I think by the time you’re fifty, you’ve made some solid decisions about your preferences.
You’ve decided, for example, whether you want a book of matches in every room in the house, or if that was just your candle phase.
You’ve decided if you prefer a four-wheel drive car in the snow, or you feel studs are the way to go.
Vegetarian or meat-eater.
Coffee or tea.
Positive or negative.
I’m surprised at the things I’ve settled on, and the things that are still up for grabs. I recently took the Enneagram (ONES!!) and realize that many of my unique quirks are actually shared by millions of people. I found this alternately relieving and disappointing. Mostly relieving because my oddities feel so odd.
So aspects related to how I handle stress, what I focus on for work, how I relate to people, those things come strongly through the Enneagram types.
Other things related more to my house and how I dress, things I like to do to relax, etc., those feel like the random things that I’ve settled and settling on. They are things that have surprised me and surprised at the strength of my opinions.
It’s a trip to be a human.
*****
One of the things I wonder about sometimes… especially as I reflect on Mary Oliver’s death and some of her comments in her rare interviews.
Is this the life I was supposed to live?
I wonder if anyone else thinks that.
She was abused and traumatized in childhood. She essentially escaped into herself and out into the outdoors. She never was completely comfortable being inside homes and buildings. She always wanted to be out, to escape.
I’m pretty sure she wasn’t meant to not feel comfortable inside.
Maybe she would have been drawn to nature anyhow. Millions of people who aren’t traumatized are.
Maybe her experience with nature would have been different, less intense. Who really knows?
I guess that’s what I mean. It’s a fascinating concept. The person I married, how and when we had kids, my occupations, the business partners we selected, how I spend my free time. What was me and what is the traumatized me? I’ve wondered about this a long, long time.
In the end, I’ve decided that I get as healthy as I can and live the life that seems to unfold in that version of myself.
I’ve found anything other than that is a bit of envy, longing, despair, backward navel-gazing and reflection.
I’ve put a few photos on my dresser of me before the abuse started. I look at her sometimes. I look in her eyes and see the open happiness and eagerness for life on her face and in her ready smile.
I’m getting back to that, but I’m not there yet.
I’m also older and have experiences under my belt that make being a child again impossible.
If it wasn’t childhood abuse and being in my new nuclear family with people on the spectrum, what else might have happened? I could have been in a debilitating car accident. I might have had to move. Maybe I would have had a stellar career and never married. Maybe I became an Olympic athlete. You can go in literally a million ways with this.
What I’ve realized though, is that to wish away the painful things is to assume a different life would have had none.
See how dangerous it is?
Sometimes, something triggers this thought though, and I have to work through the pieces. It’s okay when that happens. It reminds me to be grateful, to not look too far back, to not assume how lives are layered and work, how energy works.
*****
I keep sorting through all this shit in the basement and our bedroom. It’s getting more spare, but still areas of clutter and confusion.
I keep processing my grandma, especially after finding those slides again. I think of her now as a #survivor. Too bad she wasn’t around for #metoo. She might have felt validated and less the need to hide and be someone other than she was.
No one has traumatic things happen and escapes. You have to do something with that pain. She channeled hers into creativity and focusing on the family.
I have struggled with having those memories be positive. Toward the end of her life, it was clear she had been reclusive. I didn’t realize that until she had passed.
I compare her now sometimes to my other grandma who went in the opposite direction with her pain. She was always outside, always visiting friends and relatives. Her personal life and house was an epic disaster, but she communicated love in unique ways (bringing us fruit and nuts), and she lived her own life, something she hadn’t really done since she got married to a man who was a serial entrepreneur, ahead of his time, unable to fully make a living. Her parents had been the same way, leaving her unable to attend college.
Her final years were spent for herself. She loved all of us, but she desperately needed to be alone, to do her own thing and pursue her own desires. In many ways, I admire her more. I need to get some photos of her up on my wall.
I think these are important things to consider. One grandma spent phenomenally larger amounts of time with me, with us. The other spent shorter chunks in longer stretches, mainly a few weeks every summer and then her visits to our house on holidays. She had a good life it seems. She loved the heat, she loved her family, she loved her orchard, she loved her family. She just had her own life. My paternal grandma did not.
As I now have my own adult children, it seems super important to remember who I want to focus on. My maternal grandmother lived further away, in the middle of the state in Wenatchee. We didn’t see her as much. She enjoyed her own life and pursuits. My paternal grandmother lived in the same town I did. I saw her every week, sometimes more than once.
What are the lies we tell ourselves when there is distance between you and someone you love? You will be forgotten. Your lives will diverge. You can’t be close. You can’t influence that person. Your season of closeness is over. Things can’t change.
When I think of my adult kids, I think more of my maternal grandma, tending her orchard daily, visiting family all over the Eniat and Chelan canyons. I think of her freedom and happiness, and also, her dedication to being around consistently for big family events like birthdays and holidays. She sent cards and made a few things for us. She cooked when we were in town and helped us earn money for the summer ($20/week!)
She was also a hoarder, so her house was absolutely endlessly fascinating. We literally could have spent our entire two-week vacation exploring her small house crammed with papers, letters, old mail, fabric and every imaginable knick-knack and antique. She also had a large doll collection, something I now wonder if it was related to a truncated childhood.
She did not have great relationships with her three adult daughters. My mother was probably the closest to her and possibly only because she put up with her more than the other two. All three married to get out of the house, one moving to California to do so.
These are not fairytale stories, but they’re human stories and they’re stories of my family. They’re stories I can learn from, create art from, draw from, remember. They are the people that helped shape me and my life history.
Conclusion: I had some great grandmas. Both had trauma and were fighting demons. They handled those emotions very, very differently. One gave more time and attention but ultimately pushed me away. The other was not as available but was more true to herself. She’s the one I found the most interesting over time.
I need to remember these truths as I look to my own future and consider how to continue to shape relationships with my kids, their families and myself.
Lastly, it’s weird to be parsing this when I’ve always been one to talk about putting family first. Yeah, it’s weird. I’ve realized there is such a thing as putting family first in an unhealthy way.
There’s obviously helicopter parenting, but then there’s just this idea that you don’t have anything else going on. It feels suffocating for kids I think. It’s felt suffocating for me, to have so many female relatives that didn’t expand their lives beyond their family.
So yeah, interesting stuff.
PS A life of fear is worse than whatever it is you’re fearing