Family

Three

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 2 Comments

Once upon a time there was born a little girl

Who was adored by all, like a precious pearl.

Her two older brothers, announced proudly to all

That they had a little sister now, too busy to play ball!

And so things unfolded, and all was well.

For the next few years or so, things were swell.

Until one day, much to the girl’s chagrin and surprise,

She somehow graduated from adorable to pest in their eyes.

She followed them around and pleaded to no end,

But they’d outgrown her and had other things to tend.

And soon she, too, had lots of friends and things to do.

Each had their own life, each had their own crew.

The years flew by and their lives flew on,

And came the time when their parents were gone.

And though they each had families and lives of their own,

The girl-now-woman came to know that their love was a keystone.

And she held close to her heart the years when they’d been young,

For she knew them to be the love from which all other love had sprung.

 

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: pest

 

 

 

 

Sun Tea

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 12 Comments

If my mom liked something, she went all in. She had collections that would have challenged the Smithsonian. Beanie Babies, Spode china, Brownware, cut glass, Santa Clauses, pumpkins, witches, rabbits…anything holiday related, really.

And if she thought you liked something, she'd get it to give to you. In multiple. One Christmas I got 4 pairs of Jellies, a brand of shoe in fashion at the time after I had mentioned in passing that they were cute! I learned to watch saying I liked anything around her.

So it was no surprise that after she was introduced to "sun tea," it became a big thing.

Texas is Southern, therefore iced tea is considered a staple food and flows in every household and establishment. Many folks like it sweetened, but my mom was an iced tea purist. She took hers straight.

Usually, she relied on Lipton Iced Tea, a powder that made instant iced tea. Mix in some scoops. Add ice, and maybe a sprig of mint or a slice of lemon, and you had a delightful beverage to cool off from those humid Houston summer days. No one was making hot tea. Got the kitchen too hot.

Then, one day, some DIY crafty friend introduced her to sun tea.

My mother's life was transformed!

She began buying Lipton tea bags! And a big plastic gallon jar.

To make sun tea: Throw some tea bags in the water, screw on the top, leave the jar in the sun, and voila! Delicious brewed tea ready to become iced tea!

She thought it was the greatest thing. (And you know what? It really did taste pretty darn good.) I remember playing in the yard, running around the strategically-placed-in-the-yard sun-tea-in-the-making jugs many a hot Texas day only to find in the fridge by evening and in glasses on the table at dinner.

At a certain point, those jugs stopped being planted in our yard. Perhaps she lost interest, on to the next big thing. Or maybe, if I recall, she had to stop the tea-drinking altogether because of all the caffeine.

I wonder if anybody makes iced tea that way anymore.

Maybe I will find a patch of sun (on the fire escape?) and make some sun tea in her honor. But it'll have to herbal Roobius…

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: tea

Carry On

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 2 Comments

Things That Are Traditional in My Family That I Inherited (Whether I Like It Or Not:)

Grandmother’s Thanksgiving Stuffing

Disbelief in Good Things Lasting

Aunt’s Pumpkin Bread Served at All Gatherings

Serving Dishes and Calling Them “Salads” Even Though They Contain No Vegetables Unless You Consider Miniature Marshmallows and Jello Vegetables

Dad and Uncle’s Christmas Chili

Finding the Least Trafficked Back-Routes When Driving Places Even If It Takes Much Longer Just Because “It’s The Back-Way”

Spode Christmas Tree China On the Table at Major Holidays Whether It Is Christmas Or Not

Distrust of Strangers & Non-Family People, Too

Gradma’s Green Bean Recipe

Waiting for The Proverbial “Other Shoe” to Drop

Watching Longhorn Games on TV No Matter What the Occasion (Funeral/Holiday)

The Avoidance of Heavy Traffic and Bad Weather At All Costs Even If It Means Not Going Out

Keeping A Stiff Upper Lip/Never Let Them See You Cry/Keep It In The Family

Inspired By The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: traditional

 

 

 

 

