Missing Pieces

So, today is my birthday. 63 years ago I crash landed here…well, actually about 1100 miles south and west of here, but that’s irrelevant. I imagine they thought I’d come before Christmas, but I didn’t. They might have thought I’d come around New Year’s, but I didn’t. I split the gap, right down the middle, and came 4 days after Christmas and 3 days before the the New Year. My cycle is definitely winter. I have always enjoyed the cold weather, and in these parts snow usually makes a showing around this time, but last year we got nothing. This year could be the same, but it’s not quite January, so we’ll see. If I really want to see it, I can drive a little north, into Virginia, and I’m sure I can find it. Right now, though, I’m sitting here in the Piedmont of NC, trying to muddle through what I imagine is a mid-life crisis? 

This doesn’t feel as though it’s the middle of my life. Both my mother and her sister, and my grandmother’s sisters, died between the years of 82 and 83, so I’m figuring I’ve got a solid 20 years before things head south for me. In truth, nobody knows. While I’m here, though, I would really like to do what I am “supposed” to do, fulfill my purposed on the level of spirit. Tell my story, I guess. 

I still wrestle with the notion that I have nothing to say that anyone wants, or needs, to hear. When I tell my story in the AA rooms, which is not all that often, it is generally well received. Most people say I have done a good job at maintaining a sense of humor about things, but that’s not always a given. I don’t have a script or anything, I just let whatever wants to come out come out. I think that’s how it’s supposed to go; you channel what is needed and let it rip. I’m not sure if you can do exactly that in writing for an unknown audience.

One of the outstanding lessons in the Daily Om course I’m taking now asked me to list 5 most significant life experiences, then pick one to expound upon. I’ve been more or less stuck on that for a while now, and not sure why. Most of the events I listed were not joyous, or happy celebrations. I think I included graduating from college, which for me remained bittersweet for a number of reasons. One of the other ones that I am confident is life-changing was the last time I spent time alone with my aunt, before my mother went into the nursing home and before dementia began making its way into my aunt’s brain. I look on that as a rescue, and feel as though she saved my life. 

That day, we were supposed to meet my mother for lunch at a familiar restaurant; my mother and I had been there many times. I picked up my aunt, and my mother was going to meet us there. At the designated gathering time, and beyond, there was no sign of my mother. This was not in the least unusual. My mother was late for literally everything my entire life, so my aunt and I just chatted. I’ve always really liked her, not just as my aunt but as a person I had fun with. We had the same sense of humor, and I think she liked me as well. We had fun together.

Our conversation erupted into silliness over events of the past, family stories, crazy stuff our relatives had done. It didn’t really occur to me what a treat it was to be having an adult conversation with her, just the two of us, without my mother around to editorialize or lend tension to something from 50 years before that was festering between the two of them. Somehow, the conversation turned to my parents, and when they were married. I asked her about a time I remembered from my childhood, where she had moved to Detroit but then needed to return home. My father went up there to help her drive back to Louisiana, and I remembered feeling like there was more to the story. I asked her about that.

My aunt said, well you know I went up there for a man, and that didn’t work out. She gave me that eye-rolling look that said yeah, what an idiot I was, and we both exploded in giggles. I was still troubled, though, and I asked her flat out if my father had been in appropriate in any way with her, had something gone on during that trip that wasn’t right. She looked at me directly, and said, “Ann, your father was a perfect gentleman. He never did anything he shouldn’t have done, and he did what he came up there to do – he helped me get back home. It was a long drive, and I couldn’t have done it by myself. But he was a PERFECT gentleman.” 

I believed her, and still don’t quite get what tension there could have been about that, but I immediately answered my own question about that – my mother saw things very differently than the rest of us, and my father was undeniably a dog while they were married. But, whatever the case, I was able to lay that question to rest for myself. But there was more, and I had to ask her – why did my father stay in that marriage as long as he did. He was miserable, I was miserable, my mother was out of her mind. They stayed married for 16 years, so why in the hell did he stay there all that time, prolonging a torturous scenario that was inevitably doomed to failure?

She locked eyes with me again, with the kindest and most benevolent, loving expression on her face, and said very quietly, “That was because of YOU.” I had to sit back and take a deep breath. I felt as though a train was roaring through my blood vessels, the din echoing in my eardrums. It had never occurred to me that I played into any part of his decision about anything. I said to her that I didn’t even think he liked me very much, and saw me as more or less a pain in the ass to deal with. She probably said some other things, but all I could hear was that he stayed because of me, that I had mattered on some level to him.

Those few minutes of conversation with my aunt changed EVERYTHING for me. EVERYTHING. I cannot say I forgave him on the spot, but I had clarity for the first time about the real dynamics of their marriage, and what had been going on there. I remember he would frequently say that my mother had “warped the child’s mind against me”. I sided with her a lot, because it was always just me and her and yeah, she did more or less mold my thinking to match her off-kilter way of looking at the world, and her completely dysfunctional concept of adult relationships. I didn’t know any better, and he gave me no better alternative. I was on my own, and I had to survive. It was hell on so many levels that even Dante had not conceived of that kind of misery.

My mother never made it to the restaurant, and on some cosmic level that was the way it was supposed to be. She had been trying to call my cell phone while I was at the restaurant, but I had turned the volume down and then got into a serious conversation and wasn’t paying attention…she had locked the steering when somehow and had to call AAA and then got disoriented but made it home and that was the end of that. She was safe, and so was I.

I will never forget that conversation with my aunt, and I do believe it saved my life. I did not have all that much of a life at that point, at least not my own. That clarity let me believe in my father on a different level, a level that said he did not abandon me. He believed I was already lost, so he fled. I wish he had done that a little differently, fought for me, made sure I was safe but he didn’t. He didn’t know how. It doesn’t sound all that much better, and the outcome was still the same, but there was a little shred of hope now. Hope that I didn’t cause the whole thing. Hope that I wasn’t so deformed and aberrant that he fled THAT. Still a coward, but I didn’t cause that. 

Things were different for me after that. My mother continued to go downhill, I continued to find disastrous narcissists who used me until I ran dry, my job became increasingly less satisfying and cognitively disconnected from who I am. But there was some base level in me that was no longer a wavy line on the shoreline. I was far more solid, and I needed that for what was coming. 

My aunt is gone now, but I will always remember that she gave me back a chunk of my soul that I didn’t realize was missing.