I went home again

Dear reader,

Now I feel like my dad. My dad grew up in a time way before mine, as dads tend to do. He would make allusions and we kids wouldn’t get them. “What? Who was Gracie Allen?”

“Why,” my father would say, “she was George Burns’ partner!” Good old Burns and Allen. These days you can’t really know who knows what. A noted novelist of my aquaintance posted on Facebook the other day that her son, who is in his twenties, didn’t know who Robert Redford was. So, my friends, especially my friends who are in my generation, the generation that hoped it would die before it got old, the generation that didn’t trust anyone under 30, well, now people under 40 look like children to us and we don’t trust anyone, period full stop.

Even the phrase full stop: Telegraph terminology: Will its origins soon be hopelessly obscure? What about the phrase “off the hook”: will its origins in the physical Western Electric telephone one day be lost? Telephones haven’t had hooks for a while, though the cradle of a desk telephone came to be called the hook informally, as in, “hang up.” We are placed on hold but we could just as easily be placed on standby if it weren’t for the physical origins of the phone. My, how I miss the warm analog phone.

Anyway, this came up because when I use the headline, “I went home again,” I’m hoping that you’ll pick up the allusion to Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again, which my dad was always quoting from, and understand that this column is about the sad and complicated business of revisiting the deeply emotional scene of the family.

“Who is Robert Redford again?”

“Oh, dear, he’s some old actor.”

Hey. One other thing. So I went to the Poets and Writers Live event at San Francisco’s Brava Theater on Saturday Jan. 10, 2015*** and had lots of emotional responses and I posted a couple of pieces in response to the event, mainly around the notion that when writers gather there ought to always be some formal acknowledgement of events in the world, whether they affect us materially or not, because we are in a spiritual union with writers everywhere. Solidarity and all that.

Anyway, here’s today’s column, after which I need to put the newsletter together — which is trying to be a weekly thing. Once a week. You can handle that, right?

***Lately I use dates in body text now because the physical containers of text are unreliable and unpredictable; unlike newspapers that would have dates on every page … WordPress has date stamps, yes, but text can be extracted from its containers and then it’s just out there floating, unattributed, dateless, byline-less! I see journalistic posts whose dates are not attached and it drives me crazy! Because writing is history! And if dates are lost then … anyway, right, I’m writing this on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015, and I’ve paid the mortgage, and property tax isn’t due again until April.

Dear Cary,

About 3 years ago, my husband, our toddler daughter, and I left San Francisco (I’d been out there 15 years) and moved back to the small Louisiana city where I grew up. This was all my idea. Much to my surprise, I had grown profoundly homesick after our daughter was born (I had sworn I’d never go back – the standard cliché, right?).

Well, my husband was incredibly flexible and accommodating, and circumstances have worked out. We were able to make our oddball techie careers work in Louisiana (amazing!) and now we are close to my parents, my brother and his family, and my lifelong best friend. We’re also able to live more comfortably and peacefully since the cost of living here is so much less than in SF.

Now to the difficult bit. There is an old relationship here, or actually a web of relationships, that nags at me. I know, I know. I can’t be the jerk who leaves home for 15 years (well, if you count college, it was actually closer to 20) and then returns like the prodigal daughter, and expects everyone to throw confetti and for everything to be “normal.” But gosh, you know, that would be nice, right?

So at the heart of this is my high school ex-boyfriend. This was a very serious first love relationship for both of us. We learned all our early lessons from each other – we were both lovely and heartbreakingly awful to each other – and didn’t really get out of each others’ business until college ended and I moved to California. After that, we were what I’d call “Christmas Card Friends” – you know? We wished each other well, and had forgiven each other everything, and would be in touch from time to time with big news, but that was about it – and this all took place from a safe long distance. Kind of typical adult management of a special, much-loved person from the past.

Well … ok, so now my past tends to walk into my mother’s house from time to time, when I’m there visiting with my children! He lives on my parents’ block now (Why did he have to buy a house so close to my old home?! And why are my parents closer to him now than they were when we dated?), he and his family are very close friends with my brother’s family (Why did he and my brother have to become friends?! Again, they weren’t when we dated.) – and I see them at my niece’s and nephew’s birthday parties, etc. Not to mention random run-ins at the grocery store.

