when last we spoke

Source: https://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-to-cope-with-a-toxic-family-relationship/ 

I occasionally dabble in my family tree. 

This activity darkly amuses me, as I live largely free of apron strings. I have long found it too vexing for me to suffer proximity to most of the living branches of my tree. I have almost nothing in common with most of my relatives, and certainly I am not close with most. This is all just a polite way of saying I generally cannot stand a huge swath of my blood relatives, from both sides of my family creek, paternal and maternal. Yet I find the actual history parts -- who was born where, who died when, tidbits from newspapers and wedding or birth announcements -- to be a pleasing kind of puzzle, combining actual history with personal spurs from my lineage. 

In trolling amongst unknown branches, tied to the many women whom my paternal grandfather married and had offspring, I sometimes run into someone still alive but with whom the family "fell out" or lost touch. (If ghosting one's relatives was an Olympic sport, I come from a long line of champions.) There are so many relatives I have not seen or spoken to in three or more decades. And these are first cousins, mind you, the children of my parents' siblings! No "long-lost" here, except in terms of "lost contact." And even then it is misleading to say, "lost," as if one of my parents dropped the line of communication and didn't realize it. No, these are mutually-held hurt feelings and bitter anger driving sections of my family into Mere Strangers Now. 

I recently talked to a first cousin I had not spoken to since before 1987. Talking to "Beverly" (name change) was surreal, for so many reasons, not the least of which was that I had not heard her voice in more than 35 years:

• I could not remember the last time I had seen or talked to her; it had to have been the mid-1980s. At three years older than me, she and I were both in the throes of burgeoning adulthood, and our lives were full enough with all the trivial and interstellar things that bedevil 19 and 23 year olds. Certainly none of it had to do with my mother being locked up in a psyche ward after she tried to kill herself multiple times, post-bombshell from my father about a divorce and the other woman being someone who was ALSO in our family. Wrap a head around that one! It was Arkansas, so the joke goes ... everyone is related to each other. 

• My mother had been checked into the "funny farm" in a west Little Rock hospital. It was early 1987. I was 19 at the time -- I did not turn 20 until July of that year -- and the last person in Bev's family that I spoke to was her mother, Aunt Sylvia. Sylvia had come up to the hospital to do whatever it was she planned to do. (Sylvia was a living, breathing, walking Battle Ax, a tense, rigid woman with a bible shoved so far up her backside I used to believe she rarely ate because she knew she could not get anything past that well-sunk book up her butt.) Sylvia was my father's older sister, an in-the-flesh "christian warrior woman" if ever there was one. As I recall in my memory, Aunt Sylvia arrived at the hospital carrying a bible and her usual air of sanctimony. She had come up to “console” us, presumably, on the heels of my mother attempting suicide. Which attempt was this: the time with the gun out at my father’s shop? The pill overdose? The garden hose snaked into the car's tail pipe in the garage? And where WAS my delinquent, misbehaving father then, as I and my brother sat stunned and dispirited in the hospital waiting area? In my mind's eye, I only remember seeing Sylvia striding in, 10-feet-tall and bulletproof in the armor of her country-fried-faith. Thankfully, I no longer remember what she said to me, but it did not sit well because I DO recall what I said to her -- that she could take her narrow bible-thumping ass elsewhere as I didn’t want to hear anything from her. And she left. And I never saw or spoke to her again. Aunt Sylvia died in 2018, so she's dead and buried now, and I certainly did not mention any of that to Beverly. Sylvia's legacy to me was the irony that such a holy-rolling "turn the other cheek" type would allow a comment made by her only niece, whilst under the gallows of her mother’s attempted suicide, to permanently usurp any contact with me, that she never got past that or offered forgiveness ... ? For me, that says all I need say about my experience of Aunt Sylvia's faith, piety and judgement, n’est pas?

• It was mostly pleasant to “catchup” with Beverly. At three years older than me -- making us closer in age to each other than I am to my husband -- it was surprising that she spoke with a vague hint of “older than me” in her tone. Uncharitably, I would call it “condescension,” but perhaps it was merely slightly patronizing. In her memory, I was and am still the adorable child with the infectious giggle that she recalled from her own childhood. Ah. But I am no longer that child, not in any shape, form, or fashion. She definitely spoke down to me in some odd way, not maliciously, just as “an older and wiser person would to a younger person.” Some patterns remain stuck for some of us. 

• In discussing parents, hers and mine, Beverly offered that when “someone ‘truly’ walks (or did she say "parents" as a verb?) with Jesus, that person raises children who know that their parents have their best interests at heart." I graciously accepted her broad, blind, and gauche pronouncement, deftly responding that I was happy that this was her experience and that she had this frame. She picked up the verbal side-step and asked me point-blank if I still believed in god. I told her no, I am “a non-theist who leans heavily toward buddhism,” to which she commented that such “could hardly be farther from christianity,” and I politely agreed. (By design, cherie, by design.)

• Beverly insinuated that her parents had raised her via Jesus, offering "she always knew that her parents loved her, that no matter what she did they would have helped her and supported her," even throwing down the chestnut of “had she been pregnant, she could have told them and they would have worked something out.” I couldn’t resist the irony, given my own experiential evidence of exactly this; I was raised in a house so authoritarian in nature I truly believed my parents would at worst kill me or best disown me, after I became pregnant before graduating high shool. So I volunteered that very thing HAD happened to me, and that at 17 I just had an abortion rather than risk being excommunicated or "killed" or disowned or whatever my virulently religious parents would have done. I also offered the amusing fact that my anti-abortion father actually agreed many decades later that I had made the right choice to abort said fetus, and that he was grateful not to have a grandchild fathered by the person I had been with at the time. 

• After saying what she had about Jesus being the secret sauce of great parenting, she failed to explain the gaping hole in her own family, after recounting a decades-long silence and avoidance between her father and her brother (her brother had “divorced them,” she said). Are we to infer then that Jesus is only effective on wounds inflicted prior to the age of consent or adulthood? NOR did she seem to glimpse her own naïveté when she mentioned she was about to let her 19-year-old niece live with her, because her sister "had had enough" with the girl. I guess Jesus is no good for that claptrap either? (Ah, the cherry-picking glory that is these rarefied Judeo-Christian religionists! Such myopia! Such self-blindness, such happy occupancy of crystalline houses and favored hobbies of stone-throwing!)

Oh it was (dare I say) "fine" to have spoken with my long-"lost" cousin. She seems to have grown into a sweet and relatively pleasant woman, with three daughters whom I have never met and with whom -- statistically for this family, miraculously, natch -- she still speaks and visits.

But there is a feeling one gets afterward, after narrowly skirting past something malodorous and singeing. After I closed the call with her, I felt this feeling, born first like a whiff of mildew and smoke on the breeze, followed by a weird internal vertigo, as if I had a little blindly walked too-close to a tar pit or the edge of vast chasm and barely avoided falling to my doom. I do not know what kind of life my cousin has led, and I do not feel particularly called to know. All of her brand of believerism -- so prevalent and overwhelming in her life -- is gone from me now, purged like a virus from my blood and synapses, and like the gene for motherhood, I do not have it and am glad of it.

"There but for the grace of my own hard-won good sense go I."