Visiting Grandma

For the last two years, Sundays have been a day for riding with my dad to visit my grandma. At ninety years old, she was finally admitted permanently to a nursing home in August, something she is very unhappy about. Unhappy in that it seems like a convenient way to tuck her away and forget about her. At least that is the impression I get from her whenever she calls me. The last two years have been incredibly hard on her. As a mother of six, she never expected to outlive so many of her own children, but as luck would have it four of her six children are dead and one is lost to her. My dad is her only living son, and though I love my dad very much, he has never been a very emotional kind of person. He doesn't express himself well, when he actually does try to express himself, and that can leave you wondering what's really going on inside his head.

Over a period of about eighteen months, his three older brothers have all died. It started when my Uncle Lee, who lived with and cared for my Grandmother for the last ten years, dying in a tragic car accident. About six months later, my Uncle Ed's condition worsened and at the time they only expected him to live a couple weeks. Uncle Ed was mentally ill and spent quite a good chunk of his adult life in and out of special care facilities. During the last year of his life, I traveled every other week with my dad to visit his brother.

Uncle Ed was an interesting character to say the least. Even up until the end he had a lot of lofty ideas about how he would like to one day work in a bakery making donuts. Our visits, which often consisted of Dad driving around for half an hour so my uncle could smoke about eight cigarettes, were somewhat hard on my dad. I'm not sure if it was because of the pressures going on in his own life, or because my uncle was mentally ill, but I could always tell it was hard on him. Nevertheless, we ventured to the nursing home together on Sundays on see Uncle Ed, sometimes driving him over to visit with Grandma.

He had hepatitis c, and though his body fought it off a lot longer than they originally anticipated, he finally passed away. Not long after that, my Grandma's oldest son, Carl, died from cancer. It was all very hard on her.

Sometimes she calls me to tell me how lonely she is. It breaks my heart that we don't go and see her more often. As I mentioned above, up until this past summer, she was very independent. She worked right up until she was 87 years old, get this... caring for the elderly. She took care of an elderly couple who were twenty years younger than she was. She drove right up until then, but finally her eyesight grew so poor that she was no longer able to see to drive at night, and eventually she didn't feel comfortable driving at all.

I won't lie. There's a part of me that fears growing old sometimes, that fears the inevitable death that claims all of our lives in the end, but it's the great loneliness that comes with being elderly that bothers me the most. She said today while we were visiting her in her small cubicle of space, cut in half to share with a woman she never met until two days ago when the woman moved in... "I guess this is my home now." There was terrible sadness in her voice, as though the realization was too much for her to really wrap her mind around. My dad made light of it by pointing out, "At least you don't have to do a lot of cleaning anymore." She didn't laugh. She would have laughed at that even just six months ago. She just twitched and said, "No, they have people, and they do a good job. They come in and dust and sweep, even underneath everything..."

For the last year she has talked about being depressed, experiencing a sense of tiredness that is so heavy she just doesn't even want to get out of bed. Would this depression be lessened if she got to see her family every day? Sometimes I wonder why we started putting our elders in sterilized homes with other elders so someone else can take care of them. I wonder what happened to the sense of family unity that more or less dictated that the young care for the old. Then I think of all the times I said myself that as much as I love my own mother, I don't think I could care for her when she was old.

It makes me a little sad. This whole blog is very depressing. I won't deny that. But the small ray of light in it all is that even though the weather was bad, I was so happy that I got to see her today. I wish I could see her every day, just so I could make her feel the happiness and sense of family she deserves. Maybe I should take advantage of the fact that Jason isn't working regularly right now and start going to see her by myself once or twice during the week. I hate driving in the city, but she's a good enough reason to do it.

I think one of the reasons I'm so melancholy today is because I'm tired. The aforementioned sleepover from yesterday's blog has me up most of the night and then out of be way earlier than I would have liked. On a positive note, in the quiet this morning while the girls all slept in, I wrote the next chapter in the story I've been working on. That made me very happy. And now, I'm off to do some research for the next chapter, which I hope to at least get started on before bed tonight.