Time Travel

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 8 Comments

Shiny peach polish on elegant, tapered fingers

Faint fragrance of rose mixed with Jergen’s

I loved your creamy white hands, Grandmother

I’d lay alongside you as you napped, put my fingertips next to yours

Watch the rise and fall of your chest, feel the warmth of your breath

Fall into a peaceful sleep that felt like being carried on a breeze

I’ve never felt as safe and loved as I did then

You’ve been gone so long, but I can find you whenever I want

I just put on some Jergen’s and close my eyes

 

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: fragrance

Dormant Child

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 11 Comments

I hear you now

From within, so deeply hidden you had no chance of being heard until now

I thought maybe you’d flown away with the night and my innocence

Or maybe you’d been crushed by the weight of his body on mine

I held a funeral for you inside and accepted the loss

And then, one day, there you were; and at first

I could not recognize you through the warp and woof that my soul became

 

Here you are now

And I found you, and though you were unrecognizable to me

I knew and loved you at first sight with every fiber of my being

I’d never seen anything more heart-breakingly beautiful in my life

I drew your little burned body into my arms, your flesh black and peeling

Raw, red skin angering through the seared pain of the past

I loved you until the dead flesh fell away, until you pinked up and began to flourish

In the fore of my heart I let you pick your own room and decorate it pink and kitty cats

Let the other girls invite you to play and read you stories

I gave you hot baths and fed you warm milk and cookies, told you I was putting you first now

And I realized that you were more me than any me I had ever been before or would ever be

 

Now you are here

And you are my everything, you are the key, finally – the center of us all

You carry my truth, my play, my freedom, my deepest self-song

 

Now I am here

The parent who will protect you from that kind of hurt ever happening again

The mother who will love you like you are my everything

The woman who sings a self-song so beautiful it makes me cry to hear it

 

I hear you now

 

For Suzanne, with Thanks & Love

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: dormant

 

 

 

 

True Grit

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 16 Comments

My Dad and I had a very complicated relationship.

There were years we barely spoke, by my choice.

Our relationship was damaged in my early childhood, and afterwards, it was always in one phase or another of dysfunction.

I reached a point in my adulthood where I decided that it was best for my health to remove myself from the dynamic. And I thought that would pretty much be it for the remainder of my life, and I was OK with that decision.

Until, that is, my mother’s cancer.

Life is funny that way. You can think that a part of your life is beyond repair, and then lo and behold, Life brings you the only exact set of circumstances under which you would ever come together again.

In 2005, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She underwent radiation therapy (two rounds) and then chemotherapies (2.) I traveled down to Texas to visit often to be with her, me tersely tolerating my father, and he giving me a wide berth out of hurt respect of my former choice. (I also always took my then-boyfriend with me as buffer.)

Then in 2006, after the family gathering at Christmas, which was more uncomfortable than usual, my parents called to tell me that they had been informed by my mother’s oncologist that no more could be done for her. (I will never forget the agony of that call.)

Just like that, all bets were off.

It had been decided that she would be having home hospice care to make her as comfortable as possible. As happens in such situations, we were still hopeful that she could live for some time. No one can predict how things will really go, you tell yourself.

I started going to Houston weekly to be with her. My father and I, out of necessity and shared concern, began to interact more and more, all having to do with her and her health needs.

We found our way to something new, something beyond the pain of the past, for her sake. And later, after the inevitable happened, for ours.

In the weeks following my mother’s death, my father was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Now, my father had been a strapping, big and tall and healthy man his entire life. Never much more than allergies. But I think the stress of losing his beloved sweetheart of 54 years created the perfect storm in his system, and the cancer that might have lain dormant for years just took over the weakened man.

In the midst of undergoing tremendous grief (he’d also lost his father the year before,) my father had to make decisions regarding his own illness, which was acute and generally swift-moving. The standard treatment available was quite harsh. He decided to go an alternative route in order to potentially benefit others by entering into an clinical trial at MD Anderson Hospital to receive experimental drugs instead of the standard approach, which was tough to survive in and of itself.

So I continued my visits. My remaining brother lived in Houston, so he became the primary caregiver, which I was grateful for. But I went down as often as possible and our new relationship began to grow into a new chapter, slowly, carefully.

And in the year following, when one of my two brothers also died, unexpectedly, again, all bets were off.

I watched this man who was so complicated for me, who had hurt me in such far-reaching ways, suffer the loss of his lifelong love and his son. These losses broke him apart. He went through pain that I would not have wished on my worst enemy.