We are both very polite, friendly adults about all this. We make pleasant conversation and admire each others’ children and go on our ways. I know we both wish each other nothing but the best.

Why then, does it STING, and bother me for days when he randomly shows up at my mother’s house when I am visiting?

I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I know that I am over him. I’m not carrying a torch, and I can completely understand why I ended up with my husband instead of him, and why he ended up with his wife instead of me. No harm, no foul. Good choices by nice people all around.

I think it’s his closeness to my family that bothers me. Rightly or wrongly, I feel angry at him for not staying “on his side of the fence,” and also angry at my parents and brother for being so close to him, for allowing him access to what feels like it should be my private, intimate space with them. At times, it even feels like I am watching my old life through a pane of glass – and he is still in it, and I should be in it, except there is another woman (his wife) playing my part. And here I am on the other side, shut out of the cozy circle.

It’s SUPER WEIRD. The sullen, teenager part of me that still exists wants to throw a shoe at him and say, “You, go away! Get out of my family! I didn’t choose you! You are no longer invited in!” But then I have this lingering, weird feeling that my family chose him instead of me.

This raises the question of my relationships with my family members. Perhaps I am scapegoating my ex for emotional difficulty with them? I’ve thought about that, too.

Well, with my parents, it just isn’t the case. I’ve got good, humanly flawed, but good relationships with both my mother and father. It took some time to re-establish these relationships as “close distance” once we moved back, but after some initial awkwardness as we learned how to relate again while living nearby, everything feels solid and real now. My mother, also, will admit from time-to-time that it’s “odd” to have my ex in such close proximity, but then she’ll say what is she supposed to do about it? She can’t ask him to move. So she just carries on with a smile on her face and ignores it. Dad doesn’t really talk about these sorts of things. Old school Dad.

My brother, on the other hand…my brother has given me the cold shoulder ever since I moved back, to an extent that’s palpable to everyone, and surprising and hurtful. We have a complex history, but were close as children. I left home when he was still in early high school. We’ve never been able to reconnect. He’s also a war veteran now and has experiences I’ll never understand, and that I tacitly know I should not ask about. I wish he’d let me love him anyway. I keep trying to take the high road, and invite him and his family to things, and he just quietly doesn’t show up most of the time, without ever making a scene or explaining why. He freezes me out, and hangs out with my ex-boyfriend instead. Literally. If I have an Easter egg hunt, he takes his kids (my children’s cousins) to my ex-boyfriend’s egg hunt instead. This has happened twice. Then again, they were probably going to egg hunts over there before I moved back, so…how can I blame him? And yet…if the shoe were on the other foot…I’d at least drop by.

I know my brother didn’t develop this relationship to spite me, and I try to keep breathing and just sit with it. But gosh it hurts.

I guess my question is: How to BE with all of this and not feel hurt-y and distracted like a teenager? I just want everyone to be able to love each other and be happy and be okay.

Sincerely,
Gone Home Again

Dear Gone Home Again,

You have returned to the scene of unresolved emotional attachments. Those attachments are still quite strong. They are not as strong as they were when you left but they are still strong and they are still unresolved. Leaving didn’t resolve them.

You would like them to be resolved but it’s a better bet to learn to accept them, navigate around them. Why?

Because that’s something you can do!

You can’t change the behavior of other people. You say, “I just want everyone to be able to love each other and be happy and be okay.”

Sure. Me too. But all we can do is live with people as they are. I still wish my parents would get together after the divorce but they’re both dead now. Even when they were alive: Fat chance.

But we wish, fervently and without ceasing, don’t we? We wish like children with birthdays coming. We wish like crazy. We pray. We hope. We think maybe … We don’t even notice when we’re doing it. When you see your ex-boyfriend and it takes you a while to figure out why it upset you, it’s happening before you even notice it: You’re wishing things were different. You’re thinking about the past and how it might have been or how it’s supposed to be now but the crystalline amazingness of the present absolutely present totally right this instant now has escaped you. The beauty of the air, your children, your own hands, the doorway where you stand being suddenly irritated that he’s visiting your mom, the amazing history you and he had together, the tenderness, the blooming of love, the learning adult lessons, the passion, the enduring regard: All that escapes you and you’re just irritated because he’s in your family space and you think it’s your family space and not his.