Belated Holiday Greetings & Getting Back on Track

I know it's days after the holiday, but hey, it's still Hanukkah until Monday, so :p. I've been pretty busy with the holidays, cooking, baking, cleaning, entertaining, so I haven't taken much time to update my blog or twitter. I've appeared on facebook and myspace briefly here and there, but that about sums up my online existence outside of working. I did do some fun things for the holidays, including baking sugar cookies and gingerbread men. I made my first yule log this year with an chocolate orange center frosting that is to die for! We spent Solstice at my parents' home, which was pretty nice. My Dad had gone to visit my estranged brother to take my nieces gifts, and when he came home he actually brought photos of the girls with him. Then on the Monday after Solstice, I actually got a card from my brother and his wife with pictures of my nieces. My parents then went on Christmas day to visit them, and according to my mother, the visit went well. One small step for my brother, one giant step for the entire family.

My in-laws came in to visit Christmas day, and since my mother-in-law went crazy years ago (and no one told her...) I expected chaos. Apparently she hasn't been speaking to my sister-in-law, so again, I expected chaos, but it wasn't really bad at all. Dinner went over well (bows gracefully and hands out plates of leftover scalloped pineapple...) and while she tends to exude negativity, she actually wasn't as hard to be around as she usually is. My daughter was spoiled ridiculously by both sides of the family, and all ended well.

Aside from the holidays, the season has been a little slow. I've spent too much time under the weather, which makes it easy to brush off the important things and sink into a state that seems to recycle one illness after the next. I started out with a major bronchial infection back in November that keeps recurring. The doctor I went to is an obvious moron, who hasn't addressed the issue at all, so even as it occasionally seems to recur, I just go about my normal life until it gets so bad that I can't breathe at all. Then I call and go back.

I haven't written much and I haven't kept myself motivated, but it's time to get things back on track. I sat down last night and did some thinking about what I want to do in the coming year. It always comes down to what is most important to me (aside from my family, that is,) and that is writing. I was doing so well for so long, writing 2000 words or more every day the entire time I was juggling college, work and family. Now that I'm finished with school and spending so much time on the computer working every day to make ends meet, I make very little time for writing at all. It's exhausting to sit back down here and try to meet my creative goals. So, I've made a decision that I hope will remedy that. I am going to start writing longhand again and bring the draft to the computer. I wrote in longhand for years, and found that transferring it to the computer or word processor (back in the day before computers...) was a very refreshing process. The process helped me really put the overall idea into perspective and the transfer from one draft to the other strengthened the story as well. I know I have to do something. Writing is all I have ever cared about and wanted. It's time to start proving that again.

I was also considering applying to Wilkes University's MFA in Creative Writing program this summer. It's a two year program and the degree would allow me to teach creative writing to college students and at seminars. It would also provide an insider's look into active publication, something that despite my own attempts to understand, has never become quite clear to me. I am still considering it, as I feel it would motivate me to write under threat of deadline again and give me a slight edge in publishing that I've been looking for. It really couldn't hurt to go through with it. It's a low residency program, so the majority of it takes place from home, and I would only have to appear on campus for 2 ten day seminars a year. I have quite a bit of time to get my application and packet ready, so I'm going to be doing some serious meditating on that.

I was telling Jason this morning that I noticed I tend to feel more spiritually connected this time of year. While some may say, "Well of course, it's Christmas, everyone feels a little more spiritual then..." I am not a Christian and don't celebrate traditionally. We actually celebrate Winter Solstice and go through the holiday motions with my husband's family. I actually think it has more to do with how tough this time of year can be for us financially. The economy is crap now, but for us it feels a little harder. This is the time of year when my husband's job comes to a lull, but it's been in a lull already for the last three years, so instead of lulling it's come to a complete standstill. There have been years I really couldn't understand how we made it through, and so that strengthens my faith a little and makes me feel closer to my spiritual center.

I hope everyone is thinking about the dawn of a new year, making their resolutions now and getting ready to embrace the old one last time before welcoming the new. Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming holiday photos, and expect to see a lot more of me here than has been appearing in recent weeks.

When Families Fall Apart...

It's the holiday season again, the second year that my family has gathered without the presence of my youngest brother, his wife and their two little girls. Truth be told, no one in the family except my dad has actually even seen the youngest of their two girls, who was born last December. As she is opening the presents on her first birthday and exploring this Christmas with a sense of awareness, our family will not be welcome. My brother has not spoken to any of us since last October. He did not even tell his own family that his wife was expecting another baby.

