We really are more normal than we seem

For a few minutes on the plane, Craig and I discussed putting his house up for sale. It's paid for; he could live off the money from it for a couple of years while he gets his feet planted a little more firmly, or if he finds a job it would give him a cushion, something he doesn't feel he has enough of. I get a say in it; his house is the family house, where we grew up, it's supposed to be divided equally between the three of us if ever sold. Craig moved into it when I moved my parents closer to me; it wasn't a wanted move on his part, but our parents didn't want to sell it at the time, and he'd given up his house to his ex. He would have been happy enough in an apartment somewhere, but he had kids, and our parents were more comfortable with the idea that family was living in their house, not tenants.

So we talked about selling it; I have no problem with Craig selling it and keeping the proceeds, but we both assumed our sister would. And that's not laying judgment on her; it's as much hers as it is mine, I just happen to think it's more Craig's than anyone's.

A few minutes into batting the idea around, though, he said he couldn't do it. His best times were spent in that house. Some of his worst, too, but I take it as a good sign that he's focused on the good. For the most part lately he's been looking forward, but with the house he can't help but stay a little bit in the past. He's torn. He doubts he can ever go home again for good, but he wants that option. So in the meantime, he'll pack up what he wants to take, stick the rest in storage, and his youngest will move into the house.

Like our parents, we want family living there, not tenants. And we want family that would respect the property as more than just a place to live; Craig's son will never forget that first and foremost this was the place his grandparents chose to make a home for their kids. One of the first things Craig did when we got here was to ask his son if he would move in; as awful as it is, we wanted that set before our sister got wind of anything. She could make a case for being the one to take over that house, but the truth is that it wouldn't be well cared for. And as screwed up as Craig has been, he took care of our parents' house. Which is why I can think of it as his house now and not theirs; Val might intend to take care of it, but she tends to live on impulse, and we've both seen the results of her impulses. I've spent years mopping up the results of one of her impulses, and I don't think my niece will ever get over it.

So he's packing. He's not finding a lot that he wants to take with him; most of it he thinks he can leave behind--the furniture his son can use--but there are a few things he's wrapping carefully in bubblewrap and setting in boxes. There have been a few things he's thought I might want, but most of that--pictures--we can have copies made. There's one thing, though, that we're surprised to find. Neither of us can figure out why it's still here, and why our mother didn't take it with her when she and Da moved. It was a fixture in our lives, something we took note of frequently, something we were encouraged to touch and to hold, but to always put back exactly where we found it, as we found it, nestled on top of her dresser, leaning against the mirror.

It's a very old, very small toy puppy; if you saw one in a store today you'd think it was a prototype for a Beanie Baby, but this is 52 years old. It's not worn out, but you can tell by looking at it that it's old. Other than the times we picked it up when we were little, it was never really played with, never held tight by little hands. At best, it was cradled in the crook of a baby's arm, or brushed gently against her cheeks. When our parents decided to leave Ireland for the U.S., they didn't bring much with them, other than their kids, but this made the trip wrapped in a soft cloth in our mother's purse, and it's the only thing they had, other than a few pictures, of the daughter they lost at just a few months old.

She was born before either of us; Val was only a year or so old, so none of us have any real memories of her, but that puppy is something we all connect with her. I know our mother was likely terrified that one of us would destroy it, but she desperately wanted us to have some kind of connection to our sister, which is why she allowed us to touch the toy at all. Craig and I are puzzled, though, why it was left behind. He'd seen it every day for a dozen years and never thought much about that; it was where it always was, and he left it there, but now there's this looming why in front of us. He says if he had clued into it, he would have sent it when she died so that she could be buried with it.

Craig realized, too, that the puppy belongs on that dresser, and he doesn't want to leave that behind; his son would respect it, but his grandkids might not. They're good kids, but they are just little kids. He offered it to me, reasoning that I had the space for it, but something tells me he needs it more. He can jam the dresser into his room at TK's, and TK won't mind.

He keeps trying to argue the point, but when it comes right down to it, for all these years he's basically cared for our parents' most bitter but very treasured memory, and that might be intentional. When they first moved, I think they expected to eventually go home; Craig was moving in and would watch the house, but I wonder, too, if our mother hadn't fully intended for him to be the one to care for her daughter's only material possession. I wonder if she hoped some kind of stronger connection would develop for him. Or knowing her, hoped that her Angelica (not her name, but what she was called all the time) would become Craig's guardian angel.