(And he was my worst enemy.)

Somewhere there in the midst of it all, after a lifetime of seeing no way to ever being able to forgive this man, I suddenly was able to see that he was worthy of my forgiveness. That I had been given forgiveness in my life, and that he, too, should be given that as well. That he was not beyond forgiveness, in some separate category unlike anyone else on the planet.

I guess I was finally able to see him just as a flawed man, finally, and not as the monster I had experienced and protected my heart from for all those years. (Perhaps justifiably, one might argue. But things had changed. And those changes had allowed for a shift of my perception. And that shift allowed yet a new phase of our new relationship.)

In the remaining time of his life, we found our way to a loving father-daughter relationship.

How did this miracle happen?

I think for me, part of it was seeing the sacrifice and the bravery with which he committed himself to surviving his cancer for those of us who remained and loved him.

I know that in his heart he was grief-stricken and lost without my mother and would have loved nothing better than to close his eyes and just let go, to die and be with her. But he fought on, for us.

And after my brother died, that grief was multiplied by 30, and yet still he fought on, for my remaining brother and I. My then-boyfriend-turned-fiance after my mother died, and in the midst of it all we were planning a wedding: a wedding my mother and my father had always wanted for me. He was fighting to walk me down the aisle. And to carry her memory on for his two young grandchildren.

He withstood grueling chemo treatments and daily hospital trips where he sat for hours going through the process required of his treatment. Hours spent sitting and waiting and getting tests and giving blood and getting chemo. Medications at home. The affect the treatment had on his body and spirit. His diminishing physical strength.

This big and tall, towering Texas man became a thin wisp of his former self, eventually walking with a cane.

And through it all, he never once complained.

Three months before my wedding date, he got a virus caught during one of the daily hospital visits. I went home on my usual trip but this time visited him in the hospital, where he had to be in a protected environment.

There, I could see that he was truly exhausted. Spiritually. Emotionally.

That the true grit that had been getting him through, that amazing reserve within that he had been tapping into for so long for our sake, was nearing empty. He had been fighting to give me these last acts of fatherhood, this time of repair, this time of untainted love. I knew this and I was so very grateful for it all. I knew that this time had been a supreme gift that would change the quality of my remaining time on the planet for the better. That my whole relationship to life had shifted for the better.

And so I gave him the last gift I could give him as a daughter. I gave him my permission to let go of the fight.

There are times when life provides you with an open door, and if you are paying attention, you see it and you walk through, somehow knowing that it is what you should do.

When a moment arose in the conversation that invited such a thing to say, I took it.

I told him we loved him and were thankful for everything he had been doing. For how hard he had been fighting for us, to be there for the wedding and for the kids. But that I would never want him to stay on if he truly no longer wanted to. That he had done it all, he had fathered through like a warrior, but that if, at any point, he was ready, that we would want him to let go. That we would be OK. That I would be OK. That he and I were OK.

It was just a few sentences. He knew and I knew what we were saying to each other. He said he wasn’t at that point quite yet but he could understand a time of coming to that point.

When it was time to leave, I told him I loved him, and meant it. I thanked him for being my father, and I meant that too. And I thanked him for fighting so hard to be there for me.

He passed away the next week, after returning home, having come through the virus. My brother found him laying alongside the bed, as if he’d gotten up in the night and collapsed.

I hope he felt at peace when the moment came. Perhaps he was walking towards the sound of my mother’s voice. I like to think so.

My love for him is complicted, yes. But it is true. As true as the grit that he was made of.

2009-07-24-15-22-58-e1499812592237.jpg Dad and I at the civil ceremony of my marriage, 8 mo before he died.

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: grit

 

 

Miracle of Miracles

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 11 Comments

Some might call my cat Miracle a “fraidy cat.”

I say she just has sensitive hearing and has a very vivid imagination.

When there is any kind of pitched alarm (door buzzer, oven timer, etc) she scampers away to the nearest place of safety and won’t come out again until she is good and ready.

Ceiling fans really create stress for her. The shadows made from their fins taunt her. I think she imagines a great flying creature is overhead, ready to swoop down for the kill at any moment.

Her movements walking through the room with one in it are strategically designed to avoid being directly beneath the “creature’s” view.

