I am a common product of the Baby Boomer generation: a twenty-something with divorced parents.
posted by nate on March 27, 2003
I'm now fascinated with the pulsing, mutating being of my family, which is made up of all sorts of individuals. I fit in here somewhere: am I branch or root-shoot on this gnarled, half-rotten tree? I like to step back and try to see the whole mess as a singular personified being, then notice the attributes that span individuals and immediate families, and those which cross over to my self. I begin to realize that most of my family members have had specific influences on me, especially, as one would expect, the closest of relatives: my mom, dad & brother.
Dredging distant childhood memories, I remember being proud of my immediate family when visiting the extended. In my young, inarticulate way I could sense the attractiveness of our cohesion, my dad's sense of humor, my brother's charisma, my mom's incessant energy & beauty -- & me? The budding artist, computer geek & half-ass athlete. All of us healthy & trim, energetic & positive. In recognizing what elements contributed to our strength and which led to our dissipation, I find the strongest aspects that carried onto my character.
We've all moved pretty far away from eachother, physically & emotionally. It's difficult to remember what it was like to all wake up and eat breakfast together, to drive to the beach and spend a day collecting agates & creating sandcastles, or an afternoon in the Siletz river catching crawdads. How we built a house together & planted gardens. How my brother and I built tree forts and swings. I try to remember what it was like when my dad got home from work, built a fire, drank a beer, sat on the couch and listened to the radio. How my mom would greet him and what it was like sitting down to dinner together. This was 20 years ago and I'm now the age my dad was when I was born. I can't remember anything but bits and pieces, and dry, textual descriptions I've been told are indiscernable from true, fullblooded memories of what happened.
It's possible that I don't remember much from my childhood because I spent so much time completely immersed in my imagination.
As I get older and my imagination dims to the equivalent of a parking lot, I begin to pay attention to the world in front of me more, to the people in my life, my history.
I've traded in my childhood playhouse of imagination for the confusing complications of human relationship.
I crawl back in time to the warmth of a night as a family. The house is alive with the smell of soup on the stove, the crackling of a fire, a record on the stereo, and all of us at our various activies. I may be careening my hotbox cars around the ever-entertaining environment of the driftwood coffee table my dad made. My brother would either be working on a BMX bike or chasing girls, my mom chopping vegetables, and my dad on the phone with a fellow employee from the newspaper. This home & the people in it, the tangled web of our relations & dynamics, the history of our interractions, arguments and elations--my family--however much my young cynical mind has tried to push it away, is undeniably the largest influence on who I've become.
Of course, the house wasn't always warm & cheery, and all of us didn't get along seamlessly. My mom & dad were often screaming at eachother, my brother punching me in the background and the dog scratching fleas, the cat pregnant & immobile, the fire weak with wet wood, the tv perpetually static-ridden, rats scurrying & chewing our basement insulation, bats nested in the shingles, cheap roast bubbling on the stove, the septic tank overflowing, the well dry, etc. I've certainly inherited being poor and constantly dealing with minor catastrophes, along with the patience & humor to handle them without going batshit. Unfortunately, this inheritance of living cheaply and the crafty-yet-irritable tendency to work with inadequate facilities has also kept me single for most of my adult life.
For years, the home I grew up in reappeared as the strongest symbol in my dreams, and whatever activity occuring in the house acted as courier of my subconscious. But about four years ago, it stopped appearing in my dreams. This occurrence seemed to have coincided with when I began to see my mom not as some all-knowing, beyond-human figure, but "Judi" the person. My dad's regular fatherly go-back-to-college pitch was gone and we bullshitted & laughed & related like friends now. My brother lost his hiphop godhead status to me and we both began to reevaluate what we were to each other and what was left of our brotherhood. This shift also allowed me to what I had inherited from everyone.
I also began to see the extended family differently--not as strange characters in an endless drama that I infrequently visited and rarely paid attention to: these were my kin, my bloodline, the bizarre walking genepool from which I sprang!
Of course it did help getting drunk with the genepool to finally be able to relate with them.
Ages ago my dad lent me a book called The Brothers K by David Duncan. He was moved by the book and thought I would enjoy it also. I promptly lost the book, then felt like even more of an asshole when I found out it belonged to his second wife-to-be. It took me 5 years to run across another copy and finally sit down to read it.