Just pay attention to that. Notice it. Notice it and then turn to how you can be of service in the present moment. How can you bring some joy into the present moment?

Let the child wish. But be aware that you are the adult and you know that these things are not going to happen. When you catch yourself wishing things were different, try asking, How can I bring joy to this situation? How can I contribute?

The payoff is not in everybody thanking you and saying what a great sister/daughter/wife/mom you are. The payoff is private. It’s your own sense of well-being. It’s the relief of not thinking about that annoying ex-boyfriend.

Give. Offer of yourself. This will distract the hungry child within. It will redirect your emotional sense of purpose. It may also have a positive effect on those around you but they won’t necessarily tell you.

It will be healing, though. After another year or so, you may notice that things seem more normal. It won’t be other people changing. It will be you. You will have created a kind of normal for yourself.

There’s more to say. I don’t seem to be able to stop today:

You say you swore you’d never go back. Why? What was it about your small Louisiana city that made you swear you’d never go back? Are those attributes still there? What were you running from? Did you feel too big for the town? Hemmed in? Do you still feel that way? Was it partly a pride thing, i.e. I’m the one who made it out of that stinking town and if I go back I’m admitting defeat?

Give it some thought. For, while you can’t make these emotions go away, you can examine them. For instance: What is the competition about? Is it a competition for place in the family? Was competitiveness a feature of your relationship when you were together? What were you competing for? Did you, perhaps, imagine a whole future life together with him, and now that future life, that totally imagined thing, has come into conflict with the real thing? In this imagined future, were you his wife?

Consciously, rationally, you of course know that you are not his wife. But see if you can dig a little deeper; maybe a part of you still clings to that fantasy. Get your knife under this fantasy that is stuck to the floor and pry it up. Pry it up and fling it off. It’s a bit of stuck programming. It’s something that never happened. It never happened so you never lost it. It was never real to lose. We do that with the future, don’t we? We imagine things in such detail that when we confront their absence we feel loss, even though it never happened

Also, let’s be clear: You’re the one who left.

When somebody leaves, other people are hurt. They miss you and they wish you were still around. After a while they make other arrangements. They get on with life. If there were things they used to do with you, they do them with other people. They set up routines. And they may have to more or less consciously let go of you, because it hurts too much and it’s too much work to keep missing you every day.

You say you’re not asking for confetti to be thrown, “But gosh, you know, that would be nice, right?” The child in you, the purely emotional part of you, really does want the confetti.

Your secret wish, I suspect, is to be, indeed, the prodigal daughter returning. Of course you would not ask for such treatment. And yet that irrational part of you, that child that you were when you left, that child still wants these things.

You’ve been back three years already, but here is a suggestion: Imagine that you are the new person in town and see what friendships and alliances you can make that work for you today.

Look around for people you didn’t used to be so close. See who is available.

Your brother may seem cold but he has made other arrangements and is dealing with his own life. It may be too painful for him to revisit the site of his old attachment to his older sister. Things have happened. You left him. Then he went to war. things happened. He has his own life. So he happened to become good friends with your ex-boyfriend. That may make you feel a pang of regret but it is quite natural. For him, it may have been like keeping a lock of your hair. He may have been far more attached to you than you realized at the time, or realize now. Your boyfriend may have been in a sense a replacement for you, a reminder of what it was like when everybody was cozy and young.

To go to your Easter egg hunt now, he would have to disappoint somebody else. These are the people who have stayed and made lives for themselves. If you look at it from their perspective, it might make sense that they will not change their routines just because you have returned. I think your best bet is to find new routines that do not conflict with theirs. Find routines that add to the mix rather than create difficult choices. Can you go to your ex-boyfriend’s Easter egg hunt?

There is a lot for you to deal with here. To sum up, here are my suggestions:

Don’t expect these unresolved emotions to just go away.
Remember that other people are beyond your control
Try to start fresh, as though you were new in town
Be of service; when you feel you’re not getting what you want, change your thinking and ask, What can I bring to this situation? How can I contribute?