She hugs the edges of the room, and if she has to go beneath her enemy for some reason (the doorman buzzed and she has to get to the back bedroom to safety!) she runs low to the ground looking up as she passes as if a pterodactyl  is overhead and death is imminent. Kitty armageddon!

I feel for her. I relate to moving through the world in fight or flight mode. I, too, have sensitive hearing and a very vivid imagination. I, too, can make monsters out of harmless things and people.

Miracle was given her name by the Wichita Falls, TX vet who saved her life. She’d been found, near death, having been abused by someone. He named her Miracle because it was a miracle she had survived.

Her back leg is still a bit wonky from whatever cruelty was inflicted on her as a baby. And she hates being handled.

She is a fierce survivor.

My brother John adopted her immediately upon meeting her, despite already having two cats. They bonded deeply: she would perch on his broad shoulders when he was at his computer, and sleep on his vast chest when he slept.

When my brother died suddenly, she and his other two cats were left for a day and a half alone in his apartment after the EMT took him away.

As my father, other brother and I packed up John’s apartment, Miracle  was the only one who would come out from her hiding places now and then. When we were done after a few days and it was time to leave, I had to go in and capture all of the cats. John’s vet was taking the 2 older ones. We were driving Miracle across Texas to Houston.

Turns out a fourth cat was hiding under the bed with the other two. He was a stray John had sometimes fed on his porch. Somehow he got in, probably during the EMT situation.

This cat did not look well. I left him until last and then went ahead and gathered him up to take him to the vet too.

(We later found out that that cat was indeed very sick. The other two older cats were infected. Somehow, Miracle survived that too. It was such a relief that she’d escaped that. My brother would have been heartbroken at that whole sad situation.)

We drove Miracle down the 8 or so hours to Houston. I had offered her a home, but my cancer-fighting father insisted that he take care of her at his house there.

(My father, who had NEVER liked cats. He’d somehow fallen in love and then married a woman who had a huge heart and an enormous love of all animals. We always had cats and dogs growing up, much to his chagrin. He had begrudgingly tolerated them over the years.

Once, he suggested my mom just feed them all dry food, I guess he hated the smell of canned food. My mother asked him would he like to eat ceareal for dinner the rest of their marriage. That put that to rest.

But having lost his father, then his sweetheart of 54 years and now his son in a short period of time, I think his heart was so stretched out by grief that he was willing and able. And perhaps it was a last act of fatherhood he could give to John, to look after his favorite cat.)

Miracle and my Dad got along surprisingly well. I will never forget visiting and actually seeing him let her get on his lap! He said she was alright company. He just wished two things: that she’d not throw up or lick his arm. Otherwise, she was ok.

They were together about 7 months until my Dad died. Again, the EMT came, this time to take my Dad away. But luckily, my other brother was the one who found him, so he was there to help Miracle through the commotion this time.

Now, the plan was for me to bring her up to NYC to live with me. She was on her own for about a month in my Dad’s house until I could fly down. My brother visited her daily, but she grew very  lonely.

I was getting married and moving all at the same time and needed to wait for a calm time to bring her up where I could help her integrate.

But she was getting restless alone, so it became clear we had to do something.

Fortunately, and quite miraculously, at my father’s memorial service, his first secretary happened to offer an interim place for her to stay. Turned out she fostered animals and was well set up to take in a cat shortterm. So Miracle was moved to her place, where she had an area in a finished basement. She was played with, and safe.

I finally got down as soon as I could after the move and flew her back home. Anyone who has traveled on a plane with a cat knows it is very  stressful on them. She did pretty well, considering.

I carefully went about the process of adding her to my household, which already held two cats: a brother and sister who had been the apples of my eye and ruled my roost for 15 years.

Though I implemented all the plans I read about how to do this, it did not go well. The other two were not welcoming, and sort of forced Miracle into living in one room of the apartment. Suddenly there were war zones, and each cat had their own territory.

My visions of three cats piled together sleeping on the couch were dashed.

It wasn’t what I had hoped, but Miracle seemed happy enough in her zone, which was my husband and my shared office. She had her own litter box and food area.

And so we became a three cat household.

It turns out that this Miracle cat, who I thought I was saving by bringing her to my home, would end   up saving mine.

