning my father was uprooted. In [From] that primordial exile I have no name. I am possessed but orphaned. What is it like to have no beginnings? My father is an orphan and I am a bastard. It is always the way after Eden – angels, orphans, bastards.
Ah. That is why Eden remains so inaccessible: it is not a place I have ever been. I am not even sure which of my ancestors was the last of our line to inhabit it.
Rememory
My mother tipped a dresser on me once. I was very young, I don’t remember exactly how old, but young enough to be too short to reach the top of the dresser in my room. Too short to properly reach the switch on the tall, ugly, heavy gray lamp perched on the rear right corner.
I think she’d been yelling at me to get dressed, or some such — I’d been doing something characteristically slowly or incorrectly — and I reached for the top of the dresser, to turn the lamp on or off. But I reached too far, and my arms were too short, and turning the switch just below the bulb only yanked the lamp out of place, pushed it dangerously closer to falling off the dresser than it always was. It teetered and I panicked. Frantically I wrestled, one-armed, straining my fingertips to keep it from falling, but just making the balance worse and worse. Finally, after terrifying and eternal seconds the lamp stopped moving, clanked heavily back into place, and I breathed a tentative sigh of relief. Moments later she stormed back into my room, roaring something about how dare I be so angry that I would destroy her lamp, how dare I think I could throw things around because she yelled at me, so if I wanted to tip things over, here, tip things over, break them! I was still young enough to think that protesting my innocence would make any difference, would accomplish something other than exacerbate the situation. Maybe if I’d kept my mouth shut should wouldn’t have wrenched the cheap white Ikea drawers away from the wall and onto my legs before storming back out.
Then again, maybe not.
