Family

So that is my mother.  Beautiful.  Young and vibrant.  Yet, she had such a dark past.  She was beaten by a drunken aunt underneath a kitchen table once.  I recall a big fight we had in high school when she pulled that card….."Well, at least you weren't beaten by your aunt as a child…"  Those were the last words I heard as I stormed out of the house as an angry 16-year-old boy.  Can't recall exactly what I was angry about.  Yet, was angry nonetheless.  That is an undercurrent in my family.  Anger.  My sister has a case of it, I have a case of it and it never really seems to subside when you need it to.  But, that is family.  You know each other and you know how it ebbs and flows.  You know when to take a break from eating at each other and you know when to dig in.  Somehow, you just know.

I'm leaving out a picture of my father for a later post.  It's creepy how much I look like him.  Yet, I am very different from my father, but the same in ways, I act like him and don't want to die like him….heart attack with newspaper in hand (I still get the daily paper, subscribed, and never thought about that until now), and found in between the front door and the main door of his house.  I'm leaving out his photo for now because I'm at the point where I remind myself too much of him.  Everyone loved him except for his wife, my mom.  Yet, they were 16 years in the marriage wormhole.  My father punched a huge hole in the wall when my mother spoke of leaving him.  Never thought she would, I guess.

And this is me, just a little over a year ago.  Happy as a lark.  Really, really happy.  Yet, this darkness crept in.  Could that be my father?  My mother's father running through my veins (he straight up abandoned her after she was born)?  Could it be our inability to make a child when everyone else around was able to do so?  Could it be drinking too much?   These are the questions that swirl and swirl, tilt and whirl around my mind when I get to the concept of family.  I keep on swinging back to the idea that my family was too fucked up to let me experience one of my own.  That, in a weird way, or not weird at all, I'm not supposed to plant a seed in this world.  My family's soil is too tainted, the earth too broken in our veins of life, to make anything grow.  And with that idea, I will crash.  Wondering what exactly it is that makes me fail at being a father I'm not even allowed to be, a husband who can't even be given the chance to work on his faults.

My definition of family is not what it is supposed to be.  It is defined as temporary and that……..sucks.