Gone for the holidays

I haven't allowed my husband to see me cry in that ugly, snot-dripping, hyperventilating way since we left Barbados, where that sight was a common occurrence.  As in most relationships I have had throughout my life, I am cautious and read the other person's reactions before I go on willy-nilly just expressing the hell out of myself.  That's part of my raisin'.  I know that my real feelings, the true strength of them, can blow the roof off the house and that, generally speaking, "nobody got time fuh dat."  When I am all love and light, when I cannot give enough of myself, when I pour in and cannot see the space between myself and another person (most often my children, sometimes my husband), it is so good to be around me.  I am mistaken for easy-going and good-natured and happy go lucky to those who have only experienced me this way.  Oh, how I wish that I were.

When my husband told me last night that he would be leaving to work during the Thanksgiving holiday not on Wednesday as expected, but today, Monday, immediately, I just went silent.  I wasn't even holding it in.  I was stunned.  I just slipped back behind myself, behind the knot in my heart, in my stomach, the knot that ran the cord of all my chakras from my coccyx to the crown of my head, and I disintegrated.  I could not look him in the eye.  Did not say a word to him.  Suddenly, I was very, very busy.  There was laundry to be done, knapsacks to be packed, lists to make and double check.  I got to yelling at the girls to clean their playroom and mumbled on about how they would all be sorry if Mommy was not able to take care of everything like she does.  But I did not cry.

I didn't cry because I always tell myself, as I have even written here many times, that so many others have it worse--soldiers' families, police officers, essential emergency personnel.  They do not get to spend holidays together.  They find ways to endure.  But our situation is not like theirs.  Because we, WE, we? chose this.  Because he is a private chef, my husband makes much more money working the holidays than he does during his regular schedule.  This is because I know, we know, everyone knows that taking a man away from his family during this time is a huge sacrifice and that he must be well compensated.  For years I have accepted, even preached, the value of this package on our family's financial situation, have asked friends and neighbors to help me give the girls the best Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's possible, have sat up, without tears, putting toys together, writing notes from Santa, eating the cookies and carrots, then gone quietly to bed next to the girls hoping I've pulled it off again.

Without tears because if I let myself feel what I am really missing, I may never stop crying.  I have spent the better part of our relationship longing for him, wanting him closer, wanting him to be with me.  Long before there were children, the game of cat and mouse was being played.  I chase and he runs or at least hides. He might hide behind work or his culture, his language or his accent.  Before we were 'we' he hid behind his bad marriage, a miserable divorce, financial and professional fears, it doesn't matter.  He is hiding.  He does not want to be seen all the way and certainly does not want to see me for much the same reason as I cannot cry in front of him.  And so I hide too.  Hide behind the busy work, the busy-ness of being a mother and a wife, of hosting holidays without him, don't dare tell him I'd rather have him than the income, too afraid he will say "but we need it" which will make me second guess how important I am, we are, anyone is to anyone.  And that is not the way I think.  It cannot be.

When you have chased for love your entire life and it sits down in front of you to catch its breath and then runs off again, it is so easy to take up that game.  I am playing again.  It is so familiar.  My experience of love in my youth is the reason I try so hard to show my children how to give it and receive it.  I don't want them on the prowl for anything that looks like it, seems like it, but just isn't.  I don't want them to suffer more than they have to for love and a peaceful heart.  When they cry for their father, express how much they miss him, need him, want him, I support them but have not shown them how it hurts to be apart.  I don't want to blow their minds.  I don't want to blow my own.  But if they never see how to love from us, if they learn only to hide, to camouflage, keep stony-faced when they are full to bursting, they will be doomed.  They will disengage from their families, disconnect, and forget to tell the people they love just how much so and forget to beg them to stay.

Today was a bad day because Didier left this morning, a busy Monday morning that required too much attention to too much else, so I kissed him quickly and said goodbye.  It is the first of too many goodbye kisses that signify he is gone for the holidays.  We have done this for years and it never gets easier, but it looks the same every time.  A fairly innocuous kiss goodbye and then days or weeks of separation where we pretend that being apart like this is normal.  We ask how the other is doing without really wanting the answer, without really answering.  The ugly, twisted face came hours later after school drop off and three stops at three different grocery stores.  What I don't know, what I wonder, what I hope, is that somewhere he is making the ugly-crying face for me.  That sometimes he is the cat and I am the mouse and that somewhere in the middle we can meet, hold on, and stop this vicious cycle.