Within a month after bringing her up, my beloved boy cat Pookie was diagnosed with an agressive bone cancer. He passed away within three months.

It was devastating. Shortly thereafter, his sister Sabrina was diagnosed with cancer. After a long illness, she too passed away the next year.

So for the first year and a half with us, Miracle was not only the third cat on the totem pole, but she was also sort of the backburner cat to the ill cats in terms of attention.

The day I lost Sabrina was extremely hard. For whatever reason, her loss held all the other major losses in it: my mother, brother, father and Pookie.

Thank God for Miracle.

If I’d had to come home to an empty-of-cats home, it would have been even more impossibly sad than it already was.

But fortunately, I came home to a little furry loved one who needed my attention. And boy, did I need her.

Today, Miracle has reign of the full apartment, as well as our full attention. It has taken time for her to expand her territory into formerly enemy regions. And though I think a part of her will always be looking over her shoulder, she seems to be fully owning being top cat, and flourishing under our undying love.

Yes, she is sensitive to sounds and she thinks ceiling fans are flying predators. But it has been several years without the EMT at the door, and we are pretty much now living in her apartment instead of her living in ours.

Just as it should be.

Inspired by The Daily Post daily Word Prompt: scamper

Constant Craving

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 10 Comments

When I was a girl, I lived for food.

The promise of the after-school snack kept me going through the grueling days of my youth. I’d race home to find sweet and savory relief from the confusion of adolescence.

I’d eat from a box of graham crackers, spreading layers of vanillla chocolate chip canned frosting. Or I’d slice up a Snickers bar the way they did in a commercial on at the time, pretending I was in it. Then maybe some Lay’s potato chips. Maybe a Wonder Bread/Gulden’s Mustard/Kraft cheese and baloney sandwich.

I was on my own, so I could eat like I wanted to. No father home yet to bring tension and self-consciousness to the air.

I’d fill myself, quelling the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that haunted me at any other time of my day. This was all mine. My time free from criticism, pressure or fear.

Over the years, I became desperate around this intimate connection with food. Protective of the rituals. The private pleasure I found in food and the act of eating it.

I knew something was off about how I related to food. I felt ashamed and like there was something wrong with me, while at the same time feeling like it was crucial to my very existence. That trichotomy created a painful struggle inside me of shame and appetite and need.

I became secretive around it, knowing on some level that I was not like other people.

I now understand that somewhere along the way, I learned to equate food with so many things I needed: love, attention, security, connectedness, relief, quiet, peace, pleasure, a sense of having something for myself, a way to feel like I had control of one thing in the world.

I believe that some of this relationship to food was learned, familial. My mother, too, sought refuge in her treats. She loved candy, and when I came home from school, she was usually lying in her bed, reading mystery novels, eating candy from a stash she kept in her bedside table. She, too, at some point in her life, reached for food to solve and resolve being on this planet.

I understood her for this. I feel such compassion for her. For her huge needs and the dysfunctional way she had developed to cope with getting them met.

It has taken many years of unraveling this connection for me to find a new relationship to food. There’s been tremendous loss in it. A loss of my friend, my savior, my companion, my sidekick.

But it has been so freeing, too. I have  been learning how to give myself what I had asked for from food all those years: love.

Sounds easy, and obvious, right? But what does that actually look like?

It looks like this: giving myself The Five A’s of Love: Attention, Acceptance, Appreciation, Affection, and Allowing.

(The Five A’s concept is from the wonderful book How To Be An Adult in Relationships – Five Keys to Mindful Loving by psychotherapist, David Richo, PhD.)

Those Five A’s satisfy the snack craving every time. I’m not saying I don’t still crave and even miss that snack eating ritual. I do. That’s a deeply embedded habit. I got pretty hard-wired around it.

But today, I take the snack-seeking girl inside by the hand, and I ask her what she really needs. 

Sometimes it is some appreciation for all I have been doing all day.

Sometimes it is affection. Maybe a bath. Some demonstration of loving care.

Maybe it is the need to be allowed to really acknowledge feeling afraid, or spent, or angry.

It took awhile for that part of myself to trust that my needs could be met in new ways. To trust in something other than food.

To trust life. To trust love. To trust loving myself, in life.

