I got back to the City last night and crashed into bed about 1:00am. I then managed to sleep pretty well continuously until (I kid you not) midday. Ordinarily I'd be embarassed to admit that, if not for the fact that 11 hours little-broken sleep is the best night's sleep I've had since Joni and the girls have been gone. With the more intelligent perception that a good night's sleep brings, I'm having trouble seeing why some of the events of the last two days had me so agitated. The insights, such as they are, look something like this (in no particular order) -
- My parents live in the old house on the property that used to be the grandparents' place. It was built in the 1920s, and in about 1998-9 a really nice sunroom was added to it. The trouble is that the house is falling to bits in a lot of places. The aforesaid sunroom now has a big blackened, cracked-through patch with what looks like a water leak and a bunch of cypress needles coming through. A lot of the wall plaster is splitting into its component sheets so some of the walls now have dirty great cracks in them. A couple of the bedrooms are now essentially storagerooms where junk and odds and ends are piled up, and the main passageway is incredibly cluttered - about 2/3 of its width is taken up by shelves and boxes and bits and pieces. The house itself smells of smoke and dust and dead cypress needles and insufficient ventilation. Honest to God: I was weirdly glad Joni and the girls weren't there. I don't have many problems with allergies or sensitivities, but by about 1am on the night I slept there my face was very hot and I was rubbing saliva in my eyes to take the burn out of them. Poor Joni would have been miserable, because she has rotten allergies, and the girls would have been at the least uncomfortable. This situation just needled me for some reason. Maybe I was just thinking: Why are you making yourselves live like this?
- My little sister's boyfriend really does seem to have become Dad's kind of "resident best friend" with tincture of "son he never had". I should be more upset about this than I am. Without any false bravado, I just don't seem to be troubled by this, unless I wanted something to be troubled by. In the cold light of day it doesn't seem to worry me much or at all.
- Listening to my family speak, especially Dad recounting the many old and timeworn stories that have been told many times before, and hearing Mum speak utilizing the lines from umpteen movies that have become part of her vocabulary, I began to realise what a monumentally fucking trying person I must be to live with. God alone knows how Joni puts up with it without stabbing me in the throat with a breadknife.
- There isn't a single photo of the girls anywhere in the house down there. None, not one, on public display. I'm saddened but not in the least surprised.
- I think Joni was right when she thought that Mum wishes I hadn't married her. I just didn't think this to be so, but looking at it now I think it's probably the case. I do happen to know that Mum had no intention of going to our wedding until the second-oldest sister bailed her up and insisted. And ever since, she's seemed to keep her at arm's length. As with the last point, I'm saddened but no longer surprised.
- Dad and the aforementioned boyfriend have been cutting and rolling hay on the property. This will probably be the last time I'll see that happen on our place. God, the sheer number of summers I spent working on cutting, baling, stacking and transporting hay over the years... But this time, despite it being the likely last time, it just didn't seem to really register with me.
- What really did set me over the edge was when I realised I'd misunderstood the Christmas/skype/presents/kids plan with Joni and I knew I'd let her down again. That really did give me a royal kick in the chest.
As I typed the last seven points, it occurred to me how much I'd really checked out from the dramas and issues of my family of origin. There were things I should have been upset by, so I was dredging up the required emotion. Maybe this is why my older sisters have seemed how they've seemed in the past. The oldest one, because she had gone through the checking out process and become her own woman (out of the four of us, she was always indisputably the most independent), and Jenny because she'd checked out of our family (so to speak), and checked into her husband's family. And me? I guess the signs of having been checked out have been there a long time - a long time indeed. But this becomes discomfiting when you find you're trying to learn how to be a father on the job, but without being able to put yourself into it in the best way because you're still wedded to a view of life (as I've posted about before) in which work is the sole measure of worth and your family is (shamefully) a blind spot. This "checking out" process, then, seems to dovetail nicely with the new view of the world that I've been trying to master as a way of sorting out my other issues, so I guess the best way to respond to it is not to fight it, or even to trouble about it too much, but to let it slip away peacefully, and embrace (re-embrace?) my future with Joni and the girls. Certainly my heart tells me that this is best.
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See you next post.
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