I try not to let it get under my skin, but my brothers and I went through a lot together as children, and I always considered myself to be very close to them. After we were adults, my youngest brother and I grew even closer. He spent a great deal of his time at our apartment after my husband and I got married. He came over to play games with us and have dinner. He brought his girlfriends around. We had a really great relationship. Then he met Tierney, the woman who would one day become his wife.

She and my sister are the same age, about five years younger than my brother. They were in the same grade at school together, and my sister hated her from the start. I, on the other hand, very rarely form an opinion about someone until I meet them myself. Because of her crappy relationship with my sister at school, my brother's wife was afraid to meet our family. She assumed that because my sister and she didn't get along at school that everyone would hate her. That was the first indication that she was a little insecure... So she and my brother dated for nearly a year before she finally found the bravery to come around. Oddly, my mother fell in love with her, but the feeling was never mutual. Tierney obviously harbored a lot of anxiety and insecurity from her relationship with my sister, even after she and my sister set their differences aside and became friends. Tierney always felt like my mom was interfering in her relationship and life, telling her how to live, think, etc... Who knows. Maybe my mom was doing that unconsciously. She's always had a habit of trying to provide solutions to everyone's life, and more often than not she offers that advice without being asked. So began the early tensions between the two of them.

Then while she was pregnant with my niece, my sister began dating Tierney's brother. The four of them became inseparable as far as couples go. After about two years on and off, my sister and her boyfriend broke up and she started seeing someone else. Tierney's brother wasn't ready to let go, so he came over to my parents' home on New Year's Day in 2007, drug my sister out of the basement apartment and basically kicked her down the driveway.

My mother called the police. Within minutes of the police showing up at Tierney's parents' home looking for her brother, they were on the phone to my mother telling her that if she pressed charges she would never see her granddaughter again. My brother told her she would never see him again either. Months later he would tell me that Tierney's brother was his family, and one didn't mess with family, but what about his baby sister? "She got what she deserved..."

I know that my mother and sister aren't perfect. No one is. My brother isn't perfect either. He's got one hell of a temper and a major superiority complex. He's proud and stubborn and will never admit that he is wrong. Two days after my mother apologized to him and tried to make things right, I ran into my brother at the grocery store and he told me that if she would just apologize, he'd let her see her granddaughter again... She had already apologized, but that wasn't good enough for him.

No one in our family talks to him anymore. My dad has sided with my mom, and rightly so. He has always been good when it came to respecting our mother, and he more or less feels like my brother is a lost cause. The thing is, my mother has become a different person since all of this happens. She and I used to talk at least twice a week, but now she will barely even talk for more than a minute if I call her on the phone. The only time she does want to talk to me is in the middle of the night after she's been drinking. Then all she does is cry about how unfair it is that she doesn't even know her own granddaughters.

Now it's coming up on the holidays again. We gather every year at Yule, but last Yule was incredibly depressing. Even though the only people missing were my brother and his wife, it felt so empty. I'm sure this year will be no different.

The worst part is, I miss my brother. He used to be such a good-hearted and loving person, and now any time I've run into him, he seems like someone else. Someone angry, bitter and full of rage. I've tried talking to him, but it always turns into a disagreement about our mother and she deserves.

I very rarely long to go back in time, but sometimes I wish I could go back to the time and place when my brother was still a good person and relive it just so I know I wasn't imagining that time. The worst part is, I used to like my sister-in-law, despite all of her insecurities and paranoid delusions. Now, whenever I think about her it just makes me feel like the Incredible Hulk.

When Your Mother's Curses Come True...

I am the mother of an almost fourteen year old girl. To date, I have been incredibly proud of the young woman she is growing into. She's an individual. She's artistic. She loves to write poetry. She isn't afraid of what anyone says about her or the choices she makes. Overall, she's a pretty good kid.

Why am I complaining? I'm not, but I will tell you this: she has the worst taste in friends. I blame myself. We sheltered her when she was small. We didn't do play dates. She was the firstborn and only grandchild on both sides of the family until she was ten. She didn't go to daycare until she was four. She had very little interaction with other kids until she headed into school.

