ramblingsparrow

[ramblingsparrow]

Father-mother, Little Brother

A caring man that worked in the basement of every house we ever lived in. Away, gone, but whimsical caring and present for the fun times. Did you ever understand my pain? Did I ever see yours?

My parents roles are reversed. My mother the breadwinner and primary expectation builder. My father the soft, homebody but not the homemaker.

He made good food, listened to good music, dressed well and painted art for the house. But did we ever connect beyond the ephemeral? Beyond the superficiality of art, jam sessions and providing you with another play mate?

I understood the affair. I understood how you could love another person, I could even understand how you fell out of love with my mother. But the longer the roller coaster got, the more I wondered: was this an elaborate stringing along.

That you held on to save face, yourself, but not the truth? That instead of being yourself and executing an inevitability, you held us all in your hand to placate your own fear of abandonment. That you subverting your love, was actually more of a hostage situation than an act of self actualization. That the other shoe could drop.

Now imagine this below the surface, while you smile so nicely at me. You touch my shoulder though we haven't had a real conversation in years. You being sad I can't be around you, that I am not over it and in place of contempt there is a transendant love.

What small thing you ask for Little Brother.

What simple thing you think it is.

When you look back to a time when I was an infant. A small ball of dimples and memory-less, primodial selfhood. When you looked down at this creature you felt so sacredly attached to that by sheer instinct laughed at your smile and cooed at your touch.

We are far removed from those moments now.

You made a choice.

You hurt my mother deeply.

You shook the foundation of our home.

And you expect me to look at you, smile. Accept your touch and kiss your cheek and tell you that you didn't rattle everything. You expect me to want those smiles, those embraces, to have consented to them? And in our own family way, I bend. Because kindness is key. Because truly yuu want to move forward and move on to this ethereal idealized future of happiness. You don't want me as I am. You can't hold it, because it will break you Little Brother. My rage, my annoyance, my resentment. You'd like me

To forget, to not feel my grief.

To accept your artwork like a loving grandmother and praise you for your easy little life. While the rest of us struggle and fight and have nothing left to be but fatherless adults while you act the child.

I do not trust you and I do not feel seen by you.

I do not want to be seen. I do not trust you with how I feel, will it resolve anything? Will you be able to handle it? Will you be able to metabolize it without defence, can you be a father to ME. help me understand my feelings and how to digest them?

All of these things I live through and you do not.

Your ask for closeness is not small, it is my feelings I must swallow. Those are my dinners and $200 counselling sessions and evenings and saturday afternoons you ask for your own superficial glee in familial connection, while I drown, attempting to mask all the things I need to for the sake of politeness.

Am I to wade through those waters with all my burdens while you smile mindlessly on the shore? For what?

To have the kindness to genuinely praise your painting?

Little Brother, you are not my father. You are a desperate child in search of love from a girl you don't even know. So what should the girl do? Why should she wade?

[ramblingsparrow]

Second best

Growing up I was always compared to my sister. She was smarter, faster, got on with the cool kids.

I couldn't do those things without overcoming who I was. She made it look easy.

When we became adults she told me once that she always cheated. I still ocilaate between the time before she told me that and the after-time. When I resented her for being everything I seemingly couldn't be and realizing that she too was under the thumb of expectation.

My mother use to say that she never did well. It was her way of saying that I just had to do better than her, not excel. But this never made me feel better. Because by the time she told me this, I already had it ingrained in me that I wasn't enough on my own. That in order to be good, strife was involved. If there wasn't effort and a perfect score there wasn't value.

So, when I moved away and went to college and gave it everything I had and all I got were crickets or heartborken phone calls about family betrayal, I felt abandoned. Why did I do all that work if you actually didn't care? Why try if even that strife didn't count for any love. Any consistency.

So, I learned how to do it on my own in my very maladapted half-adult way. I never learned how to be clean, or how to do the laundry right, how to do my makeup, how to do my hair properly and became addicted to other things than your approval.

And suddenly home. Suddenly my own life was over and you wanted all the same access. All the same love all the same authority. By what right? I'm doing it on my own now. We don't have that relationship any more. I am no longer an extension of your unwatered garden or your untrained dogs. I am a garden who must water herself, a dog that must train herself to move forward.

Because any time you ask me to rely on you, feels like a lie. A trapdoor of care that at any moment in your own rocky life could crash open. or even crack. Every broken arm, every friend or family member that needs you instead of me. Instead of even you.

You were my mother, yes. You prioritized me at one point sure. But as the oldest of four, I wonder if this feeling of falling down the list didn't start very early. Where I was the side kick of care, not the child. And once I was out of sight, I was out of mind.

We've rehashed this so many time, I don't even think it is helpful any more. I know as a mother you bare more pain than I know about our lost and rollercoasterish relationship.

I don't want to be your child becaue I cant trust you to be my mother.

[ramblingsparrow]

When did it start?

Chamber,

To awake one morning and realize that life was living at arms length.

That your breath was filtering through liminal space.

A laugh, a tear, an early morning yawn all diffused in the fog and distance of a teenaged mind.

Wading in the cinema seat to your own life.

When did the present start feeling so heavily wrapped?

Like the sepia-ed film of someone elses life.

Why did it start?

Hormones? Pain? Burnout?

I remember feeling happy once, sad once, tired once and truly feeling it. Even if fleeting. Now?

It is dull, far away. Sometimes the day goes so quickly and I feel like nothing happened. Like the connection has been pulled right out of it.

What point is there in living if you aren't even there?-