Ninety pages into the novel I find myself losing track of time: 30 minutes pass unnoticed, then an hour, and I know I'm sucked in. I'm lost in the rich narrative told by a boy named Kade of his father Hugh, who loses his chance to be a pro baseball pitcher in a mill accident. This forces Hugh to work full-time at the mill in order to support his family of five.
At this point in the story he's reached a state of hopelessness, seeing no future beyond an inderminate number of dull shifts at the "dead" job for "people who can't be what they wanted."
The boy and his father are sitting in the mill parking lot in their "Fortyford" waiting to pick up a work buddy. Hugh is chainsmoking Lucky Strikes while Kade repeatedly attempts to engage his father in conversation. "How exactly do they make paper out of trees?" The words fall on deaf ears of a man who's gray eyes stare ahead at the smoke of the mill stacks until the boy yells, "Stop acting like a corpse!" This triggers such a fury in the father that he clocks Kade dead in the face. He immediately offers blubbering apologies but the boy pulls away and leans agains the door, swallowing blood, trying to give his father a taste of what it feels like pleading for communication from a statue.
The whole scene is beautifully crafted and I find myself welling up with tears. Shit, I don't know if a book has ever done that to me, let alone anything in the last 8 or so years.
It occurs to me, sitting in this mindless job of mine, full of my own building fears of dreams lost, that my father and I need to talk, see each other more.
I don't even know what my father's dreams are. Perhaps that's why my dad recommended the book in the first place. The Brothers K revolves around the love of baseball, which I don't necessarily share with my dad, but ultimately it's about the complex organism of the family. It's about how that organism mutates with the growing and expanding of each individual. The book reminded me of my clogged bloodline to the Beaty mothership, and reinforced my interest to change that.
Even though I'm now starting to embrace and savor my family & upbringing, it still seems so separated from my current identity. I look at my past and feel like a stiff semblance of a Nathan possibility, a cloudy offshoot of who I thought I was going to be. Putting my life in the context of my family seems to be a contribution to my own punch-in-the-face, an attempt at growing beyond the stagnating self-image I've been hanging onto.
Taking the Cascade Amtrak north for Christmas, I'm mulling the news from my mom that my grandma appears to have had another minor stroke. The elders in my family have begun to crumble in the last few years and I'm still finding my place in this process. As I grew up, my family was predominantly young and active. I remember spending visits with my grandparents fishing on the Puget Sound, sledding down Rattlesnake Mountain, and camping in Eastern Washington.
This visit is spent indoors struggling with the fact that my grandma can't even play cards with me anymore. She's gotten so much worse in the last few years and I can't even imagine what that's like for my mom. She shifts constantly from lucidity to moments where the neurons in her brain are obviously mis-firing: things are a bit.. scrambled up. Everyone tries to act like things are as normal as possible, even as she collapses to the floor in the trip from recliner to walker.
It's amazing how effectively a moment like this eradicates your slew of day-to-day worries, forcing you to see the fragility of life where the simplest of tasks can be monumental obstacles.
Walking, reading & writing, cooking, going to the bathroom, dressing, even staying focused in a conversation--all are struggles enough for a fatiguing day. The fact that my brother's kids see my grandparents like this upsets me. The near impossibility of any more camping trips, trips to the lake, to Whidbey for the of July.. it sucks. I realize the kids now look to me, to the generation entering their thirties, to offer these life-experiences. I'm confronted with yet another notch in the confusing process of aging: having only 3-4 times a year when I am in a position where kids look up to me is odd. Hell, I still feel like the kid most of the time.
I help my grandma up to her walker, pick up the table she's knocked over and all the objects strewn about the floor. She's apologizing profusely, sincerely confused by her inability to keep herself together. She jerkily maneuvers her walker into the kitchen and slowly angles herself towards a chair, this time making a successful landing from the tenuous standing position to sitting. I bring in her ice water and turn on the radio.
She's shaking and repeatedly wipes the table in front of her with a napkin. I show her a book my mom recently gave me about Surrealist painting. My grandma asks me three times what "srealists" are and I offer three different answers, realizing the difficulty of explaining a genre of rebelliously abstract, drug-addled painting in a way that she can understand.
