Hello friends. How are you doing out there? I feel like I keep waiting for winter to welcome me into rest and it keeps on being a whirlwind. If you’d like to share, I’d love to hear where you’re finding peace right now.
In truth, I have been struggling to write anything at all, which is a feeling I haven’t had in years. Talking to friends who are also creatives, many are feeling the same way. I know that the block always passes and the ideas come back. I’ve been crafting and painting as a way to try to shake the writer’s block and not assign it more meaning than it needs.
The holiday season finds me in some Family Stuff TM, because isn’t that what this time of year is for? I am really struggling with the line between unconditional love and enablement lately. Where are the edges and why are they so hard to find and hold? There are intergenerational wounds of addiction that can be healed with sobriety, but it does not heal everything and that is a painful truth to learn.
to stay is harder
My mom likes to say that if she saw her father dying in the street, she’d step over him and keep walking. It’s easy to kill someone who’s already dead. To stay is harder, and to keep loving someone who won’t stop hurting you is harder still. My mother’s father killed himself on my grandmother’s birthday when I was a toddler. We all became walking wounds in his wake, though I never knew him.
The threads that wind the three of us together, my grandfather, my mother, and me are familial, tinged with booze and a deep pull to self-isolate. Alcohol may not have been the ultimate antagonist in his death but it played a strong supporting role. He is remembered for his affairs and his benders, his habit of disappearing for weeks at a time into the Finnish countryside, leaving his family to make excuses in his wake.
My mother’s father was gone long before he left this physical plane. When she talks about him now, which is rare, it is to share familiar anecdotes about his failings. Each time, I can feel how much she hates him, and in the full force of that deep feeling, I can hear in the thumping heart of her disappointment, just how much she wanted to love him. I feel her sense of betrayal over what should and could have been, but never was because he could never get out of his own way. I can see the hole he has left, the the ragged edges of it still steaming into the cold of her. She does not know how to close it and so she denies it. She forgets that I was made in her body, that I know her better than she thinks.
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