Telling a story is a dicey thing. You're not just telling a story, or your story; your story is often interwoven with the stories of other people, who may not want their stories told, or who may not agree with the ways in which you interpret their stories, or who object to the ways in which you believe their stories have intersected with your own. More often than not, you're telling one side of a story which has many sides; you can own "your side," but the story is bigger than you are.
When your stories involve your family, the waters are further muddied. And I struggle with this, so very much. My family are mine, and I love them. But I love them guardedly, from a distance. I was chuckling to a coworker the other day about the existence of this blog, as he noted a particular entry and said your parents probably loved reading that one. And I replied, without thinking: they don't know I write. They're not allowed to know me. They kinda had their chances, and they kinda blew them all.
I didn't realize that I'd given up on them ever knowing me until I said those words aloud. Maybe they know; maybe they don't; maybe they're reading this right now, though I doubt it.
Part of me knows that they're intimidated by me, confused, unable to figure me out; part of me knows that they know that's the way I want it; the wounded parts of me are proud of, and guilty of, the power this knowledge gives me. Part of me knows that, were I to let them in, part of them would admire it (for lack of a better word); the deeply wounded parts of them would respond to the parts of me that have been unwilling to keep their secrets hidden away. Sometimes, a person needs permission to feel their own pain. But I can't be their permission; I can't stand in their pain with them. Just no. I can't imagine taking on one more burden for these people, can't imagine letting them into anything else I have. I could tell you stories - and it might sound narcissistic, but believe me, it isn't - I could tell you stories of the ways in which years of my burdened silence kept our family's image intact. I can't be their permission to heal any more than I was able to survive being their permission to close ranks around sickness and sin. That's only one side of a story, though; years of silence from every member of my family turned all of our wounds inward, especially the wounds inflicted within our own walls. They still live wounded, static in the immediacy of their injuries, years and years and years arrested at traumas they blink away from, if they ever surface at all.
I have always wanted to blow the doors off of every ugliness and secret and burden I've carried around. I want to stand on mountaintops and fill horizons with every word of all of the things that were not my fault. Selfishly, though, in order to hear it echo back from the heavens to my own ears; all I knew of sharing was to try to rid myself of the scourge of the abused child, to try to find absolution in making it mean something good. My poor mother, who conflates secrecy with privacy, who gave birth to a mouthy, telling person, who has jerked me up by the arm and hissed at me more than once you do not betray the family; you do not tell things outside the family. The Family. Mafioso. Italian and all. Would you believe - I remember the first time she ever became aware that I write: I was five years old, and wrote some cheesy little essay that was published in the newspaper and netted me $25, which I spent on notebooks and pretty pencils. Her reaction, deeper than the surprise and happiness she expressed on my behalf: apprehension. Even then, I think she was afraid: she'd identified a perspective attached to a voice within her own ranks.
I intended to write about grace, when I started writing this. Grace, ever-present, brand-new to me, life-changing, mind-blowing; hope, which I am so afraid to lose, because I have always, always, always been without hope. It scares me, to realize how fundamentally I function from a baseline of survival and nothing more; it shakes me, how grace and hope are secondary, and how I have to remind myself every single day that things are different now; this is what you know; new every morning is, in fact, a real thing, not just a promise, but a discipline in sweet hope; remember? remember?
As much as my family has brought about death in my life, over and over again, I can't help but carry them into grace and hope with me. I might never be able to let them know it, but it's not my grace or hope to bestow anyhow. The stories of secrets, burdens, deaths flung into the horizon are flung, east to west, into the hope and grace that echo unto themselves. Grace for me, as one of them; hope for us all.
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