Wow, that was a lot. I sure wrote a lot this time. Well, I’ve always gone long. Hope you’re not too bored with this!–ct

Cary, thank you most sincerely for answering my letter. This reply was wonderful – no, you did not go on too long or say too much! I teared up reading the response because it felt so compassionate, true, and helpful. Thanks also for playing along with the Thomas Wolfe reference in my signature 🙂 Even though I know you can’t go home again, I couldn’t resist trying. Ever since I moved back, folks have been quoting the title at me with glee. I really should get around to reading it.

People have even been saying I should write about it (as people will say) but the deal with Southern novelists who write tell-alls about their hometowns is that they become outcasts. Even if I could write such a thing and have it be good and real and true and have it say something new, I don’t want to be an outcast.

Your advice to be present, and notice the beauty of the moment reminds me that I need to do a better job of honoring my intention to meditate (I used to have a strong daily practice, pre-kids – oops! – need to get back on the cushion), and I love the advice to be of service. Best of all – calling out the difference between what the inner child desires vs. what I choose to do as an adult really helped clarify some internal tangles for me. I ruminate a lot (obviously) – and if I feel something that I don’t think I should feel, I tend to explain it away. So it was very helpful to just hear: secretly, your inner child wishes everyone would throw confetti and welcome you home like the prodigal daughter/sister! Even though it was right there on the surface in my letter, I hadn’t admitted it to myself. It helps me to see the feeling and let it go, rather than just covering it up with shame (because it really does seem like such a bratty little kid thing to want, and totally unfair, etc. I am embarrassed that part of me wanted/wants it. I’m painfully aware that I’m the one who left, and I feel guilty about leaving and abandoning others, and so on.)

Others have mentioned that there is a lot unsaid in this letter. That is true. I wanted to trace the emotional arc of the situation without rambling on for too long, and also without potentially embarrassing any of the people I mention in the letter, should they happen to stumble upon it (doubtful; I certainly don’t intend to show them, but you never know who will see what on the Internet.) But yes! There is a lot unsaid.

A few things I’ll add, in case it’s helpful to the overall dialog for others, and also because it’s helpful to me to parse them out:

1. Though I didn’t mention it, I have followed the “new kid in town” advice since I arrived and established a new group of friends – and that has been terrific. Over the past 3 years I’ve found a wonderful community of girlfriends – mostly women like me, who left when young, went out to see the world, became even more odd/liberal than we were growing up, and came back again to raise families. They are a tribe I *wish* I’d had growing up. Also, my relationship with my childhood best friend (which had remained constant even while I was gone – she left and came back too) – has flowered into something truly beautiful. She is like my sister. I feel incredibly lucky to have all these people in my life, and I do spend a lot of time trying just to live in the moment with THAT joy, rather than bemoaning what I don’t have.

But, this letter was about other nagging aches, so…

2. You asked me to reflect on why I left and swore I’d never come back. Growing up, I was very different because even though I come from an “old southern family” (yes, with all the baggage that entails but no, not the money) – I did not think or act like a typical southern girl and it was uncomfortable. My mother, though southern, was raised largely on the east coast and was very outspoken and even brash (and also relatively feminist and politically progressive) and that all rubbed off on me, and I didn’t act like the other girls, and never seemed to understand the social rules, and wanted to fit in but DID NOT in some undefinable way. As a child I didn’t think about politics – but a lot of it was simply that I had the wrong politics. I remember being the only kid in my 4th grade class who spoke up in defense of evolution during a science lesson. Sometimes it was downright unbearable. I felt like a freak and like something was very wrong with me. And also angry that this way I was, which seemed like a totally valid way to be in the world, was somehow wrong and funny and mockable. So I was a mixture of mortified, confused, and defiant. I felt like somebody forgot to pass me the rule book. I also sometimes took refuge in feeling superior to the other kids. It was the classic geek’s tactic for face-saving dignity. I read almost constantly in order to escape and lived in my head. I made straight A’s in school, and college seemed to be my ticket elsewhere – some elsewhere where I might possibly belong. So I over-identified with my brain and tried to ignore what I was feeling. I suspect I was probably arrogant and obnoxious – a playground know-it-all. Think Liz Lemon. How embarrassing to be such an irritating young person. I wish I’d found a more graceful way to grow up, but I didn’t.

