Up in the Air

I’m writing from the sky again, which could possibly be a genre of its own. Thoughts between time zones straddling past lives and current ones. Twelve hours in a car with my baby brother who is eleven years younger than I am, after three days of packing an apartment my mom and dad moved into when I was two years old. We stayed up till 4am three days in a row because I live 3,000 miles away — and now that our mother is gone, I am the only Type A person left in my Family of Origin.

Which is another way of saying that when I arrived last Thursday evening, the contents of the apartment where I grew up were in no way ready to be hauled across the country to their new home Monday morning.

Technically, I guess it’s my amended/blended Family of Origin. My brother and I have the same mom, different dads. His dad is my stepdad, the man my mother met when I was seven, and married when I was eight. I have always called my brother my brother, though.

He’s not looking too sure about this cake.

My mother and father are gone, though very much alive in my mind. I found a letter my dad wrote to my mom as I was cleaning out the desk where she used to sit and pay the bills — and another he wrote to her mother, my Nanny, when my parents were entangled and he was trying to plead his case. I say “entangled” because he was married with two teenagers when he met my mother, and she was twenty years his junior.

There were other issues, too, not that there needed to be more — additional reasons my Nanny would not have wanted her beloved daughter to go down this particular path — but my dad made an impressive effort to acknowledge every one of those objections and concerns by naming them and admitting to them openly. I almost didn’t recognize the man. It made me think he genuinely loved my mother, that he could not face living without her, even if it meant hurting his wife and kids. His wife had polio, just to add a little extra horror to the mix. His teenage kids still needed him. He said as much.

How do you hurt all those people and ask the mother of the nineteen-year-old you then go on to marry to extend some kind of faith in you — and then turn around and hurt her daughter, too, because you can’t keep your dick in your pants once she’s pregnant? With me.

I mean it honestly. Is it that fucking hard to just not stick your dick in someone else? I guess I must be furious. I’ve been packing and unpacking for six days straight and have slept about three hours each night, so I didn’t know that until now, sitting in this gigantic bus flying over the continental United States. He broke something in my mother that never healed, and that fault line went straight through the center of our relationship. Mine and hers, hers and mine.

No wonder she didn’t want my grandma to know her marriage was ending. No wonder she left me at a farm instead of taking me to her brother’s house where I would have felt safe and where I’d been a million times before. I always wondered why she didn’t take me to my aunt and uncle and cousins when she needed to grieve after her mother died and my dad left. My heart hurts writing that. I feel so devastated for my mom. I’m sure she felt ashamed. I wish I could have told her it was my dad’s shame to carry, not hers. He blew up our lives, I didn’t see him for months, and then when I started seeing him again he told me everything was my mother’s fault for being selfish and unwilling to share him. I believed him because I was four.

When I was a little kid, I thought he was the greatest. He loved that I adored him. I guess he didn’t want to muck that up with the inconvenient truth, or maybe by then he wasn’t bothering with it, or it’s possible he couldn’t face himself anymore. I don’t know. I do know he never took responsibility for the pain he caused again. He never said he was sorry when he made a mistake — or even acknowledged it. I guess I can give him credit for one thing — there is no point in saying you’re sorry if you’re going to keep doing the same thing over and over again.

My mom forgave my dad in the last years of her life, though we didn’t know they were the last years at the time. She asked me for his address and said she wanted to send him a letter to that effect. He was ninety-three and living with his fourth wife in North Carolina.

I didn’t share this with her, but I thought he’d probably shake his head and be dismissive of a letter like that, as if there was nothing much for her to forgive after all the grief she’d given him over the years. She hadn’t, that was his version. Things were acrimonious between them when I was growing up, and when I was little it made pick-ups and drop-offs hard and school events awkward.

Having a marvelous time before I came along and ruined everything.

There were screaming matches on the telephone, and I’d find my body at one house or the other feeling like there was lead in my stomach and feet, and not enough strength in my knees — but for the most part my mother kept her feelings about my father to herself when it came to direct conversation with me.