My grandma turns to me and lucid as can be, tells me flatly, "If I could just walk I'd be alright. I'm healthy, there's nothing wrong with my mind. It's just that I can't walk."
I silently wish this was true. Looking at my grandma, at the spent beauty of our family matriarch, at the sadness & confusion in her eyes, I wish there was some way I could transfer my youthful vigor to her. Instead, all I can do is just be here, try to help her with the suddenly difficult and all-important element of being: to be aware in the moment, to know we are alive and just enjoy eachother's company.
I struggle with whether I should confront my uncle who's rattling on at me with the aspects of his character that make him an asshole, or try to work with the miniscule fibers of how we can relate. I decide, not surprisingly, on the non-confrontational route. We talk about computers.
He launches on a tirade about how in Microsoft's actions are no different than Chevy declaring you have to exclusively use Arco gasoline in their automobiles. I struggle to see this analogy, but find myself shaking my head in agreement. Sometimes my unthinking (until later) demeanor pisses me off. Why can't I recognize this the situation and act on it? Why can't I think clearly and thoroughly as things are happening and call people on shit?
I am totally useless in confrontations, either stuttering and bumbling through what I want to say, or welling up with so many floodgate emotions I can do nothing but turn red and walk away.
A visit to Confrontation Camp would do me well. Healed, I'd be able to offer: "True, Microsoft is a frightening world power who continually try to be moreso by manipulative, monopolizing business maneuvers, word, but Chevy would do no different given the opportunity, nor would any corporation in the States. Microsoft is only acting out on basic capitalistic impulses and just happen to be afforded the possibility to dominate a simplified market that Gates has cornered for almost twenty years."
I escape to the kitchen and fix myself another drink. It's Christmas! Cheers, Jesus! I go to the sewing room and set up my laptop, draw, and find The Godfather on tv. Not five minutes later, my uncle's behind me destroying my attempt to enjoy the movie. In a scene where Al Pacino's wife is informing him she's taking the kids and leaving, my uncle yips: "Slap her! That stupid broad. Oh, look! She's pulling the silent treatment! Trying to act all innocent! I tell ya, that's a woman's favorite weapon.. Slap her!" Ugh. I again resist the urge to launch into an argument with him. Instead I ask if Martin Scorsese directed the movie, as they're now showing interviews with various cast and crew members. "I wouldn't be surprised, you know, since he's a WOP!"
It's amazing that I feel so close to this man as my uncle, and yet cannot talk to him for five minutes without hitting a cement dead end in our conversation. I wonder if he's aware of how we were just walking along together and he turned around and kicked my ability to relate with him in the shin. Does he shock me with ignorant statements just to rile me or does he really believe this shit? What's so disturbing to me is how intelligent my uncle is.
In the end, I just can't bring myself to confront him. I know I'd only unleash a torrent of worms from the gargantuan can of issues brewing in my family. And I don't have enough knowledge or experience regarding the mess to hold my own. Instead, I let his comments slide off me like useless water and turn back to the tv, letting the almighty boobtube do what it does best: brainlessly absorb all emotional fodder we refuse to face while distracting us from guilt or worry.
As I get older and edge towards being one of the elders of the family, I watch the younguns watch me. Inevitably I feel like a disheveled hairy monster, closer to an alien from the planet of Bohemian City Artists than a comforting uncle figure. It doesn't help I haven't accumulated or participated in the items typically associated with Adult Life which temper and dull a person to the elder role. I'm forever broke & single, thriftstore haggard, wiry, wily, & unpatriotic.
I still feel closer to the 6-year-old who's ravaging the livingroom, all-hell-fired with the urge to play play play.
Regardless, I feel like I should be offering a positive example to the kids: a beacon of hope for living a non-ordinary life, a role model for the brain-awry, a superstar of geekdom, drawing until I am stiff with arthritis. There's no way to pursue this than to live it, and I've come to the conclusion I don't really have a choice. As I continue to imbue the freak I've become with the newfound interest in family, I will also continue to be the lighthouse of idiot genius for the kids, embracing my role as geek artist.
