bleckblog: musings of a community college english teacher

Keep in mind, today's entry, as with all these entries, is part of a hoped for 50,000 word "free write." That's why this is rough, rough, rough. And maybe no good whatsoever. Such is writing and life.

20 November 2005

B------,

I was disappointed to hear about your recent exchange with Alexis. Yes, we both are painfully aware that she is not your “mother,” that she came into your life, when you were quite young, and quite frankly, in need of a mother, and that she is simply your step-mother, and that Roddy is your half brother. Believe me, we wanted to adopt you, to get your away from your mother so you would have a better life than you did, but as I noted previously, the two of us decided against that, mostly because we worried what it might do to your mother and how that might harm you as well. So, you can see, despite what you tend to think, we had your best interests at heart with each decision we made about the way we would be a part of each others’ lives.

The only conclusion I can come to is that you are so blinded by the anger you are still unable to acknowledge that future communication may not be in the best interest of either of us. I think it best that we keep the relationship on a low-key, casual plane for the next few months so you will have time to sort our your thoughts and to understand why it is you harbor such anger and resentment toward us. You have hurt Alexis greatly with this anger, and you’ve left Roddy wondering just what he has done to hurt you, to make you so you don’t respect him. While you are right that you have not spoken ill of anyone overtly, the simple fact that you feel no love for your brother, excuse me, half brother, is something that hurts us all. Until you can see how this is the case, then you cannot understand how much you have hurt me and my family.

L------

24 November 2005

L------,

I’ve done what I can time and again to make it clear that I feel no anger toward you, Alexis or Roddy. Rather, what I feel is hurt, pain, and exclusion. You mention “my” family with regard to you, Roddy and Alexis. Never have you said “our” family as if I were a member of it. This is the concern I’ve been expressing all along when we’ve talked about this. You have excluded me, even before all of this blew up in our faces, from “your” family. I don’t know where that leaves me, as some sort of an appendage, a man without a family except for that under my own roof. As poorly as they do at times, Grace’s family puts no preconditions on my to be a part of that family, but my father doesn’t even associate me with “his” family, but instead I am an outsider.

And this is something you have avoided admitting to, failed to see, for so many months now. As long as you consider me not of your family, then I won’t be. It seems that’s how you want things to be, just as you have them with your siblings. You’ve written them all off, cast them aside, for reasons that may have value in your eyes, but seem to parallel what you are doing to me. Apparently we don’t conform to what your idea of a family should be, we don’t sit right with you in that regard, so we are simply cast aside. I see the same thing with your friends. You have trouble with them, and they are gone, out of your life. It happened with Manfred and Elizabeth over the smallest of slights. It happened to some degree with Eileen as well. But the problem is always with the other person, never mind that you are the one linking each of the people and events, and that each of them has been able to maintain their relationships. I guess what I need to do then is to establish better relationships with Eileen, Manfred and Elizabeth so we can compare notes to see just what it is we’ve done to wrong the two of you, perhaps Roddy as well.

All that being said, I am comfortable with what you suggest. I’ve been unable to get you to see anything from my point of view. The best you can come up with is “well, I’ll have to think about that” whenever you are confronted with an uncomfortable truth about your self. But never have you returned to those concerns, to challenge them, to admit that there is truth to them. You simply let them slip into oblivion, never to be touched upon again. As much as it pains me to understand that I may be losing the last of my blood family, I am going to have to come to terms with that, through talking with Grace, maybe in seeing a therapist, maybe in some other way, but I am comfortable in knowing that I have proposed a number of paths for us to take together only to have each rejected in turn. I can sleep well knowing I’ve done what is right for me, though it is clearly not what you see as being right for you.

As ever,

B-----

24 November 2007

Grace,

I just wrote my father, yet again. I’ve enclosed the letters so you can see what he had to say and how I responded. As usual, he’s stuck on the “I’m too angry,” meaning me, to have a reasonable discussion so he doesn’t want to try anything until it can be on his terms, though he will never go so far as to say or admit to anything of that sort. It’s still making me crazy, though I wish I could just blow it all off and forget about him, Alexis and Roddy. I keep asking myself what is it they have to offer me, us, that makes it worth the trouble, and right now I don’t have an answer to that. All we seem to get from them is one problem after another, one empty promise after another. They bought some land, and part of it’s mine, but I don’t have any say in it. Once they sell it, I’ll get whatever profit they make. Quite unlike Roddy whom they buy a coffee shop for, renovate, and then sell, giving him all the money, never mind providing him a livelihood when he can’t provide one for himself. I suppose I should be happy with the fact that I don’t need them to get on in the world, that I’m at least financially independent, though certainly not emotionally independent of them all, or so it seems.

I don’t mean that my emotional state is dependent upon what they think of me or how they treat me, but that I have some emotional investment in them. If I were a banker, I would think that I wasn’t getting enough on my investment, that it would be wise to sell short, cut my losses and get on with my other investments, those that might provide some return at some point. But for some reason I keep trying, and I wonder how it influences what I do. It makes me think, when I’m despairing the most, that the work we’ve done on the house was to some how show them that I knew what I was doing, what we were doing, that we had an aesthetic sense on the par with theirs, but when I think about that, it seems so petty, so much of a one-upmanship sort of thing. Or that I’m trying, still, to prove to them that I’m worthy of their love and recognition. I guess this is how it goes when you, meaning me, are not particularly demanding of their time and effort growing up, but that the likes of Roddy whose been spoiled from day one.

I still remember him sitting beneath a table in a restaurant when I was on a summer visit. He sat there, bawling his head off, screaming his lungs out, because the bagel they brought him had been sliced so as to leave to circles, each with a flat side, and he wanted it cut into two half-circles, like a crescent moon. My god, how he screamed and cried. I tell you, if that were ever Alexander, I would have hauled him out from beneath that table and given him a choice: shut up and eat or go sit in the car and wait while we eat. I can only imagine that his sense of entitlement was produced by that sort of treatment, crying and getting his way. God forbid they ever tell him no, disappoint him in some way, compel him to stand on his own two feet and make his own way in the world. Instead, they buy him cars, ship him cars overseas, buy him cars when he gets home, buy him a business he walks away from, buy him a house in the city, and another new car, a hybrid of course so he can be eco-friendly even though he can’t support himself, and line him up a job, with which it would be more of a surprise if he stayed with it than if he walked away from it because his boss, or the people he has to work with, the clients he has to cultivate, are all assholes, which is typically the case.

With the kitchen, we worked hard to bring it inline with the style of the house. But they’ve never even visited to see how it looks, haven’t even visited to see Alexander. And I know they are putting it all on us, that we are depriving them of their grandchild. I know Alexander would like to see them, but they’re going to have to make the effort to haul their butts up here. The only time they have seen him, but for the time they picked up their boat and trailer, is when we’ve driven down to them. It’s always us going to them, never, rarely ever, them to us. As I said, always on their terms. I’ve had enough of that. It’s time for them to give back.

If I keep ranting on like this I’m going to lose my mind, probably buy a gun and kill someone. Not you or Alexander, not me. I wonder if we’ll ever get to resolution with them. I think not.

B-----