It is an every day practice, this mindfulness of love. I pour the energy I used to hold for food into other things. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t gotten my wires crossed, that food wasn’t so complicated for me.
But it is.

And so I accept this truth as if I were diabetic, and I do what I need to do to care for myself.

Mostly, as I said, I feel free.

I no longer carry that shame I felt around it. I am literally lighter in spirit. That feeling is the prize I keep my sights on. It is what makes it all worth it.

I may no longer “have” snacks. But I have me.

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: snack

Broken Lineage

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 4 Comments

When I was in my mid-20’s, my father made a revelation to me.

In the instant he told me, it was if suddenly, an off-feeling I’d had my whole life until that moment suddenly made sense. Something aligned within me. My relationship to the world felt different. It felt like the earth turned just a bit on its axis and snapped into place after having been off for so long.

I felt like I could breathe just a bit easier after a lifetime of holding it in just a little.

My Dad and my mother sat me down and the story unfolded. My father had been at a work conference in Galveston, TX at which he was to speak. As she always did, my mother went along.

She stayed in the hotel when he actually went to the event that morning. Before the event, there was a meet and greet in the front area of the arena. My Dad had on a name tag, as did the other guests and participants.

At a certain point he noticed an older woman looking at him form across the room. Later, she approached him, and he recalled thinking she seemed hesitant about talking to him. As they began to small talk, he looked down at her name tag, and commented, “Hey, that’s funny. We share the same last name.”

He said the woman sort of paused a moment as if considering what to say next, and then suddenly blurted out, “I’m Rose Curry. I was your father’s first wife.”

She went on to explain that she’d been married to my grandfather and that they’d had a son together, my Dad’s half-brother. They were long-since divorced, and agreed not to have contact or tell anyone about the child, but her son had always known of him had always wanted to contact my grandfather, his father.

She and her son both lived in Galveston, and she had seen in the paper that my Dad was speaking. She had not been sure of whether or not to come.

My Dad says he went into a kind of shock. He doesn’t recall anything else about the conversation or the event. He gave the speech somehow and then afterwards went back to his hotel room.

My mom said when he walked in the door, he was white as a ghost.

He recounted the story to her, and they posited that perhaps it was someone looking to grift some money out of him. He was sure that his father could never have been married before, much less have a child and not tell anyone about it. Surely they were just looking to demand some inheritance or something, claiming to be relatives.

But curiosity got the better of him. He looked through the phonebook and found the name of the man that Rose Curry had claimed was his half-brother, and he called the number. He spoke to the man, and they arranged to meet that afternoon in the parking lot at a McDonald’s.

And my Dad said that the moment he saw the man get out of his car and approach him, he knew that the story was true. He could see the resemblance clear as day.

He spoke with the man for several hours. It turned out that this man, my half-uncle, had tried several times over the years to re-connect with my grandfather. He’d gone to Midland, TX (halfway across the state) to his house and rang the doorbell, only to be turned away in the snow.

He’d even called my Dad’s house once, at holiday time, in the hopes of speaking to him.

He’d had a tough life, struggled with depression and alcoholism.

My parents told me that after they left Galveston that day, my father had talked to my grandfather about the man. But my grandfather wanted nothing to do with him. As he had turned him away so many times over the years, so he turned him away again.

I. Was. Floored.

Suddenly, my whole childhood made sense.

I’d always sensed an indefinable energy around my grandparents’ house in Midland. They were loving people. I loved to be at their house and around them. But they didn’t leave home much. And there was a tension that I could feel as a child, something I could not make sense of. I guess I always felt that something was about to happen. Something bad. It felt like we were always on hold.

Hearing the revelation of this first family of my grandfather’s, it all made sense. That energy was the energy of holding a secret together.

My grandfather had been married and met my grandmother and fell in love. He had left the other woman, and their son, and they’d divorced. My grandfather’s side of the family knew, but were sworn to secrecy. My grandmother’s family and the family she and my grandfather would make together were not to ever know.

My God, that takes a ton of energy, to hold that big a secret.

So every time there was a knock at the door…every time the phone rang…they must on some level had been thinking would it be someone who knew the dirty dark little secret?