Our mother believed in saints and angels, and I wouldn't be the least but surprised if somewhere in the back of her mind was the idea that somehow her lost baby could be Craig's guiding force.

I don't think she could have ever accepted that the specter of the sister we never knew may have played a part in his tendency toward self destruction. It's something we've been talking about, though, the unspoken expectations of being raised in the shadow of someone who never had the chance to be anything other than the perfection that she surely was.

There's definitely a lot to wade through when he gets back. I'm heading home tomorrow, with assurances from all his kids that they'll stand guard between Craig and Val (who is pissed beyond pissed that she wasn't told what was happening. I get that, but in this Craig comes first.) I had lunch with her yesterday, and she still doesn't grasp her role in keeping Craig a functional drunk, and still doesn't get why he can't handle just one drink or how even being around it can unravel everything he's managed to do to get even a toehold on recovery. Still, she was glad to see me, something I didn't really expect.

You know, we all had a perfectly normal childhood. Our parents were as good as parents get. It makes one wonder how the hell we all got so screwed up, because it really wasn't anything they did or didn't do.

(this one was written with some Thumpa-help, to be honest.)

The oldest two have been grounded this week; while arguing is not forbidden here, getting physical is, and I walked in just as Rachel tried to kick Alex in the groin and as he blocked the kick and shoved her back. I don't care what the fight was about; I care that they struck out at each other. So their first week of summer vacation was spent grounded.

They were pissed off for the first day, but settled into the fact that they weren't going anywhere they wanted to go and they weren't texting, emailing, or talking on Facebook with their friends. They each got one text to let Stephanie and Seth know that they would be out of touch for the week, but that was it. The only way out of the house was with a parent, and any incoming phone calls resulted in Char or me taking messages.

I have to admit, they were pretty well behaved for a couple of grounded teens, and the level of drama in this house was fairly low for the entire week. But with the sheer amount of time that they had, without the distractions for friends and homework, when boredom set in they started paying attention to their parents, and they started asking questions.

Several nights ago Kevin spent the night with Brad, and the other two decided they wanted to play board games with us. Scrabble. I don't relish this game with Alex, because he wins every time I wind up feeling a little bit stupid for the difference in his and my vocabulary. That night was no different; he played the board like a master and created words that I was sure were made up but weren't.

On the other hand, I know I'm going to lose to him, so I tend to relax and just let it happen; when I relaxed, so do the kids, and they start talking. We got to hear about that last week of school, the fun injected into classes after the exams were over, and the friends who wouldn't be returning to school next year because they were either moving or transferring to public schools.

Eventually, they wanted to know about the friends we had when we were growing up. Were we still friends? Did we keep in touch? And since then I've been thinking a lot about high school and the people who mattered.

The reality is that I only keep in touch with one person from my youth. There would be two, but the person I connected with the strongest, and who was my best friend from eighth grade on, died when I was 20 years old. For a long time I was sure that my first born son would be named after him, until the time came to actually ponder baby names and the only other person from those days convinced me he would have hated that.

Anyway, the kids wanted to know about him. What he was like, why we were friends. Did I think we would still be friends even today? Would they have liked him? Did I still miss him?

Yes.

Truth be told, it's not as if I think about him every day. I still miss him, but it's been 29 years and the pain of losing my best friend has faded from sharp to wistful. I don't doubt that we would still be friends today; I strongly suspect that he would have followed the same paths I took in life, although he came weighed down with a lot more baggage.

As the kids picked my brain about him, I realized that his life was a good lesson for them. He represents the sharp divide between having been loved and searching for love. He was adrift in his own family, virtually abandoned to raising himself, and because of it, he made choices that he otherwise wouldn't have.

In intellect, Alex reminds me a lot of him. By our junior year he was emancipated from his parents and living in the dorms at a local university, having graduated early. But he ached for family, and what he couldn't have by right, he tried to create. When he was sixteen, newly emancipated, he got his sometimes-girlfriend pregnant, and in trying to do what was right, he married her.

Yeah, at sixteen.

He wasn't in love, but he wasn't going to walk away from his child, not after having been left behind by his own parents. But he was just sixteen, and struggled. He dropped out of school and scrambled for jobs that didn't pay enough for rent let alone food for his new family. He lived on adrenaline and the generosity of his friends' parents.

