Family Visit

I had a good weekend. Three days off in a row is always nice, nicer still when I get to see people I love. My mom came down for a few days. We had good conversations and went shopping together - we even took in a theatre show.

It was so nice to see her again. I went from living at my parents to seeing them every four months to now, where I see them every...eight months? Every year? It can be a long time in between visits now that my schedule is no longer ruled by the school semester but by work and all too infrequent holidays. If we lived closer geographically it would be different but alas, this is how life goes sometimes.

I think of my mom, moving away from her family and going years without seeing them. I don't think I could go years. Of course my family will come see me sometimes too so the onus isn't all on me to do the travelling like it was on her. That helps a lot.

The next time I see my family might be this summer. I'm going to Barkerville BC to work for five months. It's a place my family likes to visit so they'll kill two birds with one stone and I'll get to see them again. Except for my youngest brother, who is now beginning to experience the constraint of a working schedule too.

But there's always Christmas. I hope.

27 Years

Typing that title reminded me of 27 Dresses, a movie that my mom would probably enjoy watching with me, although she'd have a hard time getting anyone who currently lives in the house with her to watch it with her. I don't get to see my family enough and I miss them - something I realized sharply today as I read letters from my sponsored child. Her letters are written by her grandparents, her father, her uncle - whomever she happens to be with that day. She gets to see them all, all the time. I told her she was lucky to have her family so close to her. She's probably too young to understand but that's okay.

It's fitting that I miss my family today, I suppose. Today, 27 years ago, my parents got married in the living room of the local Justice of the Peace. Rumour has it they had a fit of the giggles; that my mother took my father as her awfully wedded husband; that they forgot they needed more than one witness and had to get the daughter of the JP to sign the papers for them. Not what most would call an auspicious start to a marriage.

But hey. They must have done something right. 27 years of marriage is not a common achievement anymore. Probably because it takes a hell of a lot of work. Work that my parents have not always done with the gusto and enthusiasm that they have for it today. There were times when I was small that I was so afraid they'd get divorced and I'd never see my dad again. Or worse, I'd have to choose one of them to live with, and how does any child make that decision? It weighed on my young mind.

I am so grateful to them that I never had to make that choice. That they did do the work, and they did stick it out, and that they are still together today. And happy. They are happy, and that is something too because not all couples who have made 27 years are happy about it. Not every long-lasting marriage is as healthy as my parent's. Not every long-lasting marriage has two partners in it.

That's what my parents are. They are partners, and it makes my eyes tear up - why? Pride? Love? Joy? Probably a bit of all of those. Relief too. It is such a relief to see that in two people. I take a lot of hope from seeing my parents in their lives and their relationship. Nothing, or nearly nothing, is insurmountable in love if you are committed to making it work.

I see them together, knowing each other. My dad looks for something and without asking what he's looking for my mom will tell him where to find it. And she's right, and she just knew what he was after, without being told. I see my dad, loving my mom, and the joy and playfulness that is there makes the world an alright place to be.

It makes me have hope for myself. As a person. As a lover. As someone in a relationship. Possibly as a parent someday.

It gives me hope for the world.

So today - raise a glass with me to my parents, to their 27 years of growing together. May your joys increase. Your love always fill you up past overflowing. And may you share at least another 27 years together. I love you very much.

Mennonite Wedding

Today I was awoken by the ringing phone. It was my dad, phoning to tell me that another of my girl cousins was getting married. To put this is in a bit of perspective, on my dad’s side I have – let me see, now – 33 cousins, 16 of whom are girls. (In counting I just realized to my shame I don’t know all of my cousins names. I know I haven’t seen some of them for over 10 years but that still seems a bit pathetic. Oh well. Back to the main story.) In the last year, three of my girl cousins have gotten married and it is a sport with my parents to phone me and make me guess who is getting hitched next. I haven’t guessed right once, until this morning, which is all the more impressive because I had only been awake for maybe two minutes.
My dad doesn’t much care for the future cousin-in-law’s family, and neither does his brother, but it’s my cousin’s opinion that matters and apparently she likes them enough to tie herself to them for eternity. She’s getting married in the new year and it looks like another wedding (4 for 4) that I’ve missed. I wish it wasn’t so.
“At least her mother can stop stressing about her girls not getting married now,” my dad said. We talked about the customs and commonly held beliefs of his family’s sub-culture. Holdeman Mennonites vary, or so I am told, wildly from one region to another, so perhaps my family’s pocket is not the norm. I know that I have a hard time understanding how any one can believe 25 and single means you’re reaching spinsterhood, but that is a common perception and I have at least one cousin who is getting to that tipping point.
It was so neat to hear my dad talk about the culture of his youth. I don’t think I’ve heard him talk about it much, and maybe that’s why I feel so disconnected from that side of my history. His perception is so fascinating, because he was a part of it and now he has distance from it, but he understands the culture and their way of life and how they think in a way that I never can because I’ve never lived it. He came close to being a member of the church. The night before he was to get baptized he went out drinking. When he came home he told his family he wasn’t going to church and went to sleep. He has said that it must have been a huge scandal for his parents, particularly his mother, to bear. But he’s glad he didn’t join. It’s made it easier for us as a family. He were never a part of the church so he never had to be excommunicated; our idiosyncrasies and odd behaviours are more acceptable because we don’t have that stigma.
I’m glad I wasn’t raised in that culture, even while I feel a hole from the disconnect – I’m glad I was raised with the understanding that my life could be more than a rush to a wedding and children, with some time spent teaching or nursing while I waited for the groom to appear. And I’m glad that I could spend time unsupervised or chaperoned with guys. I don’t understand how young people even get to know each other before they get engaged when they can’t even spend too much time talking to each other in a group setting without someone interfering in case things get out of hand. It doesn’t make sense.
And I’m glad I got to hear my dad talk this morning. It made some sense of one side of my history. I’ll have to talk to him more about it. It makes more sense coming from him than from my family who are immersed in it; one, because I wouldn’t know where to begin that conversation, and two, because he understands where I am too.
It was worth losing ten minutes of sleep, that’s for sure.