I’m not saying she hid her feelings well, I was not confused, I’m saying compared to the amount of grief she could have given him, or the way I have seen some mothers actively try to turn their children against their fathers, he had nothing to complain about, she never did that. And as the years wore on and I got older, there were fewer reasons for them to interact, and by the time I graduated from college, they could be at events together and be social.

I gave her his address because she asked for it, and not long after she said he’d called and they’d had a nice conversation, and she was glad she’d done that. She said it was a long time ago and she didn’t want him to die thinking she was still angry with him. It was a kind thing to do and I said that.

Then she went and died first.

She forgave him years before she died, but she didn’t forgive me until the bitter end when she was in the ICU unable to speak or swallow or walk. And what was my crime? Being the daughter of the man who broke her, or being the reason he broke her in the first place?

The last year of my dad’s life, while the loss of my mother was fresh and raw and constant, I’d go to the assisted living facility where I’d moved him so I could make sure he was okay and take him to his doctors’ appointments and make sure he had his stock of Motts’ Apple Juice and sculpting clay, he’d sometimes forget the way the dots connected and start talking to me about “the secretary” — not realizing he was talking to me about my mother. She was a secretary when they met.

In the last weeks of his life he had anxiety dreams about her, and would wake up distressed, wondering where she was. Maybe there’s something in here about cleaning up the messes we make while we’re lucid and while there’s time, or not spending the tiny amount of time we get absolutely destroying people.

I found another letter in that desk, one I wrote to my mom when I was nine, the day after a night I’d made her very angry. I don’t know why she saved it, and I wish she hadn’t. I apologized to her for making a mess. I said I didn’t think she was my maid, I just didn’t think, period. I was stupid and terrible and lazy and she deserved a better child than me, and I would try to be better. It made me cry, reading it. I thought of so many nights when I tried to avoid her fury, backed up against my wall, arms trying to cover my head and face. It made me want to save every kid in the world who pays the price for adults who have lost the thread.

There seem to be so many of them.

One thing that happened over the last week of packing and unpacking a million boxes and driving 738 miles in a U-haul — through a tornado because why stop with just an insane amount of chaos when you can go for full-on Wizard of Oz pandemonium — is I barely had time to look at the news. I still haven’t, I just got back to Los Angeles.

Last I checked we were still at war with Iran and by day 12 it had cost us $16.5 billion. Terrific. But no affordable healthcare for anyone, no free school lunches, Medicaid is gutted, and Social Security will run out in 2037. Now the president wants $200 billion more to fund the military. I don’t believe there have been any Epstein arrests, correct? Still no?

I read that Cesar Chavez turns out to be another man who abused girls and women. And I saw a clip of the president making a joke about Pearl Harbor to the prime minister of Japan in the Oval Office. The expression on her face is every one of us. Honestly, I’d rather pack and unpack a million more boxes than immerse myself in this timeline. I wish I could pull those of us who feel the same way onto a different one. I know there are people who say this is the one we’re on. This is the work. It’s true, this is it. I guess the question is how we forge a better path.

I am aware the only thing I can control is what I do. I can’t control what other people do, or how they feel or what they want. I know this is impressive, but it only took me eleventy gajillion tries to figure that out. I make an effort to extend the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, and do my best not to take things personally. When people make outrageous choices — like the man who called his wife and put her on speakerphone at full volume to have a lengthy conversation as we taxied down the runway today — I attempt curiosity instead of contempt, and think about what kind of story I’d write about a person who would do something like that, even if it is absolutely bonkers. Sir, this is not a Wendy’s.

I don’t keep lists in my head of ways I’ve been wronged, and I don’t have close people in my life who do, because it’s exhausting. I forgive easily whenever possible because life is too short, and I also make mistakes. I always appreciate a little grace. But I have not figured out how to forgive people who hurt children, or any of the most vulnerable members of our community — especially when it seems as though they take pleasure in it.

There’s a point where forgiveness can be interpreted as permission or complicity, and I will rage against that machine until my dying breath. I’ll do it from the air and from the land, from the oceans, or whilst flying over them. I’ll rage until the cows come home, because rage is good fuel, and all children deserve to feel safe and loved in this world.

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