Even so, he had a future. He hit bottom and was climbing his way back up with a job that gave some relief, and after the birth of his son he was offered a scholarship. There was hope.

And then there was a horrific car wreck that ripped his family from him. Where he wasn't in love when he got married, he did love his young wife, and his son was like breath to him. He was seventeen years old, and lost everything.

He could have given up, but after nearly a year of agony, during which he had hidden himself away from life so well that we all really did think he'd gone off somewhere to die, he resurfaced, determined to live. He still wanted what he had been cheated out of twice, he wanted a family. He wanted to grow up more, finish school, get the golden job, and then find someone.

When I started college, he transferred and had stepped onto that path with me; we had the same terms to our scholarships and the promise of post-college emoployment. By my sophomore year, his junior, he had solid plans. He knew what he wanted, and he was pretty sure how he wanted to get it. And an idea of with whom.

We were nineteen, and we had everything to look forward to.

He was nineteen, and he felt a lump. And he ignored it. He never mentioned it to anyone, not until it was of a size that was so uncomfortable that he had to tell someone. He went to my father first, and didn't fight it when my mother dragged him off to see a doctor.

Nineteen. He'd been abandoned by his parents, married, fathered a child, been widowed and had his son ripped from his life, and he was suddenly looking at a diagnosis that gave him only six more months to live.

If he had paid attention to that lump and asked for help early on, he would probably be alive today, because even then testicular cancer had a high cure rate.

I do think of him often enough that the unfairness of his life stings; He died when he was just twenty, and his son should have been three and a half. But I also don't think of him often enough that when I do, I feel a little guilty. He wanted what I have; he deserved what I have.

None of that even comes close to saying why we were friends, and the kids are still picking my brain about him, looking for stories about why we were friends and what we did to get into trouble together.

But where things fell short for him, that's what I've been thinking about.

I want the kids to grasp how much promise he had, and how a few bad choices made getting anywhere hard as hell, and I want them to see how hard it was for him to get to the few places he was able, and how horribly things can go wrong. Because when you're sixteen and you crave love that badly, you just don't see how anything can go wrong.

The kids are, understandably, curious about the family members they've either never met or simply don't remember. They know I am irretrievably irritated with my brother and will probably never have a healthy relationship with him, and they understand why I've all but written off my sister.

Erin is a frequent reminder of my sister's overwhelming parental failures and her innate selfishness. Still, Erin does not mind talking about her mother, and she can answer questions the kids have that I either can't or won't. She's shown pictures of her mother to them, and they can all see the resemblance my sister had to our father, and they can see her in Erin.

Char was digging through photos today, and Kevin expressed a curiosity about my brother. Who did he look like? What color is his hair? Is he tall like Dad or short like Grandpa was? Char flipped through old photo albums looking for pictures to show him, and couldn't find any.

I had pictures; in our early 20s he and I took a trip to Ireland and I had pictures from that. I remember scanning a few when Alex was a baby. Yet somewhere along the way, either accidentally or intentionally, I've lost them.

I'm so far from being his biggest fan the idea is a joke, but it still bothers me that I don't have a single picture of my only brother.

I could ask him for one, but that would require giving him my address, and frankly, that's never going to happen.

Holiday lessons learned:

• People do not accept the explanation Ummm...Santa must have thought I had a cold when they find out you got menthol cough drops in your stocking.
  
• There is no explanation for the cough drops that you can give your oldest son, nor your father-in-law, that sounds believeable.
  
• When there are ten other people in the house, you are not alone with your wife even when you think you are alone.
  
• Next time, wear looser sweatpants.
  
• My father-in-law can actually sputter.
  
• The right gift can make my wife cry.
  
• World of Warcraft costs money every month, not just for the software itself.
  
• Waddling pregnant women still make me laugh.
  
• I really should have told Nika that Stoner can open the refrigerator, and meat left on the lowest shelf is fair game.
  
• Half a ham split between two dogs makes for a very Merry Christmas for them.
  
• Happiness is a surprise new template from an old friend.
  

Nika stayed the night, and was available to drive Char to pick the kids up from school; it gave me the entire day to deal with sorting through my dad's things and deciding what to keep for the kids for later, what to donate, and what will wind up in the eventual estate sale (though I don't know if it's technically an estate sale, but it's close enough that's what it feels like.) After six hours of dealing with it I went to the dojang and taught two classes and then headed home; I opened the door and Rachel was curled up on the sofa doing homework, and Alex was on the floor playing with Kevin, snapping Lego blocks together. I could hear Char and Nika in the kitchen and the smell of what they were cooking hit me at the same time all the laughter did.

