There are three members of my family.

My sister, my mother and I.

We are three strong. Three together. Three who will always be.

My sister might tell you something different. She might feel less alone in the big expanse of family out there that no longer shares our life. My mom, too, might have a different story to tell, though I doubt it. The others are out there, on the outskirts of my galaxy, like ghosts of the past, memories of a person I used to be.

I've always had plenty of tough girl answers for why this was the case in my life. I come from a big family, grown bigger and bigger through divorce and other life circumstances: my maternal grandfather's death, that drove my mother from her home at the age of 14 to make a life of her own, the divorce of my mom and my Dad, actually my stepdad, who raised us up in more ways than my father, who'd begun to be long gone by then. It seems like the bigger my family got, the further away from it I drifted.

While no one would have said it at the time (or now for that matter), Charlie (my biological father) and my mom's divorce had a lasting impact on their opinions of my mom-they blamed her-and, as a result, on my entire family. It was all too easy in the years that followed to blame divorce-stricken kids, entering their teens and their emotional antics for the problems that quickly began to surface between me and my stepmother, problems that my sister did not escape either. Charlie and Pat were busy putting up fronts for the people at church, the people in the family, the people in the neighborhood, but behind closed doors J and I suffered. The abuse was always emotional at first. I think that was the worst of it really. To be told by the woman your father just married, when you're just twelve that you have the devil in you, that your mother's a whore, that you're not to utter your mom's name in her house. To have no control over the fact that you remind them both, all too much, of your mom, whom they've chosen to hate and to disparage, in private and in public. Your voice, your face, your protectiveness of her are all fuel for a fire burning them against you. Charlie was more a passive participant in the abuse, doing nothing about it, even when, in the final confrontation, he watched our stepmother try to run us over with her car, screaming at the top of her lungs, "Get in the car or I swear to God I'll kill you." Did that really happen? Did I imagine that scene in the house? The fight that erupted because I dared to comment on the way my mom prepared eggplant? Did Charlie really just stand there and watch it all go down? It must have been a nightmare; Mom racing to get to J and I, standing at the payphone. Charlie pleading for us to get in the car so he could take us home. "Do you know how this makes me look?" he insisted. Witnesses remind me otherwise. Make the fact of the matter oh so real.

I was not a rebelious child. I wanted approval. I tried very hard to stay within the lines. But when it came to my mother, there was no keeping me in place. I saw the injustices being thrust on her. The blackmail. The disgust. The judgement. I could feel it in my father's house. I could imagine what he told our relatives, trying to save face when confronted with his second divorce and third marriage, in a family that only believed in first marriages. The lies he conjured about my mom. Lies he told at church. At family dinners. On Sunday mornings at my grandparents' farm, a a place sacred in the richness of childhood memories we made there. A place that should have always been ours. It is a land that drifted away from me slowly at first. We all tried to be in touch. It was not enough for my stepmother to have us out of her house (MY choice this time, after a physical fight that left me unable to remember my home phone number). She wanted us out of the family. My grandparents' hands were tied. They were asked not to visit our mom's house at holidays and they obliged. Charlie is their only son. They could not risk, would not risk, alienating him to fight for grandkids who were bound to stand by their mother anyway.

There is so much more to this story. So many pieces of me that scattered, with that whirlwind that blew through my life. Cousins who treat my sister and I like celebrities at family gatherings. The girls that everyone speaks about in whispers. People I wanted to keep in my life, who simply drifted away with the debris of my broken relationship with my father.

And as the years passed on, as my mom grew wings strong enough to stretch for her stars, other casualties followed. People who did not understand her. Mistreatment of her that I could never abide. Her sisters who always hated everything she managed to make of her life. A life that began in stark poverty and even starker abuse. A cocoon she left behind, when she grew too big for the world she was born in. A grandma who was good to my sister and I, and who was nevertheless not the kind of mother anyone, least of all my mom deserved. A woman scarred by her own life, who passed the scars on to her children, to my mom, who chose not to pass the baton to us. The family that took her in at 14, to be their housekeeper, really, drifted away with my grandma's death. Something just wasn't the same, without her there to defend my mom. Such a familiar circumstance in my life, the women being the ones in my family who keep things together. But aren't we women usually thrown into this role of the peacemakers, the bridges, the self-sacrificers? And isn't it too often the case that our very resistance to this mold that's been cast for us costs us almost everything?

I don't have the time today to write it all. To name the missing pieces that really feel like parts of me that will never be replaced. I am finding I am not always so tough. That, while I do have a choice today whether I contact the people I'm missing or not, there was a lot of this beyond my control. Decisions adults made that affected my life completely and permanently. There are years of memories I can never recapture. I do not claim to be a victim of my life's circumstances. In many cases, I did choose to cut off ties with people who were toxic to my life. But there were others that fell along the wayside with them. Others I regret the loss of. Others I love madly and miss with all my heart. Places I will never be again. The soft sand of my grandfather's land, of grandma's pancakes, the sycamore trees in their front yard, the milestones in my life they'll never share. Inside of me are all of these things. As are all of the things I gave myself instead: The right to be who I really am, to love my mom unconditionally, to change my concept of family to include people who are related to me in love, if not in blood, to say "no", to demand more for myself, for my mother and for J. To be strong on my own and today, to admit that sometimes even the oldest hurts never heal all the way.

June 18, 2003