Cease and Desist

I should be exuberant right now, with my homecoming looming two days ahead of me, but not before I have the opportunity to pick and eat wild blueberries tomorrow morning.

Instead I feel like weeping.
It's raining outside.

I've never really appreciated the value of a family's oral history until I realized that without mine, there are cancerous holes in my past, and therefore in my future.

I know very little about my mother's life prior to the age when I could form my own subjective memories, and I know nothing about my grandparents' lives, on either side of the family.

Incidentally, the perceived relative unimportance of memories and oral tradition has prevented me from ingraining many of my own memories into my mental storage unit, although I suppose there are many memories I don't want to preserve.

Acquiring stories from my father and grandparents isn't difficult; I need only ask, and they are more than willing to tell. However, my mother's history is a little more spotty, since as far as information concerning her life is concerned, she may as well be dead. I would be horrified to ask her myself, and any answers I receive may be inflated or entirely false, and I have no way to distinguish truth from ostentation.

For the past few days I have been, in essence, interviewing close family members to find out anything I can about her: her childhood, adolescence, philosophy on life, her smaller and biggest mistakes, her regrets, anything imaginable that they can possibly tell me. This is probably the most accurate source of information.

I feel like I'm compiling video for a documentary, except there is no camera, no crew, no predetermined questions, and most importantly, no prospective audience save for myself.

And I'm not sure, after gaining this knowledge, what my next step will be, or if I even have to take one.

A few people, family and non, have told me that I should accept my mother for who she is and attempt to make amends. I consider this unspeakable blasphemy. Years upon years rolled by while I lived in the shadow of her existence, hoping to get by without her noticing me (life was easier this way). I have memories from my childhood that I wish I could set to flame like a pile of dried, dead leaves dowsed in lighter fluid. Memories I don't care to tell anyone.

Except I did tell someone. I made the mistake of getting drunk and confiding in Loopis and Albert some details of my own shady past, things I haven't told anyone else, things I don't expect to be repeated. Lindsey is my best friend, and did what a real best friend would do: she took in my words, let them roll around her brain and absorb into its crevices and folds, and then from that point of understanding on behaved as if I had never told her in the first place.

Albert, on the other hand, did not act in this manner. He mentioned several times during this conversation how disturbing, unethical, and borderline illegal the actions of my mother and her husband were, then proceeded in the future (i.e. on occasion after my drunken relegation) to make illicit, revealing jokes about what obviously was very personal and painful to me.

So I tried to laugh it off, just another poor kid from a broken home, but he has effectively prevented me from ever entrusting another person with such personal information (I suppose after years of closing myself off with success, I should not have abandoned the path).

In any case, grasping out for stories, anecdotes, opinions and data to patch up my history has logical ground somewhere: my worst fear in life is that I will end up like my mother, and not even realize it's happening. For this reason I almost want someone I trust, close to me, to get to know my mother well enough to determine if I'm following her fate, but I would never wish that evil on anyone.

Still it eats at me. I think most women dread becoming their mothers, but the basis of their apprehension is usually unfounded. Not here, not for me. Lindsey absolutely does not want to become her mother, and with good reason. However, both Albert and her brother, Peter, have made similar comments to me.

Albert: "She's acting just like her mother, but I can't tell her. You can never tell a woman that."
Peter: "She's becoming mom, it's ridiculous."

Of course Linds doesn't see it, and I can't make the call because I don't know her mother that well, but the two people who know her probably better than anyone else seem to believe it.

What if this is happening to me?

how could i possibly know
and who would tell me

This is no existential crisis,
So turn your pain into piety.