That sound held me in place until Stoner and Tank ran at me and the kids noticed I was home. I don't think in all the years Char and I have been married that I've done the stereotypical Dad coming home after work thing, with Mom in the kitchen cooking dinner for everyone (it counts even if she had considerable help from her sister) and the kids sprawled out in the living room. It's always been picking the kids up from school, taking them to the dojang, then scrounging dinner for them while they try to cram homework in before bed. What was playing out in front of me was what Char and I wanted all those years ago when we realized we were going to become parents and we had everything we wanted at our fingertips. I'm not sure how we wandered away from that, but we've got it back and we don't have enough years left to give that to our kids. But at least we have it for now, and I'll be damned if I'll let go of it now.

I think Ian forgets sometimes that we grew up in completely different worlds. In his world your parents were married to each other and your siblings were a matched set, but in mine, your parents might have not even known each other’s names, and you might have three brothers and sisters with different fathers. He grew up in suburbia and I, quite frankly, did not.

Intellectually he knows that Nika and I have different mothers, but that tends to slip his mind. My mother was white, hers was not. My mother left when I was a toddler, hers stayed until drug addiction won out. We both have that ugly scar of having mothers that left, but we had different experiences growing up, even in the same neighborhood. I was uncomfortable enough that I left the first chance I had, and I think she took that as a betrayal. She fit in where I did not and it was hard for her to understand that everyone we knew looked at me and saw my mother. Someone who thought she was too good to live in the neighborhood (my father thinks it wasn’t that, really, but people will decide what they decide, and the people around us decided she thought she was too good for us.) It never helped that I look more Hispanic than biracial, and in that particular neighborhood, that was borderline dangerous.

All of Nika’s anger aimed at anyone white was a product of environment, not of how we were raised. My father was stuck where he was at, but to him people were always just people, and when he I told him I was marrying Ian his only reaction was “that boy better treat you right.” I never heard anything remotely close to disappointment that I wasn’t just marrying a white boy, but one that was so white he damn near glowed in the dark.

Nika was only 16 and already angry and confused as it was. I’d left her behind when she was barely eleven years old, and somehow in her head I left because I was going to be with white people. I left for the money white people had, I left because I wanted to be with people like my mother, I left because I wanted to be white, and marrying Ian sealed the idea in her head. My friends were white (in her head), my husband was white, my life was white, and obviously I didn’t think “my people” were good enough. When my dad decided to move here, she took that as another betrayal. I don’t blame her for it because I can understand how it felt to her. She was headed for college (which was amazing to say the least) and he was supposed to stay home, and keep it as home.

He didn’t have any reason to stay. She left for school, as temporary as that turned out, and the rest of the family he was staying there for either moved on or wound up in jail. But as she saw it, he was being sucked into her big sister’s world of white. Her world had been in a gang controlled neighborhood, and where she heard her big sister called “whitey” every day, and to her that became something to fear, and something to hate. I understood why she was upset when I married Ian, even if he didn’t.

His mental blocks sometimes amuse me. His specialty in psychology is cultural ideologies and differences, but when he’s a part of it, he doesn’t always see it. Nika never hated him, but she hated what he represented to her. When she started wandering the country it didn’t have anything to do with thinking he was The Man, it had more to do with figuring out her place in the world. After all, when your mother abandons you because the drugs are easier and more appealing, what does that say about you? How little are you worth to lose out to a crack pipe?

The last time we saw her she had already started to soften towards him, probably because of her nephews and niece, but she still hadn’t found who she was outside of the neighborhood. She didn’t want to go back there for obvious reasons, and because she believed our dad when he told her she was better than anything she would ever amount to living there, but she just didn’t know who she was. Our dad could have held her in place and made her stay with him here, but he was smart enough to let her go. I know it hurt him, especially when so many years went by not knowing where she was.

Six months after the last time we saw her she got involved with a missionary church. She says she’d been afraid it was a cult, but they were going to Peru, so she didn’t care because she was going to get to see the real world, not something “artificial” created by a bunch of rich white men. The missionary work turned out to be real, and it was hard, and as she moved from Peru to Brazil, then to Haiti, and then to Africa, she realized the “real” world was not a pretty place.