Right about that same time she started to play with some of the neighborhood kids. All of them were girls. All were within two years of each other's ages. Now my daughter is a Capricorn, and anyone who either is a Capricorn, or knows a lot of Capricorns can tell you that they are headstrong, powerful, influential and even a bit bossy. No offense. Bossiness can be a great asset. Maybe one day she'll be a world leader. THe thing is, when she would play with other kids that side of her always got overpowered. She felt insecure and unsure of herself around them, so a lot of the time she got bullied.

In first grade she asked to invite her first friend over. This girl was the epitome of nasty. She refused to talk to my daughter for an hour while she was at our home because my daughter didn't want to swing on the swingset anymore. They quickly became BFFs All through elementary school my daughter and this little nightmare were friends. Then we bought a house and moved away the summer before sixth grade. That limited how much time they could spend together and my daughter started to hang out with another girl that was friends with both her and the evil girl.

For her twelfth birthday party my daughter decided to have a big slumber party since she had a much bigger room than in our apartment. She invited 9 girls to the party and 6 of them spent he night afterwards. At three o'clock in the morning I woke up because my daughter was in her bedroom crying over something the evil girl said.

That ended their friendship. This gave her more time to focus on the other girl. For the most part she seemed nice. She was a little shy, but she and my daughter had a lot of musical favorites in common and they both liked to stand out in a crowd. The thing is, this girl was really needy. She liked to try and control my daughter so her focus was always on them. Typical teenage friendship, but this girl has taken a turn for the worse in recent days. She's actually 8 months younger than my daughter and just turned thirteen. She's got a boyfriend that she's been talking about having sex with. She's been smoking pot. Today she was expelled from school for having cigarettes in her backpack.

My daughter wouldn't tell me why the girl was suspended because, and I quote, "You won't let me hang out with her anymore."

Well duh. Seriously, the last thing I want is for her to get involved with a group of people who are making bad choices. She says that she knows about peer pressure and we should trust her, but statistics show what happens to kids who run with bad crowds. Maybe she won't drink and smoke pot herself, but what happens when she gets into a car with one of those morons and they kill her?

Call me paranoid, but this is exactly like one of those curses my mom laid on me when I was sixteen. "You're going to grow up and have a daughter just like you!"

I wasn't an angel, and my daughter is an angel compared to my behavior all those years ago. That is why her dad and I both worked very hard to teach her about life firsthand. On one hand, I don't want to deny her the freedom of learning and making her own mistakes, but on the other, I don't want her to make the same mistakes her friends are making. I don't want her to make the ones we made either.

Kids. I swear.

Taking the Glimmer Train to Memoir Town

Glimmer Train is running a Family Matters submissions category through the month of October. Though I have had zero luck with Glimmer Train (or true understanding of what they're actually looking for despite pouring over a dozen issues in the last three years...) I put together a short memoir this morning that I plan to polish up and submit.

I've been thinking a lot lately about memoirs. So many strange, painful and interesting things happened to me while growing up that I think constantly about writing them. In the past I got wrapped up in the emotional side of reliving the memories while writing memoirs, and while that can pack a powerful punch into a story, it can also make it seem too edgy and personal for every day people to relate to. A part of me worries too that my family will be offended by my memory of things. My dad believes my memory is warped and unkind, that my imagination allows me to color the truth with creative lies. He has convinced himself that many of the things my siblings and I remember are figments of this liar's imagination...that I have the power to change the memories of my brothers as well. Who knows, maybe I do.

I do know that all of my publishing success this last couple months has been with memoirs. It's like some kind of sign for me to get back into the creative side of nonfiction even if it isn't pretty or even along the same vein of memory for everybody else who experienced it.

The area I grew up in, and returned to raise my own child in after spending a year out in the world, is one of the poster children from the Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful campaign. Rich in wildlife and long stretches of forest and farmland, it's the kind of place where kids run barefoot in the yard and learn how to swim in the Susquehanna River. I want that atmosphere to flavor my work, which is something that blows my mind when I think about how the first 18 years of of my life were a struggle to get out of this area.

Now I never want to leave.