I received an email last night from my cousin, asking me to please and and finally return my grandmother’s phone calls. It accused me of not being aware that life is fleeting and can be full of regret if you don’t take opportunities to love people when you can. It said again and again that it was not trying to be offensive, just trying to help, dear, just trying to help. It tried to reassure me that there are still people in this family that care about me.

I found it pretty presumptuous. Not in the least because my gramma hasn’t called me in a good month and a half. But also because no one on my mom’s side of the family calls me ever, at all, for any reason, unless they guilting me into doing something or want to rub in what kind of wonderful people they are. Up on the gossip and doing their good deed. If, that is, by “good deed” they mean speaking in hushed tones and clucking their tongues in mournful disdain. My life? Is none of their business.

Yes, I have a problem with bitterness.

I’m actually just becoming aware of it, so thank God for His mysterious ways. If you’d asked me last week if I was a bitter person, I would have said absolutely not and spouted some meandering life lesson about letting go of the past. Most of my intimates can tell you I’ve demonstrated such at some time or another in life. Yet still, just reading just those few well intentioned lines made me livid. I felt imposed upon and exposed and misjudged and misunderstood and lied to all at the same time.

If I may exhaust my vitriol, I don’t think my extended family still cares for me. I don’t think it matters to them one way or the other what I do or whether I ever see them again, so long as they can feel sorry for me about decisions I’ve made or successes I have yet to have. I’m speaking about them as a unit, not as individuals. Because as individuals, they are always polite, always polished, always chuckling lightly at some joke and laying the coats on their beds. But I’m not one of them, am I? I’m the guest, not the host.  Not the Friend or the Sister or even the beloved Relation. Just the Guest.

Even that line (I typed “lie” at first on accident-do my fingers know something Idon’t?), about there still being people in the family who love me and my sister is alienating. There are people in the group that care for you, O Out Of The Group One. You are being honored by the collective. Will you, can’t you, won’t you please be nice? Can’t you just come over and be valiant and upstanding and obviously pretending to be as perfect as we actually are?

Ugh.

I know what this stems from. I’ve been angry at them for a long time and it’s simply festered over the years. All that time my mother was so ill, all that time her body was wasting away-O goodly, kindly ones-where were you? Where were you while she was suffering? You only came to watch her die, dragging your mass of bodies into my and my sister and my father and my grandmother’s private space. She was ours, because we loved her, and we watched her life either from the beginning of our own or the beginning of hers, and we saw everything she grew from and into. We saw her shrink in ways we had never imagined after she had spent the whole rest of her life growing in strength and wisdom and promise. We cleaned her up and took her out and went to Wendy’s to buy her chicken sandwiches and sit with her, and talk with her, and breathe her same air. We were the ones she called to lift her up when her body began failing her. We were the ones who bound her feet at night.

And where were you? Except for three days after they had assured us that nothing else could be done, sitting in a stale hospice room with your four hundred pint sized relations who were too young to come and look at death like that, whom you sent to go and color, whom you told without saying so that the slipping away of my mother’s life wasn’t something that was worth their notice, that you knew they couldn’t sit down and pay attention to? And afterward, with your arms outstretched toward my sister and I, to ask for a piano for your church.

It isn’t as though my cousin is to blame for these things. She wasn’t even a part of most of them. She isn’t to blame for anything that happened at hospice or afterward and neither is her brother. And neither are the rest of them really. I know I’m being unfair. I’m being grossly unfair. Part of me wants to object and complain that they never talk to me about her. And the other part of me knows that if they did, I would inwardly rebel and shout that they didn’t know who my mother was at all and how dare they make presumptions. I can’t be pleased . . .

But God will ease.

I am praying for strength to let all these things go. To stop clutching at them with righteous indignation. The truth is no one knows what to do with something like that, and that we all make mistakes, and that we all overlook our own. The Truth is that if Christ can ask his Father to forgive for not knowing, I should certainly be able to forgive for doing no worse than perhaps I would have done if I were they and they, I. I praise God that He can make so many lessons out of loss. I praise Him that He keeps revealing and healing and working on me. He certainly knows I need it.

When I started writing, I did so because I was angry. I’m not anymore. God has such a particular way of absorbing the thrashing of my soul until it is spent and soothing me with the duties that I have to preform, regardless of the actions of anyone else. He is . . . He is . . .