Now she’s back and plans on staying put while she goes back to school, and she brought Peter with her. He almost glows in the dark. ;) He was born in Johannesburg, but has lived in the US off and on most of his life and was naturalized in his twenties. This tickles my dad, because Peter is now the whitest African American he’s ever met (don’t ever call my dad an African American, he’ll get very annoyed and point out that he’s never even been to Africa.) Peter is friendly and funny, but most important, he wasn’t afraid of my dad at first sight, which tends to happen a lot.

I missed Nika while she was gone, and I was angry about it when I stopped to think about how long it had been since we’d heard from her, but it’s hard to stay mad after seeing how much she’s grown and how wonderful a person she is. I want to feel selfish and just be happy that I have my sister back, but I think what might be more important is that my dad has his baby back, and I don’t think he thought he would ever see her again. I can’t imagine being that distant from my kids, I know it was killing him.

If any of my kids ever take off like that, I think I’ll let Ian hunt them down. Sometimes I wish I had let him look for Nika, but seeing her now I think it would have been a mistake. I'm just happy she's here.

It’s no secret that I don’t have the best relationship with my siblings. My brother is a farking idiot and my sister is lacking a most of her common sense genes. As my kids have grown older I’ve moved further away from them emotionally; the final straw was when Erin landed on my front step because she might be pregnant (I admit, my temper slammed the door shut with my sister when I pointed out how old she’d been when she got pregnant with Erin’s brother. Pot, kettle, you know.) Every family has a few odd ones, but I didn’t want my kids to grow up surrounded by their particular kind of crazy.

Char had a fairly close relationship with her sister until she moved across the country to take a job post high school; T’neeka (or Taniqua, tn’nika, or any of a dozen other names; it depended on her mood any given day) was not happy that her big sister was leaving her behind, and she jumped feet first into the pool of teenage you-hate-me angst. When Char married me, T’neeka took it personally; You’re marrying a WHITE boy?

Their mother was/is white, but that didn’t account for much at the time; she was pissed off, and stayed pissed off. She was also trying to “find” herself, and when Brad moved out here to be closer to his grandkids, she took off, thinking she would find what she needed somewhere else. They heard from her here and there, but as weeks and months wore on, her attitude expanded, and she was extremely unforgiving of having been left behind when Char was eighteen and was still angry that Char married “that guy.”

(I am “that guy” to most of Char’s extended family. For most of them, it’s said with amusement.)

Char and Brad never knew where T’neeka was going to be, so keeping track of her became more difficult, and eventually she stopped calling. The last time we can remember hearing from her was when Kevin was just a baby.

Until this morning. Brad called early, before the kids were ready to leave for school. I answered the phone and he asked for Char; this itself is unusual because I usually get one “you bastard” before I hand the phone over, but he didn’t sound upset, so I didn’t press. I just handed the phone to Char. She talked to her dad for a few minutes, her eyes went wide, and then she was squealing.

I left her at home while I took the kids to school, and she spent a couple of hours talking to her little sister. When I got home she told me we were having dinner with T’neeka and Brad, and Theresa would watch the kids. Initially, my stomach rolled; I’d suck it up for my wife and father in law, but having dinner with someone who hates me is not on my to-do list very often. But as morning wore on and Char was still excited, I started to look forward to it, to re-meet the kid (and she was just a kid then) that I think had to force herself to not spit on me before.

I would not have recognized her if she hadn’t walked into the restaurant with Brad. The last time I saw her she was an angry, defiant, bitter person who walked around with her eyebrows practically fused together from the perpetual scowl; the woman who walked in holding her father’s hand was filled with lightness, and when she smiled, I would have recognized it because she has her sister’s smile.

She’s been all over the world since the last time we saw her. She set out to rid the world of white male oppression and instead found herself in third world countries working with the truly oppressed; she’s done everything from teaching basic reading skills to teenagers in South America to helping bring running water to villages in Africa. She’s been out there working her ass off, and working her anger out. Nika (as she’s going by now) grew up.

She’s back in the US, likely for good, and will be living less than three hours away, and she’s getting married next year. She wants to be a part of her family again, and she wants forgiveness for walking away without much of an explanation. Everyone knew why she left in the first place, and now knowing where she’s been and what she’s been doing? Brad missed her and was hurt, but I don’t think he could be prouder of the way she went about finding out who she was outside of the neighborhood where she and Char grew up.

She wants Brad to give her away when she gets married next year.

To a white guy.

I did not laugh.