You know what? This is a blog about living out my values and finding an ethical way through the world. But I want to tell you about my childhood.
Yup, I do. I worried when I was a child because was this really just a beginning and not the actual life? Well, no, childhood is always a magic important time, even to adults. So I want to tell you about my magic time.
I fear for my mother's heart, though. It's not a story about her. She - a middle class, white, Puerto Rican Catholic who worked full-time and was a Girl Scout leader too - mostly wasn't a main character. That, though, that very non-primary-ness, is enough to wound a mother, isn't it? Ah well. I'm sorry Mom.
We were what we were, and though Mom was around, I refused her, choosing to be raised by my thoroughly kind grandmother (now deceased) and my simultaneously ghastly and wonderful father (now in jail), in a large extended family that was white and suburban, agnostic and neo-pagan, at war with itself, shockingly safe and good in the ways it was not sad and hurtful. I grew up dissociative there. My heart is there at Grandma's house still, and with those oddball uncles and sensitive cousins, I forged a sense of how people should be: calm, curious, willing to laugh at themselves, self-contradicting, fiercely loyal but prone to wandering off on solo adventures, readers who tremble to speak the truth but do. They were not anything like the typical Long Islanders all around them; they were Pennsylvanian in their hearts, woodsy and gritty and without accents and with some William Penn in their souls.
The world outside my family surprises me still, every day, though I left home twenty years ago.
I was sixteen then. I had a philosophy of life (neo-paganism), two lovers (one of each gender), a passion for a particular field (alternative education), and a stubborn desire to learn things the hard way, that is, personally. This die-hard will to do at any cost what I carefully determined best was a lingering survival mechanism inherited from my bloodied toddler-self. I burst through the gates to independence as soon as I was legally able, terrified and shivering, and I traveled to another state halfway across the country, then another state halfway across the remaining distance, like finding my way in the world was a calculus problem written to confound first-year students with the potential impossibility of ever getting where one is going. Life was so pretty out there on the flat prairie, blue sky coming down on either side of your ankles like a big upended bowl. I saw an openness and peacefulness in those prairie people which I still miss dearly. But after a few years it became apparent that I shouldn't stay.
I found my way back to my home state of New York, leaving my first attempt at a settled-down dream life. I took with me from there two little spooky-smart babies, a sheepdog, a knowledge of business and Christianity, a love of a capella folk singing, and a wicked new additional set of triggers to add to my childhood PTSD.
Though back in New York, I settled half the state away from my childhood and lived in limbo. My body and brain conspired to force me to deal with the terrible things which had gone before and I faltered, throwing myself this way and that, against fads, friends, diets, diagnosis, etc., heartlessly and viciously looking for safety. During those years, I found a few good refuges: my blogging voice, homeschooling, a third son, homemade toymaking. I lost everything else (except the sheepdog), and gained no practical skills to help me survive the world. I was unskilled both at traditional employment and at interacting with welfare agencies. My sources of passive income dried up at the start of the second great economic depression and I entered a terrible, debilitating depression of my will.
When I had lost even the walls of my home and a river was running without my permission down the floors of my house, I ran away again to stay with friends in a bigger city. I left my failed attempt at independence to rely on the family of a secret lover. This I knew then was a less-than-ideal solution, but I didn't know what else to do. I was out for stability and joy and togetherness for me and my three little boys, and I would risk any terrible thing to stay with them and keep giving them the mama-made life I had decided they deserved. And I would not kowtow to any rules that say do not love, so I loved the secret lover despite understanding that his family would not work so hard to keep me and my boys afloat and together if they knew how little respect I had for their no-loving rule.
Of course, after such a move, into a thing grand and also not okay at once, our lives were terrible and wonderful. Again. I learned that when your childhood is poured in that mold, the shape follows your years no matter how much running back and forth across the country you do, no matter how much ditching and gaining of whole social networks you do, no matter what kind of help you find or what terrible trades you make for that help. Not, though, no matter what truly and entirely, for I'm happy to say it is here, now, in this same city of the secret lover, in the past few years, that I leveraged some of the wonderful against some of the terrible and saw the mold crack.
The secret lover is no more and I found a husband in his place. The consequences of that terrible trade helped me finally find the mold and crack it apart. The handmade, meaningful, together life I wanted for my children has revealed itself, via delightful competent boys, to have been there all along.
So here I am now, waking up each morning to just ordinary life, life like I expect it to be for the rest of it. It takes my breath away. This blog is my record of these blissy ordinary days.
