I'm conflicted. I'm worried about my sister. She had a bad test result, and I emailed my mom to see how my sister is doing, but I haven't gotten news, and that was something like two weeks ago. I've been worrying ever since I heard.
I should call. I know I should call. Good daughters call. However, if you know me at all, you know I hate phones, loathe and despise them. I cannot hear through them very well, unless wearing a headset. I cannot recognize voices through them. Without my visual cues, I'm pretty impaired in carrying out a conversation with someone on a personal level. None of this matters to a tech support agent (hey, it's all impersonal and random and done with a headset), but it matters a lot to someone trying to connect with people they love and care about.
Plus there's an added disincentive. I don't want to talk to my brother. Everytime I phone my mother, I wind up speaking to my brother, and the very thought of him is enough to make me so angry that my veins begin to bulge. I love him, but god help me, I want to kill him. Or at least have him abducted and shipped off to a third world nation where he can't do any harm to the other people I love and care about.
Lot of history there.
I've been thinking a lot about my family lately, especially when the talk in my pod turns to holidays and who's taking what holiday off and why. My fearless leader and my stalwart compadre get all boggly that I cheerfully volunteer for any of them, all of them. Hey, my kids aren't with me, and my domestic partner doesn't celebrate. My foreign partner celebrates things I never heard of, but he's farther away even than my kids. So what need have I for a holiday?
"But don't you spend your holidays with your family?" they ask me, and they are both youngish, probably a good five years younger than me, so I figure they are talking about my parents and siblings. No, I don't. I'm out of touch, I'm estranged.
I'm the only kid my parents had together, and they were together a brief time. Over the course of many years, my mom had two more daughters and a son, and my dad had two more daughters.
My dad and I are living proof that the apple don't fall far from the tree. Of all the people I'm related to, he's the only one who understands me, and quite likely vice versa. My dad has a corny sense of humor and an extremely practical outlook on life. He's not unbreakable - I've seen him close to broken before, but he's resilient and he's wise.
My mom and I know what things not to talk about. She doesn't approve of my life, or wouldn't if she allowed herself to think about it any, which she doesn't. She practices the age-old strategy of suspecting but not knowing and keeping it that way. If you ask her about me, probably the words you are going to hear are "smart" and "good with computers" and not much else. My mom also has a corny sense of humor. She also has a hugely loving and generous soul, as well as a literary mind. Plus an immense faith.
My oldest sister is another of my mom's daughters. She's judgmental and narrow-minded and stubbornly ignorant. I love her, but I get so sad because she was really, really smart, when she was a kid. Smarter than I was and twice as charming, but she fell in with stupid people whom, for some reason, she really wanted to impress. And it all went downhill from there. I think she's not speaking to me at the moment because of this journal and her reaction to it. It wasn't pretty.
My brother can't stay out of trouble with the law. He also can't stop abusing members of his family. That's all I'd better say about that. When I can put all the anger away, I get really sad about him, too. He had a talent for making music with anything. He could just walk up to an instrument and just do stuff that sounded good. Before the advent of the electronic keyboard, you used to be able to get an electric organ without too much of an investment, and my mom had one of these. My brother could play it like it was on fire. He also was so saturated with handsomeness and charisma, he could have led anyone anywhere.
My next oldest sister is one of my dad's girls. She's always been beautiful and lighthearted, and doesn't seem to have trouble attracting friends. She's inherited the terrible "out of touch" gene, same as me, and we wind up only calling each other when we need something. But we get on really well, better since my youngest sister died. We both seemed to have learned to appreciate each other more since then.
My youngest living sister makes me worry. Her moods are deep and wild and chaotic. I suspect she's bipolar, or at least suffering from depression, but I don't know how to be of any help. She's so beautiful, I wish I could show you a picture, and she's always been the one who could woo anyone. She can be judgmental and narrow-minded sometimes like her other sister, but it's not on purpose - she really does try to empathize with people. She's a deep feeling person.
My very youngest sister, the other of my dad's daughters, was killed a few years ago at school. She had a lot of energy and joy, but was terribly misunderstood. Other kids were awful to her because of her weight, but she got on top of her life and steered it with a vengeance. I didn't know her very well during the years when she flourished, because I was out of touch, but I hear she had tons of friends and was really successful in school, and that she uplifted people.
Anyway, we have our barriers. They're made of distance and time and, in some cases, resentment and anger. I don't have a lot in common with any of my family members, except for my dad, and it makes it hard to attain some mutual understanding. It doesn't mean I don't love them. It means I never know what to say. I never know what to do, and I am never comfortable, not for an instant.
My mom sometimes says that I'm a Yankee soul that got misdirected on the way to earth. I think she's right.