(c) Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Father's Day

I have to confess that no matter how hard I've tried to distance myself from some of my dad's behavior, there is no denying it.  My mom is as cool as a cucumber, but my dad, all moist-eyed and sensitive, all curious and excitable, all passion and rage and angst and joy, is me.  A girlfriend of mine has told me repeatedly to cherish the time with my parents, to celebrate and relish who we are to each other while we can as both of her parents are no longer living.  I have listened, though often not heard her because I am all moist-eyed and sensitive, all passion and rage and angst and joy.  I am, in so many ways, the Mini to his Me. 

He and my mother visited this Father's Day, stayed in our home for the first time (not including Barbados which was not actually ever our home), spent real adult time, played with the girls, went on our errands, meandered through our town, and enjoyed ourselves together.  We visited with family friends and I felt adult and grown and proud to be with them.  I am not sure if it is my midlife crisis which looks more like actualization than crushing breakdown, my recent interest in meditation and reiki, my return to dance, or the shifting of our collective consciousness, but I have found acceptance of who and what I am and therefore in who and what everyone around me is.  I have found the desperate need to hold on to past hurts and wounds to be exhausting and have forgiven them, though more than likely not forgotten them. (I am, after all, a Penn.)

I have spent much of my life recognizing my role as a member of my family and feeling that I was failing miserably.  No matter how this thinking came about, I felt overwhelming pressure at being "the daughter of/big sister of/first grandchild of."  The burden of carrying on the line of two incredible families, the credits, achievements, and successes of which are extraordinary by any standard, but given that they were done by those poor and black, largely undereducated, during the dark days of our country's history, made them mythic, epic, heroic.  I felt like a straight up fraud.  Middle class, indulged, allowed my mood swings and artistic tendencies.  I didn't have to give up my dreams, whatever they were, in order to put food on the table or a roof over my head.  The fight over outright racist and sexist policy was fought on their backs while they were striving for the promised American dream.  I had a kind of survivor's guilt because I did not struggle to achieve what was seemingly handed to me, because the racism, sexism, and white privilege that I faced was more subtle, because I had been walked to third base by a family that persevered in getting into the stadium and onto the field.  Though I know now that I did not need to apologize for myself, I was then so sorry and ashamed.

Under the weight of that, my father and I would look at each other, mirror to reflection, reflection to mirror and declare, under our breaths, "What?"  There was so much expectation, so much want, so much need and no real way to express it.  So there was moist-eyed, sensitive, curious, and excitable passion, rage, angst, and joy.  I would cower in his presence, hold my breath, not feel safe expressing myself as I did when "away from home."  I was miserable to be around, was either pulled in and tense or exploded when provoked(like someone I know), hated family get-togethers because I did not feel like I could be myself, because what I reflected back to Mr. Penn was too much for him to see.  It might even still be. 

But there are new facets to this diamond.  The glittering, fascinating shine of my children.  And in my children and how they are being raised and how they behave and love and give, I believe that my dad and I can share something, love something together.  We can see that part of each other that loves, that cares, that is all moist-eyed and longing.  Like two shy, nervous baby birds we just might dare to fly, helping each other do so but also concentrating on our own flight.  As I see him soar, I feel joy.  He might not tell me, but he feels the same for me.  We have this story to tell, this epic tale in which to contribute.  Like that game where one person starts the story and another picks it up where he leaves off and then another picks up and so on and so forth until an incredible tale is told, we are living and weaving our lives. 

We are much alike, but not entirely the same.  My father wanted to be a journalist but that gig did not pay well enough for a young man who had the obligation to help put his younger siblings through school as his older siblings had done for him.  He has something to say but often chooses his words carefully, sparingly, and certainly does not express his feelings or wear his heart on his sleeve.  I, on the other hand, did not have that financial responsibility, did not make a choice based on monetary need, cry, laugh, love, freak, and respond to every stimulus, and even when I might keep my mouth shut, cannot do so!  I want to say something; I have to, come what may.  I respect his choices, his sacrifices, and know that he loves us.  I hope, hope, hope that he feels the same for me because this Father's Day, I allowed myself to love him like I did as a girl.  With wonder, curiosity, awe, and the first twinkling of autonomy that a toddler shows when she realizes that she and her parents are not indeed the same entity.  It was truly a great day to celebrate having and being a father.



(c) Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.

Our brother's keeper

My three year old is quite precocious and wise beyond her years.  I love talking to her and her big sister about whatever interests them, though we don't talk about murders or attacks or death of any kind which terrifies Lily and leaves her reeling for days.  But we do tell them honestly how we feel about certain things, in an age appropriate way.  No questions are off limits.  Complex subjects are broken down but not dumbed down.  We talk about God, religion, sex roles and gender stereotypes, marriage, politics, money, meditation, spirituality.  I trust that my people can find the center, the core concepts.  Tonight as we were going to bed, her big sister long ago fast asleep due to the cold that is kicking her little behind, Virginie said to me, "Do you remember that boy (Virginie still refers to all males as boys.)who was lying in the street when we went to New York City?"  I did remember the man but was rather surprised that she did, as we'd been there together more than six months prior for a birthday party. 