2. What was I running away from? Well, from myself and all my attendant identity-awkwardness. And yes, a town that seemed small-minded and confining. I was also – and this is a big part of the story that I left out – running away from my mother. She was very domineering and controlling. Always right. Emotionally tone-deaf. As a teenager I experienced her as suffocating and overpowering, and I couldn’t sense myself in her presence – I was only a reaction to her, or a good girl puppet. I was also running away from a family dynamic where I was the “star” child because I performed in school (our mother valued academics and achievement over everything – she also graduated college in ’68 and it was my job to make good on the feminist movement), and my brother was the “problem” child because although he was bright, he did not do well in school – or would sometimes succeed when bullied/cajoled/coached into it by our mother – but when he left home, he began to fail, and fail harder, all the way through college until (and this chapter has never been very clear to me) my father had to go retrieve him from his third school where my brother had gotten deeply depressed, stopped going to classes, stopped showing up for his job, and had let the electricity go out in his apartment. He may have been even suicidal, but nobody talks about it. In his early 20s he was diagnosed as ADHD. My mother believes the diagnosis, but I’m not so sure. He may have it, but I also think some of his symptoms were consistent with what I’ve read of C-PTSD – the kind of PTSD you get from growing up in a very stressful family situation. Who can say? It’s not my place to say definitively what it was. In his mid-20s, my brother joined the military and reinvented himself as a new person. He’s a gifted soldier. Now he even asks us to call him by a different name – the one he used in the military. It’s clear he wants to leave the past behind. I loved and love my brother. I hated being compared to him. I hated to see him suffer. I hated the whole family set up and thought it was grossly unfair. I also profited from it, in the family politics – and I’m sure I had a bossy big sister tone a lot of the time. I was the golden child and, as a child, probably abused that. And I also felt like a fake and like the whole thing was messed up. I loved my brother incredibly. He was always sweeter and funnier and in many ways stronger than I was. I was brittle and prickly. He was goofy and a delight. And I could not save him. I didn’t know what to do. I was only two years older / three grades ahead but somehow over time there was a wall between us. We couldn’t talk about it. I left. I moved as far away as I could get. My brother and I rarely talked – he didn’t like the phone. I couldn’t figure out a way to communicate with him. And I still feel guilty. I still don’t know what I could or should have done. Once I was strong enough to come back – enough my own person – I came home – not expecting things to be as they were – but wanting to pick up the pieces if I could, to love and be loved, if possible. To find a way to love everyone in the middle of the mess, to accept all of it.

3. What’s the competition about? See above. It’s not about my ex-boyfriend at all. It’s weird that he’s tangled up in it at all, but it’s almost like a distraction. The real story is between me and my brother, and our competition for our mother’s love and highly conditional approval. My brother is a bit chilly with the whole family – I just get most of the frostiness – both my parents have pointed this out. Sometimes my mother gets it worse from my brother than I do, and then she calls me, and I try to comfort her and gently explain his actions to her. I try to do it without confronting her fully with the old family dynamic – I have tried explaining what happened (as I see it) to her before, but not surprisingly it makes her very angry and she denies it – so…I try just to counsel her on how to be kind to him and give him space, he has a new identity, etc – without forcing her to change her worldview.

Strangely, through all of this – my mother still has a relationship with my brother, and she still has a relationship with me – but the relationship that has been destroyed is the one between us two siblings, which makes me incredibly sad. I wish I could take my brother out for a beer, and say “Don’t you see we were both pawns in something MOM was doing? It’s about her, not us! I’m sorry if I hurt you back then. I was a kid. I love you. Can you learn to trust me again?”

Obviously the answer is “No” he can’t trust me. I don’t even have to ask. I can’t help wishing that recovery were possible though. I keep hoping that if I’m just quiet and kind and non-demanding and leave the door open, that maybe I can rekindle something. He’s the only brother I’ve got. I’m the only sister he’s got. Our parents are getting older. Three years in, he does not seem interested. He spends most of his time with his wife’s family.

