Today is my sister, Mim's, birthday. She would have been 72. Throughout the day, have found my thoughts turning to what remains of my family - me, my two brothers, my sister-in-law, nieces & their husbands & daughters, a married nephew & one who's single.
Still feel my heart wince, remembering that the only one who reached out - beyond a Facebook post - when Mim was hospitalized & died, after her memorial tribute, was my niece, Karen. Not a card or a call from the others.
People have a seriously hard time accepting that it's not personal. None of them - even my parents - gave any sign they considered me within the family circle. Not that I realized it, myself. Was pretty clueless for my first 50+ years. I knew that my drawing breath at the same time bugged them, but took forever to realize how much. There I was, acting as if I had a natural, legitimate place in the family, when the folks who mattered knew it wasn't so.
From reading the growing cache of letters recently rediscovered in our houseclearing & cleaning Big Dig, no one seemed more exasperated by my presumptuous presence than my sister-in-law, Kerry.
That AH HA! came out reading the letters as a cohesive unit instead of piecemeal. Their timeline revealed how the emotional explosion of early Summer 1997 was a cascade of KABOOM! reactions of long-buried issues, triggered by actions I innocently set in motion.
Suffice it to say, the situation involved money - never a good thing to mess around with & all too easy mess up. It involved money & a series of unfortunate events worthy of Lemony Snicket.
An unfortunate series of events that I bungled. It mattered not one whit that I had only the best intentions, that I truly truly truly wanted to do what seemed fair for everyone, including me & mine. Looking back, can see in crumpled hindsight that the situation was predestined to blow up in my face and set off a string of long concealed resentments & rancor none of us saw coming.
Yes, I was a total doofus to not realize how much & how long I'd gotten under my sister-in-law's skin, how many grievances she had against me that she'd never brought out into the open, never discussed.
It's been healing, reading over the recently rediscovered letters, seeing how many times she was irked or outraged by me - and never said a peep. Time & time again, she brings up things I did that cut deep - and that she kept silent, buried in her heart.
Our great falling out - and her later falling out with Mom over another stupefying situation - was inevitable. It never dawned on me that what Kerry said about being being addressing sensitive issues could be so much a polar opposite to her deepest feelings.
The collected letters are a blessing from the Universe that surfaced in my life at just the right time, when rethinking family was thrust upon me. It feels like a mitzvah from Mim. Her death could have brought her sibs together, started a healing. Instead, the blessing was in giving me a space to reimagine family.
Am sad that my life experience with Kerry was dogged with not one, but (clearly, from her letters) many unfortunate series of events. Looking over the letters, what she says & how she says it, can see why we'd be at such total communications loggerheads. Maybe someday we will be able to reimagine family in a way that can include the other. Maybe someday she might experience me as less Lemony Snicket, more SARK.
No comments:
Post a Comment