Archive for the ‘Family’ Category
The Skinny on the New Place
This place is nice. Not large, but softly carpeted and not a billion years old and cozy in a way that Rosemary’s and my place never really was. We were always a little scared to sit on the ground there. Or walk around barefoot. It’s further from campus, which is a deterrent from going to class (you have to leave 20 minutes in advance to make it to the closest building and you always arrive a little sweaty, no matter how cold it is outside), but so is being a senior. It is close to the BART station and a bunch of restaurants and the bus stop and a STARBUCKS, though, so I’m not complaining (too loudly).
And Then There Were Too Few
He’s dead. My Great Uncle 5, who’d been the delight of his family, the bright intelligent playmate of my father’s youth. This morning. I can’t say anyone’s surprised at it, but no surprise is a different thing altogether from no sadness.
I think there’s a part of me what thought he would get better, that despite everything he would pick himself up and recover from the mess he’s become. It was a slim chance, but there’s always a chance. Except now; you don’t recover from death. In some ways it’s a blessing that the dead stay dead. It’s one of those rules you’re glad exists…as long as you and yours are exempt from it.
My grandmother died loved, satisfied, happy, and if I’m guessing, at least I have good reason to think so. Not so for my Great Uncle 5. I don’t know very much about the situation, and I’d hate to presume, but I don’t think I’d be entirely wrong to claim that he died a broken man. At least he didn’t leave much behind; that’s the only mercy.
It’s a sad time for our family, in face of these two tragedies. It makes us reconsider our own mortality; it makes us realise that there’s more death to come. There’s always more death to come. Still, what can we do but let it?
Great Grandfather and Lucky Number Five
For some reason, even writing this post feels wrong. Like it’s taboo. Like I’m taking a sensitive subject meant to be kept inside the family and exposing it to whatever micro-inch of the world that reads my blog (and if my blog is what it was created to be, then I’m the only person who knows of its existence). I feel callous, crude, and traitorous. And yet, here I am, plowing on.
My father’s father’s father, that is, my great grandfather, had six children, all of them boys save for the last little girl. My grandfather was his first child (my father was his first child, and I am my father’s first child; interestingly, my father’s mother, my mother, and both my mother’s parents were also first-borns), and after him came another five baby boys. They grew up. They grew apart. Moved away from my great grandfather’s house in JinZhou, China, but every once in a while, very rarely, will all my great grandfather’s children get together to visit the now extremely aged, incredibly wizened old man, now past ninety, who was the single root from which we all sprang.
Family Matters
Though I may not always agree with them, heck, agree with them most of the time, and though sometimes I may wish some very bad things for them (to my credit, this hasn’t happened since I was maybe 16), I have always liked my father and my little brother. I think that if there weren’t blood ties binding us together and making me love them in a subjective manner, I would still think they’re decent, likeable people.
A Revelation of Sorts
So there was just another blow-up in the household. And for the first time in seventeen (soon to be eighteen) years, it wasn’t aimed at me. As I stirred my uncooporative thai tea and listened surruptitiously (sp?), I began to notice key signs: the grandparents retreating back to their room upstairs where they converse in undertones, the grandmother sneaking to the top of the stairs to watch the going-ons, the mother, clearly disapproving of the father’s methods yet still agreeing with his standpoint wordlessly busying herself about the household tasks, the father shouting and hitting and screaming at the little kid who is defiant but too scared to show it, with tears streaming down his face, cowering and boiling inside.
And I came to a not-so-brilliant realization: that little kid was me. Those tears had been mine. That father, mine. That mother, those silent grandparents…all mine. How many times now had that been me cowering, mentally bristling at the self assumed unfairness of it all? How many times have I run crying to my room where I slam the door and sit on the bed, sobbing? And now I’m watching it all as an outsider, an observer. The jaded older sister who sits and watches and remembers when she was a little girl (or a sixteen year old, for that matter) and it all happened to her.
It’s hard to say what I got out of this experience. An understanding. A sense of…I dunno, exactly. My brother was in the wrong today, even I got that. But my dad did go a little too far. And I’m not entirely sure my brother wasn’t entitled to “talking back”. It’s a start, at least, to my unraveling of this whole scenario. Maybe when I’m older, I’ll understand.
Suffice to say, this event has at least accomplished one thing: the ruining of the mood of the entire household. Forgive my french, but I feel like crap. I really, really want to leave the house, but I dont want to ask. I dont want that same not-yet-completely-diffused-anger to turn to me. I dont want to be that crying little girl again. But I want to see JT. It’s strange, but the first person I wanted to see was him. Well, maybe not so strange, seeing as firstly, he’s always free and his house always open to his friends, and secondly, I’ve been feeling especially close with him recently. But it’s so much past that I-like-him-he-likes-me boy-girl love. I dont want to date him or kiss him or marry him. I just want him to be my friend forever, corny as it sounds. And hey, a few hugs wouldn’t hurt, either.
But anyway, if anyone has experience in this sort of buisness, it’s me. In a few hours (well, days, more like) this will all blow over. The household will return to normal…until the next episode, that is. And so it will go on, episode after episode, until my brother too turns eighteen. That’s just the way of things. And strangely, my thoughts right now are “it ain’t so bad”. Maybe it’s because I’m finally close to understanding how this family works (and a few years too late, at that). Maybe I’ve learned to appreciate.
Then again, maybe it’s because of the knowledge that I’ve escaped the viscious cycle, and I’ll never have to be that little girl again.
I’m (almost) free.
If You Took Everything That My Life Has Ever Been
and put it through a blender, you might have some idea of where I am now.
I am so damn tied down. I look at my life, and I have nothing. I couldn’t survive a day out on the streets; if I didn’t get raped and mugged first, I’d be laying dead in some gutter somewhere. I’ve got nothing. Brand spanking nothing. I’m a dependent. Yeah, I’ll admit it. I’ll say it again:
I’m a fucking dependant
