Something Is Happening and It Feels Like Hitting Bottom
9/17/08
Wednesday
In the house of my dead mother.
I have to make this trip a personal sabbatical...a sojourn. I'm here in Georgia to help my sister with the estate of my mother and her husand. They died within six months of each other, my mother being the first to go. I hang now in their house where I putz, clean, pack, move this there, then back again. I wash underneath, scrub above, spray down the inside, make the outside shine. All the while oppressed by the lingering remains of what killed them both: cigarette smoke so pervasive it makes my ears hurt.
As I pack up the personal effects of the mother, I understand that the love between us was complicated and difficult to touch, while all my life I have been consumed by my father. For years I have been trying to run him out of me like flies off stink. Most times he just fades in and out like bad radio, but he has always taken up too much space. If I am to die whole, his ejection is imperative.
I feel really close sometimes. In a dream I shove him flailing and clawing out the backdoor as he digs his talons into the meat and bone of the threshold. But his resolve for the misery he creates has always been stronger than the rest of us. Even so, how long can I continue to make this true.
On this day my girl sits in Seattle, missing me but oddly glad that I am gone. I've planted landmines all over with a deep seething anger I just can't shake. I bruise her with my hair trigger even though she is the best and only person in the world for me. I am ungrateful and assuming -- unkind -- and I have become typical in my treatment of her. Typical like a knife in the heart.
On my way out of town I tell her in note that I am in despair. I'm having a health crisis as my doctors scratch their heads and tell me it must be allergies and I've just about had it with their useless conjecture. I go off the rails and crash around the house like a tsunami. I'm out of control, short tempered, and drowning in my own bile. I want her home with me to be a happy place, only I can't prove that right now. I'm not at my best. A thousand miles between us she tells me over the phone we can have a new start.
But wouldn't that be just like me to wear her out first?
Wednesday
In the house of my dead mother.
I have to make this trip a personal sabbatical...a sojourn. I'm here in Georgia to help my sister with the estate of my mother and her husand. They died within six months of each other, my mother being the first to go. I hang now in their house where I putz, clean, pack, move this there, then back again. I wash underneath, scrub above, spray down the inside, make the outside shine. All the while oppressed by the lingering remains of what killed them both: cigarette smoke so pervasive it makes my ears hurt.
As I pack up the personal effects of the mother, I understand that the love between us was complicated and difficult to touch, while all my life I have been consumed by my father. For years I have been trying to run him out of me like flies off stink. Most times he just fades in and out like bad radio, but he has always taken up too much space. If I am to die whole, his ejection is imperative.
I feel really close sometimes. In a dream I shove him flailing and clawing out the backdoor as he digs his talons into the meat and bone of the threshold. But his resolve for the misery he creates has always been stronger than the rest of us. Even so, how long can I continue to make this true.
On this day my girl sits in Seattle, missing me but oddly glad that I am gone. I've planted landmines all over with a deep seething anger I just can't shake. I bruise her with my hair trigger even though she is the best and only person in the world for me. I am ungrateful and assuming -- unkind -- and I have become typical in my treatment of her. Typical like a knife in the heart.
On my way out of town I tell her in note that I am in despair. I'm having a health crisis as my doctors scratch their heads and tell me it must be allergies and I've just about had it with their useless conjecture. I go off the rails and crash around the house like a tsunami. I'm out of control, short tempered, and drowning in my own bile. I want her home with me to be a happy place, only I can't prove that right now. I'm not at my best. A thousand miles between us she tells me over the phone we can have a new start.
But wouldn't that be just like me to wear her out first?
posted by Ruby Fowler at 9:53 AM
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