Family is Complicated (and the birds go tweet…)

Family is Complicated (and the birds go tweet…)

Monday, February 19, 2024

AKA Family Day

In the “About” section of this blog, (https://interrobangmehardbaby.blog/about/) I say that I will cover the broad strokes of my life, including complicated family and friendship dynamics. So far I have avoided the topic of family and complicated friendships, except for one post about my experience finding a previously unknown family member through 23andMe. Every time I think about writing about my family I get so overwhelmed that I just can’t even. So I don’t. But today is Family Day in my province and I thought I would force myself to venture into this sticky, murky, funky thing called family. 

There are so many things I could go into that I have had difficulty composing this piece in my head, which is what I usually do prior to actually writing. My family of origin is complex and riddled with intergenerational trauma. The family that I made fell apart with such acrimony and deceit that it has left me unable to trust and kept me single for almost a decade. Fool me once, shame on you, but he fooled me twice, so I carry a ton of shame. Some of my “found family” has hurt me more than my blood family. I’ve had no idea where to start, but I think that I have finally landed on a topic that usually raises an eyebrow when I mention it to people. I may go off on a tangent or two. I apologize in advance if this jumps around or is choppy, but it occurs to me that family is exactly that: scattered and difficult to navigate, also sometimes nauseating.

I was not born and raised in the city in which I currently reside. I’ve been here for sixteen years now and have had the good fortune to make several friends who feel like family. Many of them supported me through the final breakdown of my marriage; we had been separated years prior and attempted to reconcile. Being newly single in a city that is clear across the country from the one I grew up in was beyond isolating, especially as a single working mom. Fortunately, some “found family” in the form of close friends made sure that we were never alone on holidays and I am so grateful for them. 

My in-laws had lived with us for a few years before our final split, and had left the city when we moved into a smaller house that didn’t have a basement for them. They had lived with us to take care of my child River while it was in preschool, moving across the country to live in our basement. My ex has always had a complicated relationship with his mother, but he said he was happy that she was coming to lend a hand. Very shortly after she and her husband arrived, his mood shifted HARD and he refused to talk to her or even acknowledge that she had spoken for most of the four years they lived with us. It made the emotional climate of our home beyond toxic, and my in-laws were a nervous wreck. He’s since been diagnosed with a significant mood disorder which explains a lot of things, but he completely cut her and her husband out after we split up. 

Once it was just River and I, alone in a still newish city, I had a choice to make. My ex, Garrett, had decided that he was never contacting his mother again so she would not be able to see her grandchild. I could not do that to her and her husband, as they hadn’t done anything to warrant his decision, so I have kept them in “my” family. A decade has passed, and long story short, my ex in-laws are still a big part of my life. For the past couple of years I have been the key contact for my ex father-in-law Tim who lives in long term care and has advanced Alzheimer’s. Every now and then, he gets sick enough that they think he’s dying, and I have to help out at the last minute with moving furniture or packing or whatnot because his stuff can not be there even one day after he passes. I was in the middle of a move myself once, and the night before the movers were coming I got a call that they didn’t think that Tim would live another day. I dropped everything to go and be with him. This man had moved across the country to live with me and care for my child. Just because we were no longer “family” due to my divorce did not mean I was going to let him die alone. 

He has “almost died” a few times now, but he’s still truckin’. People think that it’s strange that I continue to visit him, as there is no familial obligation and he doesn’t recognize anyone any longer, but I tend to think of family as the people who show up for you, and he did show up for me. Many times. I will always show up for him. Usually with ice cream, because he loves it, and I know that in some part of his brain he knows that I am family. 

My ex mother-in-law Sammy is still my child’s grandmother. I feel that keeps her related to me even though I have divorced her son. If he hadn’t cut her out, or if he had at least facilitated keeping River in her life, then I probably wouldn’t have remained close with her. She’s always shown up, both literally and figuratively, so I show up for her. She moved back to our hometown for a couple of years recently to be with her family following a difficult bout with cancer, which is why I took over as her husband’s point person with the long term care centre here. I was helping her with her move and a friend asked me if she was my mom. I always get a confused raised eyebrow when I say she’s my mother-in-law, because people know I’m divorced, so now for clarity I say my ex mother-in-law but that just makes the looks of confusion a bit more intense. Their eyebrows are like a sideways interrobang as they try and figure it out. 

My own mother Nancy moved across the country to buy a house with me a year and a half ago, so I now have some immediate family around which is so comforting and lovely and… complicated. She is a joy to have around but I know that it is hard for her to live with me, as I am a clutterbug and she has OCD around tidiness. Then my ex mother-in-law Sammy recently moved back to town and stayed with us while she found an apartment. It’s been pretty special to have some time with my mom, my child, and my child’s other grandmother. The two women who were with me while I laboured (for 50 hours, but that’s another story) to give birth to River were with us on River’s 19th birthday this year, the first time we’ve all been under the same roof in years. 

Families split up and people let us down. Sometimes rifts are permanent and we often do not get closure, especially in difficult divorces. In my experience, people tend to pay more mind to those who leave them or treat them poorly than they do to the people who show up. I’m trying very hard to do the opposite; to clear the past traumas from my mind and spend my time and energy on those who are here by choice. 

My marriage still affects me and often my past experiences sabotage my ability to be in a relationship. I have been in a relationship for a bit over a year, and in trauma therapy for the past two years; my past interferes with my present far more often than I would like. It is so difficult to stay in the here and now, especially when an emotional trigger hits hard and I find myself flashing back to intense, awful moments that made me question my sanity and my basic intrinsic worth. I worry that this will never end, that my mind will forever flash back to moments in which I was made to question my perceptions and intuition. It takes hard work and a lot of courage to process the past so that it won’t ruin the future, but it’s the present and the people who show up for it that deserve our mindful attention. They are really all we have in this world, and I plan to enjoy every moment, even the interrobang ones.