About Family

My mother put me out of her house when I was 24 years old.



When I say "put me out" that's exactly what I mean, though she denies it whenever the topic comes up, which isn't much anymore. My mother is a firm believer in detente; as long as I'm not openly doing something she disagrees with, we can get along. The minute I vary openly from her path, we are instantly in conflict.



Notice something in that last paragraph? Twice, the word: "openly".



My mother is fairly sure that LJ lives here. But she will not admit that she knows, and she repeatedly asks me "whose is that (stereo, tv, jacket, whatever)?" If I were to admit it, every phone conversation would become a guilt trip, every visit an argument. I have been through this before.



That was why she put me out. She claims I went willingly, but when it's 3:00 in the morning and someone says "you need to find somewhere else to live", the message is pretty clear. I packed all my CDs, some of my clothes, a few of my books, and I ended up at JP's mother's door. He was the reason I'd been put out--because I would not agree with my mother's ban on seeing him, because I'd seen him only that night and stayed out later than my mother thought I had a right to stay out--and he took me in. His family took me in. They treated me better than my own family.



A couple of days later, my mother came to the school where I worked and tried to get me to come home. No way, I said. JP and I spent the next three weeks sleeping on the floor of his old bedroom, and then we got a storefront apartment with a den for $400 a month in Wicker Park.



Ten months later I called her in the middle of the night--we hadn't talked in a month at least, and since I'd left our calls were brief and angry--and told her JP was dead. She said she'd come and get me; I said no, I had to go to the police station first, but I'd come back when I was done. She knew something was going wrong with me, but never imagined the truth of it.



For the next week I lay in my old room in the grip of heroin withdrawal. Physically it was just wildly uncomfortable--there was worse to come, with later habits--but the physical pain had the effect of keeping my mind off what had happened. I remember going to a hospital where my mother wanted to check me in for treatment, but I had no insurance and she wasn't willing to mortgage the house. It was a good choice, really. It wouldn't have worked, not in the long run. I remember going to JP's mother's house--where everything had started and everything had ended--and getting my clothes and our cats. I remember asking his mother if I could take some of his clothes--we had a shared wardrobe of flannel shirts and men's jeans, and I wanted some things that had special significance. Of course she said yes.



I remember his funeral, and the gathering afterwards. I remember the look on Justin's face when I told him the truth I'd been asked to keep secret: that it was heroin, not an asthma attack, that had killed JP. Justin was like his brother. He never spoke to me again.



Other than that, I remember nothing of that week.



A few months later, on my 26th birthday, the day before I planned to leave for North Carolina, my mother told me a story. She told me that she'd known there was something wrong with me--the things I was doing were so out of line for me--and she said that the morning of the day I'd called, she had gone to church as usual. After the mass was over, she said, she'd kneeled down at the front of the church and prayed for me to come home. "I prayed for a miracle," she told me, "and that night was the night you called."



That was the day I decided I would have nothing more to do with my mother's God.



When I moved into this house, my mother made a small request of me (as opposed to the larger request, implicit in all our conversations from the moment I'd announced my intentions: that I not move into this neighborhood, that I find some nice quiet suburban condo.) She asked that I ask for an unlisted phone number because, in her words, "I don't want my brother and sister to know about this." My cousins--even the ones I like, even the one or two who might understand--are told, if they ask, that I'm still living in my old Rogers Park apartment.



I am, no pun intended, the black sheep of the family. I was a source of division even when I was very small; my cousin April, born two weeks after me to my mother's oldest sister, had some learning issues, while I was testing off the charts and developing a very snarky sense of humor that the adults in my mother's family didn't understand, let alone appreciate. I was too much like my father, not enough like them.



I was also extraordinarily vulnerable--a "crybaby", as my cousins phrased it. It was easy for them to get under my skin. My mother saw it, but claimed it would help me "get a thicker skin" as she put it. Later she allowed as how she should have stopped it, maybe, but she was "trying to keep the peace". None of the other adults ever curbed their kids. I knew a lot about adults from a very young age--that they were hypocrites, mainly, and that many of them were weak.



