Caution: Whining Ahead

  

For the first 40 years of my life, I clung to the family of my birth.  My parents and sisters were central to my existence.  I married, we bought a home, we acquired pets and jobs and stuff.  We had a life, my husband and I, but it was always in orbit around my parents and family.   I would make little independent forays away for awhile, but I never went very far, and I always snapped back to them, like steel to a magnet.  When they moved away from me, I followed them. 

Then, all at once, I was exiled from the center of my family.  Following my dad’s death, in the midst of complicated issues of guilt, grief, and control, my mother and sisters pushed me away, turned their backs on me and marginalized me to the point that it was too painful to remain in physical proximity to the family of which I was no longer a cherished member.  So I packed up husband, dog and cats and moved away.  Only 120 miles away, but more away—physically and emotionally—than I had ever been from the roots of my existence. 

And I stayed away for eighteen years.

Mostly, I developed a tough skin.  I learned how to get along on my own.  I figured out how to extract joy from life by broadening my horizons with solitary activities.  (And I ran a restaurant that ate five years of my life.) I learned how to be without my family.  It’s not that we didn’t visit, spend times together, heal our relationship some over that 18 years.  But the relationship we’ve cobbled together with the broken pieces is vastly different from the one that was my life and breath 25 years ago, before Dad died and our world changed forever.  

I am actually mostly okay with that.  I suppose the umbilical had to be cut sometime, and maybe the reason it was so painful when it was cut was that I had waited far too long to do the deed…waited, in fact, until it was cut for me.  And that was not destined to be a smooth transition.   

Three years ago, I got sick of the redneck world we had moved to, tired of living so far away from the place we had chosen as home when we left actual home, and a little paranoid about what our choices were going to be, with retirement roaring up on us like a freight train.  Some stubborn, residual attachment planted deep in my brain insisted that family still meant comfort and safety.  So we “downsized” back to Eugene, back to the land of my sisters, for better or worse.

I don’t think I had any lofty expectations about how this was going to affect our relationship.  I guess I hoped it would bring us closer.  I guess I was just tired of being so alone all the time, and any scraps of companionship I could scrape together would be better than the solitary existence that had become so colorless and lonely.  And for the most part, that’s how it has played out.  And it’s okay.  Good enough, anyway.  My life is certainly far superior to what it was, even taking into consideration the last two pandemic-ridden years.

But the reason I’m writing this, the thing I’ve come to notice more and more, is that, when I’m with the sisters, I’m…invisible.  I don’t much get a word in edgewise.  My “problems” are not problems to them, because each of them seems to have life challenges that are so much more difficult than mine.  To them, I come from a place that is solid (in that I have a successful 45-year marriage to a man who is actually a reasonable human being) and secure (we have a home with no mortgage payments, make enough money to pay the bills and have a little left over.)  So my role it so sit and smile and give no input when conversation drifts to life’s difficulties.  Okay. 

However, if I DO try to add my voice, or relate a story that I believe contributes to the conversation, they talk over me as if I haven’t even opened my mouth.

THAT bugs the shit out of me.  I find myself pulling back and avoiding spending too much time among the sisters.  A situation I had hoped I would not have to navigate any more.  But there it is.

And it sucks, because I just can’t seem to reconcile myself to doing things by myself again. 

Shopping alone isn’t any fun.  It never was, but I did it and told myself it was fine.  Going out for little picnics and little photo-shoots and drives/walk out in nature by myself is just…lonely.  I could do that, and I have.  It’s obviously better than not going at all.  But I’m not excited about re-visiting that chapter of my life.

So here I am, destined to pick my way between unfulfilling solitude and companionship that is almost equally unfulfilling.

Bah.  Here we go again.