My Family (Not a funny post...sorry!)

There are very few things that are so important in my life that I dare not speak of them. As if my thoughts alone could break the fragile glass bubble that holds those very things together. My family is sustained there.

It’s strange to think about the bond between my mother and father and what it grew from and what grew from it. A young sales man in New York City meeting a youthful nurse in a hospital cafeteria and such is how the idea of my life began. I often try to picture them, so novel to each other and the journey that lay before them. I imagine my father in a derby hat with his cleft chin and laughing eyes, introducing himself to my mother. My mother with her infinite style, sensitivity and fire which I’m sure claimed many hearts but my father was the last to lay claim on hers. It has been said that my mother innately has the kind of style that people try all their lives to have but never quite achieve. Above all, my parents laugh. They share a bond that makes it hard not to believe in the kind of love that can endure a lifetime. Sometimes I wonder if my fear of marriage is that of seeing in their relationship a mythical perfection.

My parents love brought them to marry and my father’s job brought them to Chicago where my sister was born. My protector. My sister came out of the womb with a maturity which took me decades to understand and even longer to reach. She has always taken care of me so subconsciously but entirely that I have found it hard to find a specific occasion to thank her. She has a laugh that fills a room and a kindness that sooths. There is understanding of me in my sister that I myself do not possess and that has guided me to answers which questions I hadn’t even thought to ask. Growing up we shared a room and being only eleven months apart shared a disparity of personalities. I made sure I was everything that she did not wish to be. That is how I found myself, by looking up to someone and trying to find the differences to live inside of.

My father's job relocated them to Canada after my sister was born. I can't grasp the task at hand for my mother, having a one month old baby girl, being newly pregnant and moving to another country. So far away from her home and her family with her husband traveling for weeks on end, I am amazed at the strength she must encompass to have gotten herself over the border to create another home thousands of miles away. There must have been lonely nights when she realized, as she put her head to the pillow, that she hadn't spoken one adult word throughout the entire day. My mother may breakdown now and then but she is unbreakable. Ten months later, I came into this world, into a foreign country that is so similar to ours yet a bit tilted. I still believe that this somehow explains at least a portion of my oddness.

Two years after I was born my family made its last voyage to central Massachusetts where my father’s past of moving from school to school decided for him that he would not move his children again until they graduated high school. Regardless of the offers that surely would come in, we would stay.

Three years later my brother entered our lives with weak lungs, a sensitive heart and his own way of doing things. He was my biggest fan and shadowed me for the following seven years of our lives giving me a sense of worth that I had lacked in being only a younger sister. I found reasons to teach and guide, to boss around and to be in charge. But the three years between us was an eternity of difference and through the eyes of my adolescence he was stuck at the same age and would never grow up. Until, that is, I graduated from college. I remember a party in New Hampshire that my brother had invited my boyfriend and me to. We stopped by for a few beers and I met my brother again as well as for the first time. Out from the depths of the boyish façade that I had created for him emerged the confident, secure, mature young man who could make even the most severe crumble to the ground with laughter. I saw the lightness and the wisdom of my father. It was apparent that his friends had known this man for a long time.

And these are the things that stir in the quiet of my mind. I know that family, like all things in life, are fleeting. For humans are born to this earth with only one piece of certainty, knowing that they too will die. But on this day, I speak to the now and I am indebted for it. For this has been by no choice or will of my own that I should have been placed in the hands of those whom I not only love but who I like. And when we sit together at a table sometimes the laughter builds to a level that makes those around us uncomfortable. I try and make a photograph in my mind. I hold my breath. I try to not disturb the balance and I think to myself, remember this. Remember always what was your family.