My birthday is in four days.
Gifts of luv, money, new life, geeky men can be sent here.
home is where the heart is
My friend Jenni from back home, sent me an email with this in it:
you need to come home before it goes…….
for old time sake, we could have a sleep over and I can snap your bra into the ceiling fan.
My mother, it seems is going through the toughest parts of her life. My step-father Robert is finally filing for divorce after being married for nearly 8 years (they have only lived together for aproximently 2 of those 8 years) and my mother has decided to file for bankruptcy. Along the lines of bankruptcy, she’s giving up the house on Paris Ave in Grand Rapids along with all the furniture inside of it.
Danny is making arrangements to have my mothers four poster cherrywood bed, cherry wood desk, my grandmothers rocking chair and the living room couch put in storage for me.
my brother Jeff got accepted to Bradley University, my mother is moving into a mansion outside of Grand Rapids with friends and I’m in SF. Any resemblance of family is now gone.
I remember back in early days, when I was a child growing up in Port Huron, MI, the big family get togethers held for every holiday. My mother is the oldest of seven children, I’m the third oldest grandchild. Now, everything is gone. My older cousins are married with kids of their own. My younger cousins Kevin, Shelly, Chris, and Paul are god knows where. My aunts are all retreated into some sort of weird lifestyle that makes them forever unmarriageable (three of my mothers sisters never did get married and all hang out together in some sort of weird lesbianism way. but they aren’t lesbians. maybe just crotchety old aunts?). My grandmother died in 1972, my grandfather passed away in 1996. My fathers side I have never had any contact with to begin with – and my father is now 72 and holed up in a nursing home in Toronto.
I am, completely alone.
And it’s been coming for years. When my mother in 1985 got the killer job offer in Grand Rapids and moved our little family of three there, all the family get togethers died. Even living just 2.25 hours away from them, I never saw them for months if not years at a time. The last time I made any effort to see my family was back in 1996 when my grandfather passed away, and I stood like an outsider at my grandfathers funeral. I knew nothing of these people anymore. My older cousins Doug and Denise who used to torture me when i was a kid had nothing to say to me. My younger cousins Kevin and Shelly were grown up — and I stood there feeling lonely than ever because I never had what I have always dreamed about: family. And I remember crying on my way back to my apartment that I shared with Danny then, because I had nothing. My relationship with my mother had been lukewarm at best, my father I never lived with save one year when I went to school in toronto, and my cousins never made an effort to contact me.
I remember sitting at my computer the day after I got back from his funeral, drinking down a fifth of absolute and paging my brother to get a bag of pot so that I didn’t have to think. No one could quite understand what was wrong with me. I never drank at home and Lisa buy pot? Oh yeah right — hell must have frozen over. I drove to the funeral on Christmas Eve, came back the day after Christmas and drunk myself into a stupor between the 26th and New Years Day.
Many people don’t understand why I feel so damn down about this — primarily because I’ve always regarded myself as an orphan in all aspects. My mother even said it herself that when I moved to SF that I had cut off all ties to family and never called, wrote or even came home. I tried going back home and making things right last Christmas, but things between me and my mom never changed and while I was happy to be back at my old stomping grounds I found that nothing was the same — and that any life for me in GR was over. I tried telling myself that I wanted to go back — and I still do — but it’s not the same. Everything has changed and I am no longer that scared little girl any more that used to sit in her bedroom crying anymore.
it’s several hours since i wrote the above, and I’m at work now. i hate when i break up a chronicle like this: writing half at home and the other half somewhere else. i lose my train of thought — and the somberness i had earlier this morning isn’t as prevalent as it is now. A good shower, shaving my legs, lots of cawfee, talking to cartoon boy, I can’t feel depressed right now.
But then again, maybe i don’t want to think about it.
it always ends up this way.