I remembered a man coming to my grandparents’ house at Christmas. My grandfather going out and talking to him on the front yard, coming back in angry.

(Now I know it was him.)

I was at the Thanksgiving dinner table when a man called interrupting dinner, asking for my Dad. My Dad came back to the table saying “some guy had just called and as said he was his brother, must be a wrong number, the guy sounded drunk.”

(That poor man trying yet again.)

Secrets are powerful things. They create an energy, they take up space. As you work to hold them in, it takes away from the living of your life. Every relationship feels that weight in some way or another.

As a sensitive child, I sensed it all. But no one would say a word.

I was close to my grandmother, but the one time she ever got mad at me or denied me anything was when I asked her in college for some family history. She refused to help me. I was so confused by her behavior at the time. It was so unlike her.

But once the big secret was outed, it all made sense.

My idea of my grandfather was forever altered on that day. My grandfather and my grandmother, but she had been dead for some time.

I never spoke to my grandfather about it. I had wanted to, but my Dad said not to, and I complied. I guess I have been conditioned to accept the weight of lies.

Sadly, he never agreed to have contact with the man who was his son, my half-uncle. I never met him either. All involved parties are dead now.

I remain. And I seek to be sure that I live life lie-free. Lies cost too much, and they can never be held forever.

I had a half-uncle. I wonder what he was like. I hope his children and their children have also broken the chain of lies. You can only hold the Truth at bay for so long.

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: revelation

 

 

 

 

Freefall

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 3 Comments

I love to jump off cliffs.

This runs antithetical to just about every way I was conditioned growing up.

I come from very fearful people, stoic Protestants who practice “keeping things in the family,” “never let them see how you really feel,” and “stick close to home.” Cautious, careful, deliberate action-takers. Spontaneity? Not so much.

I never questioned it growing up. It was normal to me. Things like traffic and weather dictated activities. Never let them see you cry. Don’t show weakness. Therapy might as well have been witchcraft.

It is imbedded in my code, this desire to avoid potential problems. This fear of something bad happening if you are not careful at all times.

And yet.

I am no adrenaline junkie or extreme sports athlete. While I do enjoy a good rollercoaster ride now and then, I have not been ticking off a list of things I must do such as skydiving and bungie jumping, though if the occasion arose I might do those things.

But.

Years ago, at a quarry in Vermont, I discovered that inside me is a kind of a dare devil all the same. That there are times I want to take risks, when I must, in fact, take the leap.

I love to stand at a precipice and then jump off into a deep body of water. I just love that sensation in my body as I step off into the air, my heart in my throat as an unheralded scream of joy-fear comes out of my mouth. Those moments of being totally free and falling through the air are just so life-filled, so in the moment. I experience the rush of my own full life force. There’s a feeling of being at one with something outside of me and yet within myself all at once. And then, the landing into the water. Being encompassed, becoming one with it in those moments in the muted depths before surfacing. Astounded at having been saved once again.

Maybe those moments are my church, my sanctuary.

For those seconds I am not thinking, not watching, not taking care.

I just am, and I am far from alone, and it feels great.

I know that experience now, and I seek it out in other ways. In my work as an actor. I feel that same way when I fully invest in my character and truly lay deeply personal life and death needs on the line and take that same kind of leap into the scene. My partner and I leap into the air of the play and sometimes find astonishing moments of true experience together. Surprises, places unexpected. When it is over, the same astonishment and gratitude for having landed safely. This is also my church, my sanctuary. It, too, is holy.

My early conditioning and the family encoding have not gone away, maybe never will. I can still catch myself getting very anxious when it is raining hard and I am in the car with my husband, feeling as if we should go straight back home. I carry unwarranted dread around at times like a Pashmina shawl. It can feel comforting and necessary.

But that’s OK.

Today, I consciously choose times to allow my spontaneity to take the front seat, put caution and fear in the back and assure them that “I got this.” I look for more places to find my free-fall worship, and I’m so grateful that I do what I do for a living.

Acting as I know it is not for the feint of heart, and I am honored to embody the lives of people who are fighting to live better lives, love more fully, taking risks to get what they need.

For them, and for me, I am happy to take that step off into the air and see where it takes me.

#freefall #risk-taking #acting

Inspired by The Daily Post Word prompt: precipice