Yup, I do. I worried when I was a child because was this really just a beginning and not the actual life? Well, no, childhood is always a magic important time, even to adults. So I want to tell you about my magic time.
I fear for my mother's heart, though. It's not a story about her. She - a middle class, white, Puerto Rican Catholic who worked full-time and was a Girl Scout leader too - mostly wasn't a main character. That, though, that very non-primary-ness, is enough to wound a mother, isn't it? Ah well. I'm sorry Mom.
We were what we were, and though Mom was around, I refused her, choosing to be raised by my thoroughly kind grandmother (now deceased) and my simultaneously ghastly and wonderful father (now in jail), in a large extended family that was white and suburban, agnostic and neo-pagan, at war with itself, shockingly safe and good in the ways it was not sad and hurtful. I grew up dissociative there. My heart is there at Grandma's house still, and with those oddball uncles and sensitive cousins, I forged a sense of how people should be: calm, curious, willing to laugh at themselves, self-contradicting, fiercely loyal but prone to wandering off on solo adventures, readers who tremble to speak the truth but do. They were not anything like the typical Long Islanders all around them; they were Pennsylvanian in their hearts, woodsy and gritty and without accents and with some William Penn in their souls.
The world outside my family surprises me still, every day, though I left home twenty years ago.
I was sixteen then. I had a philosophy of life (neo-paganism), two lovers (one of each gender), a passion for a particular field (alternative education), and a stubborn desire to learn things the hard way, that is, personally. This die-hard will to do at any cost what I carefully determined best was a lingering survival mechanism inherited from my bloodied toddler-self. I burst through the gates to independence as soon as I was legally able, terrified and shivering, and I traveled to another state halfway across the country, then another state halfway across the remaining distance, like finding my way in the world was a calculus problem written to confound first-year students with the potential impossibility of ever getting where one is going. Life was so pretty out there on the flat prairie, blue sky coming down on either side of your ankles like a big upended bowl. I saw an openness and peacefulness in those prairie people which I still miss dearly. But after a few years it became apparent that I shouldn't stay.
I found my way back to my home state of New York, leaving my first attempt at a settled-down dream life. I took with me from there two little spooky-smart babies, a sheepdog, a knowledge of business and Christianity, a love of a capella folk singing, and a wicked new additional set of triggers to add to my childhood PTSD.
Though back in New York, I settled half the state away from my childhood and lived in limbo. My body and brain conspired to force me to deal with the terrible things which had gone before and I faltered, throwing myself this way and that, against fads, friends, diets, diagnosis, etc., heartlessly and viciously looking for safety. During those years, I found a few good refuges: my blogging voice, homeschooling, a third son, homemade toymaking. I lost everything else (except the sheepdog), and gained no practical skills to help me survive the world. I was unskilled both at traditional employment and at interacting with welfare agencies. My sources of passive income dried up at the start of the second great economic depression and I entered a terrible, debilitating depression of my will.
When I had lost even the walls of my home and a river was running without my permission down the floors of my house, I ran away again to stay with friends in a bigger city. I left my failed attempt at independence to rely on the family of a secret lover. This I knew then was a less-than-ideal solution, but I didn't know what else to do. I was out for stability and joy and togetherness for me and my three little boys, and I would risk any terrible thing to stay with them and keep giving them the mama-made life I had decided they deserved. And I would not kowtow to any rules that say do not love, so I loved the secret lover despite understanding that his family would not work so hard to keep me and my boys afloat and together if they knew how little respect I had for their no-loving rule.
Of course, after such a move, into a thing grand and also not okay at once, our lives were terrible and wonderful. Again. I learned that when your childhood is poured in that mold, the shape follows your years no matter how much running back and forth across the country you do, no matter how much ditching and gaining of whole social networks you do, no matter what kind of help you find or what terrible trades you make for that help. Not, though, no matter what truly and entirely, for I'm happy to say it is here, now, in this same city of the secret lover, in the past few years, that I leveraged some of the wonderful against some of the terrible and saw the mold crack.
The secret lover is no more and I found a husband in his place. The consequences of that terrible trade helped me finally find the mold and crack it apart. The handmade, meaningful, together life I wanted for my children has revealed itself, via delightful competent boys, to have been there all along.
So here I am now, waking up each morning to just ordinary life, life like I expect it to be for the rest of it. It takes my breath away. This blog is my record of these blissy ordinary days.