While I understand people having a tough time getting their heads around just how thoroughly I irk my sibs, there's nothing better than their own words to underscore my point.
The following is a Feb 1999 e-mail exchange between Mike & Kerry and myself, starting off with me sharing delight that Kerry had mentioned she'd be touching base with Mom, who had scant regular contact with her kids.
Date: Monday, February 8, 1999
Subject: Will let Mom know you're getting in touch
It must be pretty monotonous having John & yours truly the only family members who are in any sort of consistent contact with her. Weeks & weeks go by without a phone call, letter or e-mail from anyone else in the family. Dullsville!
I know you appreciate Mom perhaps more than anyone else in the family, including me. She is an awesome woman with a lot to share and learn from family & friends, something she is more open to and capable of now than ever before. Bravo!
Date: 99-02-09
From: clanlock****** (Kerry Lockhart)
Dear Elsa.
I find your sense of responsibility in this email for your siblings contact with Mom is irksome. I really don't think Mum needs this kind of championing her cause. We received your letter today (snail mail) concerning your insight into the way you have related to Mum in the past. I admired (that) letter's no frills writing style, without all the flowery prose. It sounded sincere.
Mum does demonstrate the characteristic of second guessing people and trying to avoid conflict etc etc. It must be a genetic thing because (others in the family) share the same trait. Elsa, rather than apologise to Mike & co. do use this insight to the best advantage for you and Mum.
Love Kerry
Those two brief e-mails capture my experience with all my sibs to a T. There I was, trying to broaden the contact Mom was having with her other children, which in Feb 1999 was basically zip; there was Kerry, first chastising me for needlessly championing Mom's cause, only to turn around in the next paragraph & confirm her experience of Mom trying to avoid conflict.
Spot on - I wrote & shared the lack of connection with kids she adored because Mom never ever would have, not in a million years. At least not in 1999, a year away from her first Mindwalker1910 e-mail.
I had no intention of apologizing to my sibs for asking them to step up to the plate. Didn't have a clue back then about the referenced insight, still don't.
In 1999, Mom needed regular contact with her children. I think of friends who get together every Saturday morning with their mother, the daughter who has her to after-church lunch every Sunday, the boys who split taking her out to dinner that night. I think of a friend who lives hundreds of miles away who calls her father every Thursday, at the same time.
That's the sort of thing I was looking for, not only for Mom but for me, too. It would have lightened Mom's days, as well as our load.
I am not sharing ancient e-mails as a way to get closure, but to get enlightenment. It helps, looking at them through a lens that's gained a different perspective over the ensuing 17 years, seeking clarity rather than some iffy resolution.
All my life - well into my 50s - was spent immersed & infused with funky family messages that often seemed contradictory, like Kerry rapping my knuckles for championing Mom's cause then admitting in the next paragraph she'd never do that herself. It helps seeing some of them written out. Kerry apparently found what I wrote in the e-mail to be sunny side up bull shit, while the letter - in which I was down on myself about my failures to interact effectively with Mom - was credible.
Maybe others reading them will see them totally differently, maybe they'll experience what Kerry wrote as making sense, that I was the one off base. That would be valuable to hear, too.
What I can say, with complete certainty, is that it feels wondrously liberating, releasing them into cyberspace. To steal a line from You've Got Mail - I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void.
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