JOURNEY

 My eldest brother, whom we called Doonie on Second Street a long time ago, loves to take an impromptu trip now and then. This week he decided to take a little drive north to Detroit. He hit the road in Georgia and landed fifteen hours later on Mom's doorstep and asked what's cookin', Mom? Mother, the Matriarch of the family, was beyond pleased to see Doonie but he prefers that she call him by his real name now because he hates his childhood nickname. He does not feel it did him justice, and truly it didn't. He was way cooler than that. However, this is Mom, and he allows her the privilege of calling him Doonie once in a while, out of respect for her, even though he is father to three very adult children and  himself a grandfather.
 When he comes he plans not only to see Mom, but makes a point to see the other members of the family as well. Because of our complicated family dynamic, and the fact that it perpetuated itself well past childhood and into adulthood, when it came to my brothers' relating to me, the little girl inside  vacillatde between hope and insecurity. Will he want to see me? Maybe he won't have time. Please let him have the time. The adult me knows better than to think in such an immature manner, to lack confidence. I have come too far for that.


 The children in Port Angeles practice earthquake drills at school by hiding under their desks. The very present threat of aftershocks and possibility tsunamis require the discussion and careful planning of viable escape routes. Similar events of the relational kind occur within the family unit as well, especially when a family member suffers from mental illness. Sometimes, as in this instance, an escape route is difficult to find.

 On Second Street Mother survived a natural disaster of her own: the unsteady earthquake of her marriage to Father. Among many things, he was afflicted with bipolar disorder. Often he sat in his chair, and stared vacantly out the window to the old green shack across the street. He sat there to brood about how his dad treated his mother among other things, and thus began a lengthy depression which caused his withdrawal from life and family. He sat there for days and got up only to eat, feed the monkey, and take bathroom breaks. His trance-like state rendered him completely unavailable, and Mom knew that no amount of pleading could move him out of that chair. As his mood deteriorated, anger for the injuries others had inflicted on him as a child and young adult, stacked up inside him brick upon brick. He pulled so far backward into the shell that he became unreachable, unresponsive. Then the sea of bitterness behind the wall drew back much like a tidal wave, and Mother heard the rattled pebbles shake their warning.  Still she waited. The hateful words would come like an ocean, and when they did,  she mistakenly believed there was no safe place to which she could run. She had four children to protect and could have gotten us out of there, but instead, she chose stoicism over heroism and stayed. He withdrew into himself, then released the tsunami of anger. It was heaped upon the Mother's structurally flimsy scaffold of what she believed to be heroism, and he rose up from the chair and charged her with words of meanness much like an unpredictable bull thrusts his sharp horns into the soft spot of his tormentor. She submitted because she believed in submission. She believed a good wife who bore up under these things demonstrated strength and virtue. Because her instinct to protect and defend her children was overruled by her feelings of being true to a false husband, she insisted there was no way for us to escape the insanity.
Following wave after wave of tirades, Mom tried to figure out what she could do to improve herself, and we kids repaired ourselves as much as we could at night by each rocking in our beds for hours to self soothe our way to sleep. However, in spite of our efforts, and the night time rocking did help, the repeated damage left water lines that marked our hearts. We could only do so much ourselves.
 Though our hearts were marked forever, his illness could never darken our spirits. As a result, our fractured family unit clung to fragile threads and found that, like too much water heaped into a cup that refuses to overflow, the constant surface tension at our house strangely held us together in a rough vessel of unease.
 The thin surface tension of a too-full cup still remains, it still feels so real, for all of us. But, as adults, it has become a vessel in which to reflect. Now it takes on a new role: it is a pool of memories, a place of lost innocence, yes, but also something we should use to grow up into someone better, far better than what we inherited.
 And yes, its contents feed an underground garden of wildly unbelievable stories. For the 40 years endured with a manic depressive husband and father, at least there is that.
 Every year he enjoyed keeping a garden out back of the house. There, he successfully grew green beans, snap peas, potato mounds, and luscious red strawberries. He made it clear, however, that the strawberries were off limits to us kids for the simple reason that Father intended them for others outside the family. We asked " Why?" He carefully tended and fertilized the red orbs of sweetness for the sake of the big banana slugs that hung out around the periphery. He was a strawberry serf, of sorts, and those slimy things the sole proprietors! They moved in at the peak of ripeness and the dark of night, slurped holes in every strawberry, then left the slimy trail of treachery behind. In the morning the strawberries, every one, were destroyed, along with our hopes of tasting their goodness. As this pushed us into a frustrated place, it gave Father a perverse pleasure.
 We all weathered his wild storms and tried to understand him for a long time.
Broken as we are, our family try still to comprehend him, and ask that infernal "Why?" and it is not without some bitterness. Some things hurt forever.  Life rarely turns out the way we need it to.
 In spite of the whys, we want love from him still and long to love him back, but the truth remains that, even though he died alone four years ago, his heart never was here and we were not his to love.