He is marvelous.

(more…)

I finished my exams for this blitzkrieg round of summer school and am on to the next one on Thursday. Ahh . . .what joy! The paintball blast ice cream took the brunt of it.

Anyway, I came home and took a nap. It was wonderful. And then I woke up and took Emmy outside and there was this young man standing outside talking on the phone by his shiny red hatchback. I squinted in the sunlight. Then I hobbled back inside with my dog and felt a lot more like the Hunchback of Notre Dame that I would have liked.

(in all honesty, I wish I had boots like that.)

It isn’t so much that I was adandoned in a church as a baby or only befriended by a jerkface clergyman or that I have a thing for gypsy girls named Esmeralda. The real issue is the slightness of my excursions from home of late. Studying is to blame of course, so I suppose it’s only the old thing of The End of something. My exams went well, my time was well spent in preparation, but . . . there is much more time today than I’m used to.

Sometimes I think that it would be good to move away, really. Just any old Somewhere Else. This place has already been scribbled on too many times. Case in point: Today I was late for my exam so I had to make it up at a coffee shop across from UC while my professor graded papers. I don’t know if you know this, but a few years ago this particular shop used to be called the Buzz?  It’s called Taza these days. The entrance is met by two flights of stairs, one to the order counter and the other to the seating area. Anyway, the one and only time I have ever been to the Buzz was with Mark the First, my affair du jour in something like 2002. Not expecting the plethora of stairs, I promptly fell down all of them in what can only be described as one of those long cinematic type scenes where everything slows down and my body bounces horribly from one cement slab to the next, legs flailing, patrons looking up sharply and over their shoulders with alarm. The tinkling of ceramic coffee mugs, the chatter of college kids, and the faint drone of indy-pop music are all silenced as everyone waits, in slow motion, for me to stop falling. Finally, when I reach the last step, time speeds to normal, sound resumes, the waitress rushes over to ask if I’m alright and Mark, leaning over to help me, says, “I’m not going to lie to you, Marianne: a lot of people saw that.”

It was distracting being there. And all over the city it’s like that. I drive home and pass by the Walgreens where Mark the Second and I used to go to buy sodas and cigarettes and talk about his life in the Drug Years. I go to work at the shelter and am reminded of when my clothes used to strain over my belly where it held my sweet little Natalie, before she had a name, when she was still the Biscuit. I go up to Field’s Ertel and think of the snowy evening when Simon carried me so my feet wouldn’t get cold. I drive down Creek Road, I go in the house, and the curtains are all still there, and its overwhelming how tactile the remembrance of my mother is, like she’s still there. In all my usual places, I think of the grief dinners and grief breakfasts Stephanie and I had.

Are memories such a bad thing? Of course not. The real trouble is that many of them are unpleasant ones. Not unpleasant in and of themselves, but in situations and with people that turned out unfortunately, either through my own action or inaction or through that of who I was with. I don’t think of myself as someone who’s been prone to disaster, and in fact, there are so many blessings that God has bestowed on me that I shouldn’t ever be able to complain, about anything, ever again. And it isn’t as though I always remember these things. I can be mindless and free of them. But their propensity to come to me unbidden is unsettling.

Maybe I’ve done what I was here to do. Maybe it’s time to be moving on.

I woke up early this morning, shuffled to the kitchen, and let Emmy out. It had snowed a little overnight and the fluffy whiteness packed itself thickly into the crevaces of the soles of my houseshoes. I walked back to the parking lot to throw away a bag of trash and then swooped back  by Emmy cowering with cold on the front step to let both of us into my apartment. I sat on the couch and turned on BET. My mom used to watch Charles Stanley sunday mornings on this channel. Today David Jeremiah is on, talking about prophesy and why it’s as relevant as topical sermons on be ye kind or tithing or the length of the modern hemline. He raises a good point, which is that if Christians claim to believe in prophesy, specifically the Apocalypse, the Rapture, the Second Coming, it carries with it some serious indications about evangelism.

And now, on a more fallen and human note, I change channels to the Hour of Power and come upon the abject smarmy-ness known as Bill Dallas. Some mangled faced man in a long robe drones on and on about what a great man this is, this man who rose above, this man who’s been in prison and worked his way out, who’s poor little baby company failed. Bill Dallas the Resilient, the Penitant, the Saint. Slime in a suit, my mother would have said. Ugh. I feel like retching on his tailored suit and red patterned tie.