Like Mother, Like Daughter

My mother is a writer.

All of my life she has called herself a writer. I must admit that during most of my growing up she only wrote in her journal. Before she began her blog I actually didn’t see much concrete evidence of her writer status. However, she has always been a writer and I never doubted that.

I didn’t have a title until I went to acting school. After a few years I felt comfortable calling myself an actor. Well, actress – I don’t like the whole politically correct thing of everyone being actors now. I had my own title, I had my own life, things were good.

Then about a year ago I took a playwriting class.

God forbid I ever call myself a writer. I have always written, but it was more of a hobby. An interest, nothing more. I kept a diary from the age of 6, on and off, wrote several skits with my brothers, wrote a children’s novel in my teens that I never did anything with and I have at least half a dozen unfinished stories in my head and in my filing cabinet, but I was not a writer. It was an interest, an acceptable interest for an actress. Supplemental income and all that rot. So I took the class.

Within two months I began to wrestle with my titles. My teacher was calling me a writer. My classmates were calling me a writer. The other instructors in the school were calling me a writer.

I refused to accept it. Even though I was writing and nothing had ever felt so perfectly natural to me, I rejected the title with all the strength and stubborn willpower in my body.

I struggled and procrastinated like I had never done before in my entire life. The things I would do instead of writing! I suddenly found a passion for my annotated bibliography, the most pointless course I take here; I don’t think my room has ever been so clean and orderly. I vacuumed. I hate vacuuming. I washed other people’s dishes. Anything so that I could avoid writing my play.

I put an astounding amount of energy into avoiding writing. My ideas would come, my spirit would whisper to my muse, and I would evade eye contact. “If I can’t see you, then you aren’t reeeallll,” right?

I can only live in denial for so long, but it took a lot of wrestling before I broke down and called myself a writer. It did break me, even though I was alone that first time.

I go for walks when my thoughts get too jumbled up to the cemetery up on the hill, an old cemetery full of old graves of long forgotten people. I walked around the dead, watching my feet swish through the grass, scaring the grasshoppers into their rain-pattering flight. I was railing against God. Against my play. My idea, the only one I’d been given, was too big. Too dangerous. Too painful. It wasn’t fair, and I told God so.

I crumpled to the ground and with tears falling down my face I looked up to the sky and said, “I’m a fucking writer. Okay? I’m a writer. And I hate it.”

I uttered the phrase with a mouth full of resentment and bitterness. It wasn’t fair, I was an actress, I was not my mother, I refused to become my mother, and I knew this was the first step down a long and impossible backslidden slope.

Months later I finally said the words to someone else. I think my passion for writing equals my passion to act. It was strange to hear those words coming out of my mouth. The strangest part was that my resentment had disappeared. It was suddenly okay for me to admit that I could, perhaps, be a writer.

I’ve spent way too much time trying to figure out why I had such a strong negative reaction to being called a writer. I’m no closer to an answer, and no closer to knowing why it became okay. But I can call myself a writer now.

It scares me, but there is a peace in the fear along with an excitement as I explore this newly forgiven aspect of myself. The world seems like an open book, my oyster chock-full of pearls just waiting for me to come along and pick them up.

Like mother. Like daughter.

I’m okay with that now.

Inheritance (written the week of May 21st, 2007)

Another of the posts I wrote during my absence...

I sat down to write some lame explanation for why I haven’t written here for a while. It’s not even that I haven’t been writing because I have been. I just haven’t been posting what I’ve written. Getting to the office (where the internet is) while it’s open was challenging (well, damn near impossible) because I was in full-time rehearsals for four weeks. I enjoyed myself. After a hiatus from acting, the passion burned brightly again. I learned so much, and I have so much more to learn – but instead of being overwhelming that thought simply makes me smile with anticipation.