I worry that he may have classified me as “Mom 2: The Sequel” – I’ve been afraid for much of my life of turning into our mother. I search for ways in which I’m being controlling / domineering (they are there!) and I try to stamp them out. Then I feel like a Class A Neurotic for all the self-policing. So then I just try to be nice. To be kind. To do nice things for other people and get on with it.

In any case, even if he doesn’t think I’m the same as Mom – I suspect he thinks I’m allied with my parents or with the family system against him. He rebelled against the whole family system by becoming a somewhat sterotypical southerner. Along with the military, he has also embraced big trucks, guns, conservatism, etc. Meanwhile – I and my parents could be described as “good NPR-listening democrats” – with me on the more liberal edge of the spectrum.

The advice NOT TO COMPETE with my brother’s new life and commitments – the life and commitments he built while I was gone – is good. I’ll work harder on making sure I’m not asking him to make uncomfortable choices. I can’t believe I didn’t see before that the first year I held that darn easter egg hunt on the same day as the ex-boyfriend’s, it was an accident (I sincerely didn’t know), but the SECOND year I did it, I was trying to get my brother to pick me, his sister, over his newer friend. Not fair. Bad move, big sis. (This is where I facepalm for being controlling again. Ugh!)

5. Okay – so all of this begs the question (which somebody asked) – Did I like San Francisco? And if so why did I leave? And why, given all of the above, would I come back here again?

So, yes, I LOVED San Francisco. I lived in the city from age 23 to age 37, from 1996 to 2011. It’s where I grew up and became not just and adult but a person, built a career, met my husband, started my family. I embraced it. I loved it with a ground-kissing fervor. I tried to be San Francisco for awhile. I worked in magazines, wrote for ‘zines, had strange hair and large boots, made friends with and loved and dated musicians and artists and wordy people, lost my apartment due to an owner move-in eviction during the dotcom boom, then lost my job during the dotcom bust, lived in the Lower Haight, the Mission, the Sunset, NOPA (though we all know it’s the Western Addition, right?), worked in tech, rode my bike along the wiggle, ate a lot of good food and also talked a lot about good food, took film seriously…you know, all those things people like to do in San Francisco and many more things besides that I haven’t mentioned.

And over time I changed, because that’s what people do. I calmed down some. I let go of some of the more arch fashion and cultural stuff because I just wanted to look like and seem like my authentic self and not try so hard. I discovered Buddhism and the Zen Center and Tassajara and Spirit Rock. The pace at which we had to live our lives and make money in order stay in the city began to feel breathless, had always been breathless, how had I gone so long without breathing? I wanted to be able to breathe. To see and feel and notice at a more languorous pace.

In 2008, I quit a fairly prestigious creative job because it just wasn’t worth it anymore. I was too stressed out and frantic and miserable. I started freelancing, trying to make some space. In 2010, we had our first child. When she was around 18 mos old, I became overwhelmed with the idea of home. I wanted to make a home. I wanted to go home. I wanted my daughter to know her family, my family. Even though my family was kind of a mess. They were also loving in their own messy way. Even though we had good friends in SF, lots of them were leaving as we all began to have children. Living in San Francisco began to feel like being rootless, living out on the edge of the world, living 20,000 feet up in the air, in a daydream, in outer space. Where WAS I? Something shifted and San Francisco no longer felt like home. I wanted to find home. Where was home?

So in 2011 we returned to Earth. My California husband, as I mentioned, has been a terrific sport. He’s also safely ensconced in a work environment that might as well be in San Francisco, so he has a safe, familiar cultural bubble to be in. I continue to freelance – so I’m insulated from a lot of the more small-towny local cultural stuff too – and so we are free to make connections with our own little tribe of southern progressives (they do exist!).

And meanwhile, I’ve been trying to figure out how to hold and love my family, instead of running away from them.

And I am glad we came back. It feels better not to run away. I don’t know if we will always stay here and I worry about my children feeling as “weird” as I felt, but for now, it’s what we’re doing. I’m not sure how it will end.

That was an awful lot of stuff. Thanks for letting me share it.