I’m going to try and start writing a journal a little bit everyday again. I didn’t feel like I need to before but now I am starting.

I have been in Oklahoma the past few days. I arrived on the plane on December 20th. It’s been a week. I’m already starting to get bored. Mom is losing her memory more than before. She stays with Oran now most of the time. He’s about 12 years her senior, and she’s only 78. They spend most of their time in between eating out at local restaurants, and mom’s apartment that she doesn’t stay at very much anymore. They are off to check the mail as I write this on Oran’s dining room table.

My mother was in a car accident a few months ago. She was on her way to drop off a few things from her apartment to a goodwill or a salvation army or something. She’s gotten the idea to throw away a lot of things. I remember when I was growing up and living with her she would accumulate so much crap. There were always stacks of newspapers laying around our apartment. When I was a little kid, I used to try and organize some of them. But there were always too many, and they would always find a way to move around and come apart. So many papers my mom had. She was never very organized with her personal documents. At this point in her life, it has become clear that if she had spent more time organizing…she may have a lot easier time with many things. But my Mom was not parented so kindly by her own mother, Nonni. Nonni was a mostly depressed divorcee who’s husband left her to raise four children by herself. Nonni did get a chance to remarry, but Pappi wasn’t the greatest man in the world. In fact, I don’t believe he even loved her much. She was a convenient person to care for him, while he philandered, after his second wife left him or whatever. The details are all rather murky as my family doesn’t discuss those things very often, and the whole story will probably never come together, as the disparate threads held by my aunts and uncle could only ever come together if they did, and pieced it all into a family tapestry thru amicable conversation. There’s very little chance of that happening now. They all seem to harbor bitterness towards one another. As an only child, I remember fantasizing about how great it would be to have a sibling. Someone who you could be close to in age, whom you could rely on in dangerous scenarios, who would always have your back, who you could abandon rationality for in favor of that hot, innervating clannish camaraderie that looked like bloody fights and obscure secrets and understandings that only the most hermetical of siblings know.

It’s not always like that. The way parents raise their children has a lifelong impact on the way the children relate to each other. And from what my mother has shared, it sounds like they were mostly on their own to figure out the world, each other, themselves. Not only that but Nonni, to me, at least from my mothers stories, sounded like a sad, broken woman. Perhaps clinically depressed, but also shit on by the world. She was one of five children, and my great grandmother Mimi, was a hardworking farm mother. Apparently Cozette (Nonni) didn’t feel the most affinity with rough, heavy physical labor. She had dreams of becoming a movie star, as she was exceptionally beautiful as a young debutante. Somehow she found Earnest DeSoto, a military man who had flown in WWI. But after two children, they divorced. I don’t think Cozette wanted to be a mother.

There’s a strange abiding of misery in my family. My mother seems to sit in her abjection as if it were immutable, or rather, that she’s helpless. I wonder how many times she watched her own mother spend weeks in such a state. It may have seemed so natural, that air of despondence, that she may have breathed it into her bones. Sometimes I think about the way she speaks, my mom. She really is quite careless with her own feelings. She has belittling pet names for herself: ding-dong, silly, airhead, goofus. She’s like a child with worn out toy, berating it when it does or doesn’t do things like a worn out toy would, but all the time never thinking that it could somehow be special in a different way, or that a new one could be better, or that anything but this one could suffice. But it isn’t a toy, it’s her worn out heart. So mishapen and small from a lifetime of neglect and disappointment, broken and patched over with newspaper and scotch tape, dusty and sticky and pathetically meek. Maybe thats how Nonni made her feel when she was just a little girl, learning about the shape love takes in the world. My poor Mom. She may have never felt what it was like to experience a truly happy moment, unclouded by gloomy tragedy, or some other turgid sadness thru which she’d most recently slogged. I imagine that my mother’s life has indeed been a rather long, and uneventful trudge through a world morassed in fearful disarray in the wider globe, and tricky, prickly, perhaps even dangerous forays with men. All the while a nagging lonelines that only people who grew up in broken families know, telling her that she was both the cause of and only resource for all the endless, stultifying tribulations that found her through the gray decades of the middle of this 20th century in America.

I wonder sometimes if I am one of the things in her life that made her truly happy. She always said that she wanted a baby and when I was born that may have been a moment of unfettered joy. But humans are complicated by design. And now as I sit here writing all of this down I wonder if my own boredom, and resentment towards her are more of the same inherited legacy of depression that grows like hair and fingernails from us as a bloodline. After a couple years of therapy, the unconscious part of my mind that worked so hard to keep me caged inside my own head has become less of a solid imprisonment, and more like a foreboding primeval forest where scary animals, and toxic plants live. Navigating it is still harrowing, and sometimes it takes my full attention simply to not allow those animals that live in the shadows to devour me, but at least I can move around. At least I have names for such creatures, at least there are paths that I know lead to spots in the trees, where the canopy receeds, and the sunshine can reach the floor, and there are some flowers and soft grass where I can feel safe, and like life has some modicum of of that quality that makes it worth enduring.

Mother is at a place in her life where she doesn’t know what to do next. Honestly, she’s kind of been that way most of her life, or least for the time that I have known her. Blown this way and that, she’s never really been the most determined of souls, but again, I don’t think she was instilled with that inner confidence that attentive parents are wont to instill in their offspring. It’s as if she’s spent most of her life, living inside that worrying, nattering head of hers. I don’t think she may know how to live in the moment, without anxiety revving her thoughts up to a distracting maelstrom. She doesn’t seem very happy. And I’ve tried to tell myself multiple times that she is an adult and is now responsible for her won emotions. But I still cant help feeling sorry for her. She didn’t get a fair brake, and in so many ways she was betrayed by her family. By so many people. Just the other days she mentioned staying here with Oran for the remainder of her days. Then just the other night, she was saying she was sure Portland was her next destination, so she could spend it with me. Then just today she said it’s Colorado where she’s going, so her neice Laurie can care for her. She doesn’t know. I’m wondering if she’s hoping death will come soon, and release her from any obligation to make any life-altering decisions about her future, maybe she’s even hoping for that. Again, I have to remember that she’s a woman who has lived long enough to make her own decisions, and that I have a responsibility to myself to live my own life the best way I can. I don’t know. Regrets and disappointments grow fat and heavy like stone fruit on our family tree. As if it were meant to, genetically, like ourselves too are inherently disappointments, regrets, the saturnine harvests of an execrable branch of humanity.

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