I never understood entirely why my mother chose to have a child. Maybe because all the sibs had theirs already, or maybe to prove to her family once and for all that she was not, as her brother had once accused her of being, a lesbian. After all--35 years old and unmarried? In a CATHOLIC family? There simply MUST be something WRONG with her, right?



But once I was born, I think, I lost my novelty to her. I developed a personality--a sense of humor, an attitude, interests that were entirely unlike hers. I was a challenge because I was not another limb she could control--I was not an extra arm for her, or an extra foot, or whatever it was that would fill that space I was supposed to fill. I was a person, a strange, lonely little eccentric person with no defenses and a big vocabulary. I started out strange, and just got stranger.



Along the way I tried to make her happy. I tried to be good enough--smarter than all the rest, because if someone else got a better grade, what did it matter that my grade was good? An A didn't count if someone else got an A+. I tried to be the person she seemed to want, even if what she wanted was different from day to day.



When I was 10, just before Christmas, I had a crush on a boy who had a crush on my friend. I told my friend I'd write her a letter because I wanted to ask her how I could get this boy to like me. It was too dangerous to pass such things during school, so I sent it through the mail. When she replied, my mother asked me what it was. I haltingly tried to explain without explaining too much--and at some point, when she asked why I was talking to other people about these things and not her, I said something about "I didn't think you would understand."



She said "Thanks, pal," and walked down the basement stairs, and I knew I'd made a terrible mistake. I always knew when my mother was angry, and always did the same thing--chasing after her, pleading for forgiveness even when I didn't know exactly what it was I'd done.



I will never forget what happened next. I went down into the laundry room, poked my head in the door, and said "Mom?" The next words out of her mouth were "Get out of my sight, you ungrateful little brat!!!"



After the four-hour tirade about what a horrible, horrible, disloyal person I was, continuing til well after my dad was home--after that was over, she didn't speak to me for about four or five days. I can remember pleading with her, telling her she could take back all my Christmas presents if she'd just talk to me and forgive me.



Ten years old.



By the time I got to high school, I had learned that it was bad policy to be honest with her about anything real. I still tried from time to time, and always got the same results. I remember one time after I'd started seeing Chris, my first boyfriend. I was at a friend's house up north--by that time I had inherited my dad's car--and Chris had called me because he was having family problems and he really wanted to see me. I knew my mother wanted me to come home, so I drove all the way from Niles back out to the south side, to ask if I could go see Chris all the way back up north. I told her what the problem was and that he really wanted me to come over, but that I thought I would come home and check in like she'd asked.



She said no. "I don't want you putting that much wear and tear on my car." (She had her own car. But anything that could be used to control me instantly became "hers", even if she never used or needed it.) I learned it was better never to ask.



To this day, my mother complains that I never tell her anything, never ask her opinion; that if she asks me something about myself, or gives me any advice I haven't asked for, I just say "yes" to whatever it is, then go about things my own way. Once when she said "You never ask for my opinion," I told her "Maybe I would, if you wouldn't GIVE it so damn often!!"



When I was very young, there was a word that kept coming up around the dinner table at all the family gatherings. From my school friends, I knew it wasn't a good thing to call someone, but the connotation of it wasn't entirely clear. How could it be? The school, the block, the neighborhood, were all uniformly white. That Word was simultaneously the worst thing you could accuse someone of being, and the least relevant insult in the arsenal.



Generally it was my Uncle Bill, April's dad, who said the word most. Auntie Cyn, April, and Shelley used it a lot too, but Uncle Bill used it with a special venom. Uncle Bill, it was explained, was a cop, and he worked in one of the worst neighborhoods, so he knew about Those People.



If that was the case, I thought, what was Uncle Dave's excuse? He was a shipping manager. Or Aunt Linda? She just stayed at home. For that matter, what was my dad's excuse? He used it once in a great while, too. Mom told me it had something to do with his mother having to sell their house because They were moving in.



