Wednesday evening ramble

A coworker stopped by today to let me know that the wife of someone we'd worked with (outside the organization) had lost a pregnancy. I was deeply saddened, but that's not the point of this post. The coworker--my former boss, before I'd moved on to another assignment--and I got to talking about how often "these things" happen. Not just complicated or lost pregnancies, but other things that you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy that, nonetheless, sometimes happen to people you know and care about. He observed that, including in his picture-perfect suburbs, there's no shortage of broken marriages, dysfunctional families, mental illness, addiction, and so on. He talked about friends who tried their best to accommodate their not-all-their spouses, and sometimes they succeeded, but at a great strain on themselves. Someone else was just telling me the same thing--was it over the weekend--that they knew someone who realized too late that he'd started a family with "the wrong person," and keeping the family together was a priority but also a sacrifice.

I thought about my dad. He seems to take it well. He is where I am: he can deal with it, but he can't be there for mom the way he could if she'd let up on the abuse.

I thought about Ani DiFranco's line from "Angry Anymore":

Night falls like people into love
We generate our own light
To compensate
For the lack of light from above

I thought about the concert where, in the middle of that song, she talks about how she doesn't know what to make of happy families.

I told my coworker that I'd "officially" fallen out with my mother and summarized why. He said it was about time, said he never liked my mom stories (he'd gotten an earful once because we were on a business trip together shortly after the holidays, so I had plenty of what I thought was amusing 'fat talk' to relate).

And that seems to be the consensus: that this separation is inevitable and good for me. It probably is, but I get no joy from it (just a respite). Contrary to what mom would argue, I get no joy from being "right." I'd just as soon not have this stuff to be right about.

I thought about how I'd dealt with my mother's abuse over the years by talking and writing about it, by mining it for humor. "Everything is copy," Nora Ephron would say.

I thought about how much comfort I take in other people's writing and other art. I thought about how F. and I went to see Dar Williams about a year ago and he hated her, or at least the concert. That night, she played "The Easy Way," which, as I'd previously written, would run through my head as I processed the breakup. I kept the wine and laughter.

But I also thought about the introductory 'paragraph' of the song, in which she talks about losing the man she thought was the love of her life to an ex of his who'd threatened to kill herself if he didn't come back to her. "I let him go where he thought he had to go," she sang. And I felt bad for the guy, not just because he lost out on being married to Dar Williams. He was stuck--he chose to be stuck--with that manipulative woman who managed to convince him (and perhaps herself) that he, not she, was responsible for her life and her happiness. How could anyone be happy in a relationship like that?

Which brings us back to the original conversation: being in that kind of a relationship is a huge strain. If someone is unwilling or unable to take responsibility for him- or herself, the work is never done for the other people in that person's life. There's are too many external strains in the world as a whole--addiction, mental illness, loss, etc.--to have to go through with someone who consistently shifts his or her share of the weight of the world onto others. And really, there are people--like my mother--who will do their utmost to bring everyone down even during the good times, because that's how they think they get their power. "Energy vampires" is what the self-help people call them.

Like most rambles, this one doesn't have an overarching point. We already know that $hit happens, that some people choose to deal with $hit differently, and that the people in your life can either smear the $hit in your face or help shield you from it. I don't need to tell you to choose the latter. But as someone who was born with--born to, literally--one of the former, I can tell you that it's not going to go away or get better. And that you do have a choice.