(more…)

So my old boss called me this afternoon and asked me to come in to cover the overnight shift tonight. Fine. Great. Wonderful.

And she also asked me to take the same tomorrow because the woman who usually comes in is in the hospital and no one knows when she might be released. Fabulous. Super. Happy to oblige.

And after work I have an interview at Kristen’s mom’s workplace. Fantastic. Cool. Bring it.

And when I get to work there’s a knock down drag out fight over whether or not the door should be left open in one of the rooms, futher complicated by a language barrier and stressing the already taut nerves of a group of domestic violence survivors. Manageable. Pithy. Taken care of.

And I’m sitting up in the early morning hours, chugging a 20 oz. Diet Coke and playing Text Twist on Yahoo.com, when my sister calls and asks me, So, how’s school going?

Anxiety. Panic. Disaster.

(more…)

I ask myself, When did you begin to grow? Was it when everything fell apart or did it start before?

There seems to me to be a piece of everything that’s happened in everything that came before. Nothing simply appeared. If I hadn’t gone to a sleepover in seventh grade at the house of a girl I didn’t know very well. If I hadn’t been at a certain Bible study my first week of college. If that other boy hadn’t been bitter, if she hadn’t thrown me that surprise 20th birthday party. It was all so tenuous. It could have all turned out differently. But it didn’t. And this evidence reminds me that God’s plan is sometimes interwoven so by little things that it may seem at times as though nothing at all is happening. But then something will happen, like a couple offering to raise your child and give her the home that you would have wanted for her, and looking back, all the steps will come together.

And this is what I need to keep sight of.

(more…)

I want to run away. I don’t want to be here anymore. I can imagine myself in places all over the world, sitting, accepting, some place that is quiet and strange to me. I can see myself breathing out my days with some sense of . . . peace? With some sense of rest.

I can’t sleep at night. I either refuse to go to bed because of some free floating anxiety or I wake up again and again and can’t fall back asleep. Grief is choking me. It creeps up on me while I lay in the dark with my eyes closed and suddenly I hear my mind say, “My mother is dead.” It’s as if I just realized it. I weep. My mother is dead.

(more…)

If you happen to be unfamiliar with the term “to winge”, let me please explain. To winge is to whine excessively, to become so frustrated with one’s circumstances that one is paralysed from the top lip up and the bottom lip down. To winge is to make a thorough annoyance of oneself based on consistent and usually ridiculous complaints issuing forth from one’s mouth, preferably with an alternating, but always very high, pitch. To winge is to take a long hard look at the cruel world you live in, stick out your tongue, and call it a meanie face. To plant your feet firmly on the ground, cross your arms, and pout like a three year old.

It is this practice that I would like to demonstrate for you now.

(more…)

So today is Thanksgiving. Hoorah! Fall is past full bloom and winter is on its way in, with all it’s traffic problems and snow delays, with all its cancelled school. Winter is a great season. I mean, sure a lot of people get S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder-isn’t that cute?) because there’s less sunlight, and it’s colder than blazes, although it’s usually not cold enough to snow so instead there’s a lot of yucky grey rain/slush, and also it’s more expensive with Christmas (and in my case, several birthdays) and gigantic heating bills, and . . . Well, winter’s alright anyway. It could be worse. Probably.

So the reason I’m going on about winter is 1) winter makes me want to fall in love, and 2) although that’s true, it isn’t the reason. The real reason is that I’m procrastinating, and the reason I’m doing that is because I don’t want to go to Thanksgiving dinner.

(more…)

There are dark times. This is one of them.

This year I have lost both my daughter and my mother, four months apart to the day. The woman I came from and the someday-woman I bore are both gone from me, and that makes me wonder . . . where do I go now? What do I do with my life? How can I now make them proud? What would they expect from me? What do I expect from myself? And most importantly, what does God expect?

I could say this was the most devastating time of my life. But it isn’t. Of course, it’s painful. It . . . twists in me. But it has also been a time that I have seen most clearly the faithfulness and providence of God. As I was going through my mother’s papers, I found a letter I sent a few years ago to encourage her and in it I wrote how God knew what was happening and He had control of it. Reading it over now, I thought to myself, How could I have possibly known that then?

(more…)