I heard the word, and as I grew older I started to understand a little bit of what they were talking about and why, but it always stayed on the surface, like a skim of grease. Their hatred never sunk in. I wonder sometimes if that wasn't just Fate making my path a little easier.



Because when I got to high school, I met some of Them. I had been strenuously warned about avoiding Those Boys, because they would all just LOVE to get themselves a white girl. (This was always said like we were some valuable trophy, something that would elevate Them above their allegedly pre-ordained lowly status.) But on my first day of school, I met Darius. He seemed harmless enough--more like me than most of the kids in my grade school, really. We were both geeky and loved science fiction. We liked most of the same music--Phil Collins, Genesis, etc. In fact, there was nothing dangerous about him at all. I wondered what the hell my family had been talking about all those years.



When we got to that stage teenagers get to, where they start with the parties and the gatherings and all that, every once in a while they would happen on the same day as a family event. So I would hang around long enough for dinner and dessert, and then I would leave. But of course, at that point, I was still in the average kid's predicament: no transportation. But Darius had a car. And not just any car--a really sweet car. (Okay, so it was his mom's. But it was still a car, and that's nothing to sneeze at when you're 15 and your parents won't let you get your permit yet.) So Darius would come to the house to pick me up.



You can imagine how well that went over with my family. And I'm sure what wasn't said behind my back was probably said to my mother's face--even though I made it clear that there was nothing going on between me and Darius. (Not then, anyway.) It was based on that assurance, along with her persistent belief that I wouldn't even THINK about getting serious with ANY boy, that allowed my mother to permit that friendship.



But when JP came along a few years later, and I left my husband, there was no spin control that could protect her from her family's wrath--if they knew. So she made sure they never found out. I was under strict orders never to say anything about what had really happened. I took that even further--I just stopped dealing with my mother's family. I never liked those people much, anyway. None of them know the central event of my life up til now; none of them know anything about it. None of them know anything about where I am now, or who I am, or who I'm with, or where I live, or why.



And so one day I will be really alone in this world. My dad has one surviving sibling, and most of the nieces and nephews have always lived out West, so I never knew them well. My mother's people don't know me anymore, and wouldn't want to know me if they did. I hear from my mother about things they said when they called, or when she saw them; they have only aged, not changed. All the cousins, my uncle informed my mom a few days before the election, would be voting Republican. He was horrified when my mother told him I would be voting for Kerry. "Well--I mean--you have to DO something about that!!!" he said. "You have to CONVERT her!"



We managed to laugh about it. My mother voted Bush too, but she's long since learned the folly of trying to talk politics with me. "You're just such a .....radical," she says, when I talk about how ill-served the people are in my neighborhood, or how much I'll hate it when the rich eventually claim this block and make it another Lincoln Park. We never talk about race at all, except if she thinks I need to be made to feel guilty about my way of life. "You're abandoning your race," she's said more than once, and I think Abandoning my race? My god, woman, I'm a freaking NASCAR fan. I still think the nadir of the entertainment world came the day Kurt Cobain shot himself. How much whiter can I be? But of course, that's not the point she's making. We never talk about the REAL standard of "abandonment", which has nothing to do with what I believe and everything to do with who I sleep next to.



Though she'll never accept my choice of who to fuck, she's starting to understand, maybe, that I'm serious about what I believe. She once said "Sometimes I think you just believe these things to make me upset." It would be easier for her if this was just a long-delayed adolescent rebellion; she would be able to call it "just a phase" and actually believe it herself. But I'm 34 years old, and there's precious little time for me to "grow out of it", the way she's always said. So instead we just don't talk about it. It is accepted as a given that LJ does not live here, because that's what I say, but she feels the need to ask anyway, because she knows.



And all the while, I'm sure she wonders what happened to that tractable little baby in the pictures, the one who couldn't stand to make her mother angry. She wonders, I'm sure, what went wrong; when I became this individual she doesn't know or understand.



I could tell her, if she asked--if I thought she'd listen.