Days before my grandma passed in 2010, my mother had the idea to ransack all our old VHS tapes to find home movies they could show her. I was not able to make it to this visit due to my work schedule in radio at the time. My oldest sister had confided in me that one of the tapes prompted my grandma to berate my parents. There was innocuous footage of an infant Eddie locked behind a gate in an empty bedroom (save for a few toys), I guess this irritated the hell out of her and she told them “I hated how you always kept him behind a gate. It never agreed with it, and I wish you had not done that to him.” The remark made me smirk, of all the relatives in my life I felt like she was the only one who understood me, rather why I became the way I did.
Admittedly, isolation has been such a large part of my childhood and young adult life that it had become so normalized that grandma’s last remarks prior to becoming invalid days later didn’t really resonate until I saw her obituary page. All the condolences written were specifically addressed to my mom’s siblings. None were addressed to my parents, or their children. I remember when she passed it felt like…I am not even entitled to mourn her; she does not belong to me. She has not belonged to me since 1998, when we reconnected in 2002/2003 she was already very sick and I made the best of our short-lived reunion. However, if I am being honest? It felt like she died, was resurrected, only to perish a second time on me. That is why 1998 was the crucial year to the story of Charlie and his family. While I certainly don’t want to spoil the ending of my own book to those who have not even read or finished it, 1998 did end with tragedy just not nearly as catastrophic as it did in the book. Rather, it did not end in catastrophe at all for a lot of people…just for one person. I suppose now you could chock it up to collateral damage, but in thinking back to what was lost in 1998? Hyperbole or not, it certainly felt like my childhood was incinerated into cinders while the end of the 90s forced me to figure out what in the hell I had left…really, did I have anything at all? When my dad passed, the familiar feeling of not feeling attached to someone came back when I looked around the room clutching a eulogy in my pocket that I was strong-armed into writing and realized no one was there for my dad or my mom, they were there for myself and my sisters. I guess that is why I had to run away from everyone for two years. When I realized the that my lack of entitlement to my own family was being passed on to my oldest child? It was a cumbersome emotional burden I did not want to pass onto him. Like a curse. In my two years away from anyone and everyone, I raised my oldest and then my second son was born and I couldn’t help but feel this newfound need to protect them so that they would never attend a funeral and feel like a stranger sitting in the church while relatives eulogize and talk about a lifetime they were left out of as they watch their grandparents be buried. I mean no disrespect to my two big sisters, but the three of us are so ruined by this family portrait in the frame when you bought it homogenized fallacy of family, that the three of us have suffered tremendously to navigate the world, ourselves, and really how to keep our kids from being cursed by it. I finally found the scariest story I could think of, and who would have known that it had been coursing through my veins for thirty years. We don’t even know how to love each other, we do…but none of us feels comfortable being demonstrative or really vocal about it. When our father died, everything felt like a cheap P.R. facebook moment to shoehorn us all back into each other’s lives again. Its something our mother tried to engineer this coming Thanksgiving. I am so sick of family being this counterfeit currency that people try to spend on social media or to look good for the people they are terrified of disappointing when they realize…this person does not care about family and probably never did. The three of us deserved better. We did, but nothing can come from how bitter or how disenfranchised we feel. It terrifies me to no end that this book can be read by anyone, or not…frankly its an emotional purgatory to exist in. No one’s family is perfect, and I am sure a lot of people have similar stories. THAT IS THE POINT! God, how fucking great would it feel to be able to read a family like yours or meet someone like you and think…just fucking say everything you ALWAYS wanted to say, scream it out! Be honest for once because you can….you bought into the lies that you indoctrinated to believe and then you woke up and went….where the fuck am I? who am I? Why don’t I look like, feel like, or fucking exist where everyone else outside of this dumpster fire?!?! I guess in all the rambling and digression, is that maybe I don’t have it all figured out but when people have talked to me after reading this or getting an iota of an idea about it…it is so fucking liberating to talk to people who get it. The best part (so far, and maybe that’s as far as it will go) of this book? If my grandma was still alive? I can show her that the blonde boy found his away out from behind the gate…and I know she’d be so proud of him. Then she’d smile and say…that’s my boo-boo baby. So, if I have reached out to you after a million years? If I thank you, if you do or never read this book? This book exists because I did not have a family, and I don’t know conventional love…and maybe that’s the best part. Because this book, myself, and my sons? All of us are a mosaic of every single person who for years, for minutes, for seconds, let me into their lives and actually liked, loved, or got to know me.
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