But back to the lame explanation. As I sat down to write it I saw my new desktop. I like using photos for my desktop. My last two desktops were headshots of myself, which prompted my mother to say that only an actor could be egotistical enough to have their own face on their computer desktop. I am one of the few women who thinks she is beautiful, and both of those photos showed that wonderfully – they were beautiful pictures of a beautiful woman. However, when I decided to change my desktop yesterday my mother’s words whispered in my head. It helped that I was bored with my own image, so I turned away from the headshots and instead chose one of myself and my brothers, taken by one of my parents last Christmas. It is also a beautiful photo. My two much taller brothers are holding me so that it appears that we are all the same height, although in reality I am sitting on a cradle made out of their hands.

Anyone looking at the photo would see two young men and a young woman, all with the same blue eyes and soft pink gentle lips, all with the same definition to their cheekbones and jaw-lines. The two men have the same nose, the girl’s nose is similar but feminine, with one nostril slightly collapsed on itself. Their hair is different – a red-head and two brunettes, one in mid-tones and one dark, but even in that darkness the German ancestors leave their fair mark.

You don’t see how their personalities mesh and differentiate, as all sibling personalities do. You can’t see how they all have a creative bent. You can’t see how they all have completely different ways of showing that. Things like that aren’t really visible, but that’s okay. That’s why people get to know each other, after all.

Looking at this picture was the first time I saw that I do share facial features with my brothers. We’ve been told all our lives that we look like my father’s people. That is a definite fact – at the last family gathering I went to I saw our lips and bone structures on every side – although our faces hold evidence from my mother’s input too. I’ve never really seen a similarity between my brothers and myself until I chose that photo for my desktop.

It somehow roots me to see that my brothers and I look like our family. It reminds me that there is life outside of learning lines and blocking and finding the lights.

Which is a good thing to be reminded of, I think.

Hurtin' Unit

My youngest brother came to visit me this weekend.

He is on an extended leave of absence from work following a mental break-down. At least that gave him the freedom to catch a ride with a friend and spend two and a half days just hanging out with me at my home.

He has a lot of pain and it isn’t hiding very well behind his shields of cynicism and bitterness. The chip on his shoulder is so big I wonder how there is any shoulder left. I can see the roots, deep inside his broken heart but I don’t think everyone can. The perks of being a sister I guess.

We had some good talks, about our brother getting married and how happy we are for him. How good D1’s girl is to him, and how we think they’ll make it. How we wished we had been better siblings to him and how we hope we’ll be able to continue to repair those cracks we made.

We talked about relationships. He hung out with S. for a few hours and said he seemed like a good guy, that he trusted my ability to choose a man. He said it must be nice to have a relationship that our mom didn’t have a problem with, where I didn’t have to fight with her to have my adult choices respected.

He spoke of his girl, of their life, of where they might go. I asked him if he thought they’d be together forever and he said they might be. We have problems, but who doesn’t? he asked. She loves me the best she knows how, and she’s learning how to be better. I wanted to ask him if that’s all he deserves, and if he loves her as best as he knows how or if he thinks he needs to learn to be better too, but I didn’t. Instead I listened as he talked to me.

I don’t know if I remember a lot of the words he spoke to me. I do remember how much pain there was in his whole being. He’s like a dog that’s been whipped, L. said. In his whole body, in his attitude, everything about him looks like he’s been broken and hasn’t been put back together yet. I nodded and held my own pain inside.

We went for walks and talked about life, me walking upwind so that the smoke from his cigarette would blow away from me. Watching him smoke was hard for me. It made him seem hardened somehow, like the thug he played as a child had come real. Like he didn’t give a damn, like his pain was all there was and he had no hope that it would ever change.

We spoke of how confusing it is when peace comes from a source that we were taught was wrong. How confusing it is when we learn that something we were told was out of bounds is completely within our grasp. We talked about how things can be right for one person and wrong for another. About how God is bigger than the mistakes of our parents and the church. I learned how cynical he is towards church and pastors.

We talked one evening about our mother. He used some of the exact phrasing that I had used in counselling three days before. It was a comfort to us both that we have the same problems with the same woman. It helped us to see that it isn’t in our heads. That the problems are real and solid because someone else felt them too.

It was a comfort to me to see that counselling has actually helped me to grow and learn to deal with my anger, pain and frustration. It filled me with calm to see that I used to be where D2 is now, full of pain and anger that I didn’t know what to do with, but I’m not anymore. It filled me hope to see that a person can learn to keep acknowledging the feelings, to put the responsibility for them on the right people, and to let it go and move on.

I told D2 that he should seriously think about going to counselling. He agreed with me. I hope he does it.

I have a lot of hopes for him. I hope that his choice to move back in with my parents is a good one. I hope that he can get what he needs from them, especially my mother. I hope that all of his pieces get put back where they belong and that he won’t always look so beaten down.

I hope.

Maybe with enough hopes behind him, his pain will become easier to bear.

Congratulations!

That is to my middle brother, who asked his girlfriend to marry him.

She said yes. Otherwise this would be a sad little post, instead of a happy one.

I am really excited for them, and can hardly wait to welcome her into our family!

Congratulations, you two. Lots of love and best wishes your way.