"Yes," I answered.  I do remember that man.  He was homeless.  Remember that I told you that he had no home?"

"The street was his home.  He lived there," she announced.  She wasn't proud, just stating matter of factly that he must live somewhere, so the place where he lay must be it.  She sat quietly for a moment, which for anyone who knows my dear girl knows is no small feat.  Then she said, "Can he drive his car to his house somewhere else?"  To which I replied, "I don't think he has a car either, baby, or a house somewhere else."

Her little brow furrowed and she stared into the darkness for a minute before she said, "We have to help him, Mama.  Papa gets jobs.  Maybe he can show him how to get one too."

"Maybe," I said while brushing her hair from her face and trying to gently lull her to sleep.  I lay there in the darkness, missing my husband who is working through this holiday season, and thought, This baby is right.  We have to help this man.  We have to help people.  We have to help each other.

I, too, have been guilty of turning in, working on my own issues, my own problems, my own story.  I have gotten used to letting go of my community, not asking of it, and being slow to offer my assistance or service, assuming either that someone else will do it or fearing calling unwanted attention to me or my action.  I have figured that the connections were too personal, too scary, left me too vulnerable to attack or to love.  Whenever I have had the chance to participate, I've felt so incredible, so alive, so connected, so tangibly, vibrantly, extraordinarily human.  I have been reminded by this small girl who somehow saw the connection between us all and asked not if we would help, but demanded we should.  I say this so much when it relates to real tragedy, to the furthest reaches of human suffering and need, but it is also true in our every day.  We are our brother's keeper.  We need to see each other, consider each other, support each other.  Want to.

Strangely, I too, could not get that particular homeless man's face out of my mind.  Maybe it was because I could see him in the distance as the girls and I were about to pass and I mulled just what I would tell them when the question was inevitably asked.  But for days after, when I thought of the conversation between us, I wondered how I'd found it so easy to explain that there was a man, red-faced and cold, clinging to a box, sleeping on the sidewalk in the city of their birth, and that I was able to say it so matter-of-factly. 

I remember as a child, seeing my first homeless person.  It was the early eighties and we'd gone into the city to do something, probably see a show or go to a museum as was usually the case.  I was older than my girls are now and homeless people we not commonplace. As more and more people found themselves unable to keep up with the excess and striving of the 80s, coupled with the closing of mental health facilities that saw many with mental disabilities actually released to the street to fend for themselves, an invisible, underground (so to speak) population grew alongside those of us living above ground.  I was terrified of the man and woman I saw.  They seemed out of a movie.  Which is, frankly, why it was probably so easy for so many adults to consider them unreal.  It was hard to look at them and see their faces, to look them in the eye, let alone consider their stories.  Their real life, human stories.  Stories the same as those I or others I knew might tell.  I never forgot them and my feeling that as a society, as a community, we were choosing to allow these people to live out of our sight, rather than bringing them back into the fold.  I was just a kid but I knew that this just didn't seem right.

I'm not sure when and where we let go of each others' hands.  Maybe we were never holding them in the first place, and it is a fantasy of my youth that we were meant to care for one another, to look out for one another, to try to lift each and every one of us from our place on the sidewalk, physically and metaphorically, to allow even those living in parallel universes to be seen and acknowledged from time to time.  Some people think when we are young we can still see ghosts and spirits and as we age, we lose our connection to that world, overwhelmed are we by the material world.  We cannot see what children see right in front of their faces.  "We have to help him."  We have to help each other because we need each other.

Inherent in all the struggle we have meeting the demands of the modern world, striving for a level of success equal to that of our parents, raising our children to be decent citizens while giving them everything we can without making them completely spoiled, must be the sense, if not the realization, that we cannot leave all those people behind.  That there has already been too much of that, too much "going for mine," and that it has not brought comfort or peace.  The "otherness" of homeless people, black people, white people, foreigners and expats, gay people, straight people, people with disabilities of any kind, people who think differently than we, rich people, poor people, anything that doesn't look, on the surface, just as we envision ourselves, has allowed us to ignore each other, to step over each other, walk around each other, justify killing each other, justify fearing each other, set up communities where we don't have to look at each other or be with each other.  But that does not negate the fact that this man was lying down on the ground, living, breathing, sleeping and that many others actually and metaphorically are doing the same.  And we should help them.

My baby wants to help him.  It's my job to keep it that way. 


(c)  Copyright 2012.  Repatriated Mama: Back the Suburban Grind.