I thought about my family history as I stirred my son’s pasta and changed the flow of water first in one direct, then another. A pot of water is a small thing in which to create change. A little heat, a few minutes, stir with a spoon—poof! Change is done. The very molecular structure of the food has been irrevocably altered.
A family history is a harder thing to change.
My grandmother, my aunt and my mother all prostituted to support their families. My family story is replete with abuses: the groping hands of old men on little girls as the men played poker with grandpa; the rape of my five-year-old mother by the neighbor boy; the beatings by my own grandmother of her children. My mother was schizophrenic, paranoid and my sole caregiver until I was thirteen, before I went into foster care. In her parenting, she perpetuated much of the violence she’d experienced as a child.
How does one turn the tide of a family history? I can only say that I have learned to sense and ride the undercurrent that flowed in opposition to that tide.
My whole life, I’ve been moved by BIG ISSUES: homelessness, poverty, universal healthcare, the devastation of warfare, the desolation of our planet by our careless consumerism. I have longed to make a difference in the world. Over and over again, though, it seems that the necessity and priority has been to straighten out my own inner world. Without doing so, I could not function. Depression, compulsion, grief, the seemingly unmanageable logistics of keeping myself in job and home have been all-consuming at times and have eaten up vast amounts of time and energy. When I ignored those signals of my own inner need, tried to plow through them, as I did in my 20s, they just got louder. The waves got bigger until I was choking beneath them.
And so, by my thirties, I’d learned that the Borg were right: resistance is futile. Ironically, it was not the tide of my family history that was irresistible for me. Rather, it was the tide of health and healing that sprung up from within me and created the tension between where I’d come from and where I was going. I seemed to do much better when I simply dove into the stream’s center and explored the healing and stayed away from the more turbulent shallows. I found I was not so much the cook as the noodle.
My childhood had taught me to ignore myself, to care only for the needs of others at the expense of anything I loved or enjoyed. I eventually learned, though, that I can’t actually honor the needs of others and their loves and their pleasure without honoring my own. After all, if every other human being is worthy of a meaningful life…what makes me different? I had to accept that I’m as worthy – or as unworthy – as all the rest. Saying that the needs of others were important while my own were not simply created a dissonance that grew too loud to ignore.
My son has repeatedly been the source of this lesson for me. I look at him, and while I see him, I also see the child I was (and still am inside). I am fascinated by his loves: the beloved ball, his See-n-Say. He clutched his toy radio to his chest this week, saying, “My!” with such delight that it brought tears to my eyes. I know the time will come soon when “my” and “mine” will probably not be the words I love to hear from my son’s lips, but for now, it brings me as much pleasure as it brings him. I’m seeing personality and passions of my little boy bubble to the surface, and it touches me. In seeing him do these things, I realize that the abuses I experienced in my childhood were undeserved -- no small realization. In learning to love Isaac’s preferences, I am also learning to value my own.
