Oh man, this is totally the best.  My Mom loved this song.

Oh! And this, which I knew the original with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, but this one also has Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson!

[Disclaimer -- A lot of this is personal.  Almost none of the people mentioned within know about this blog.]

I’ve been thinking a lot about family lately.  What it is, how it defines us, how we define it.  How it affects us.

This last year or so has been so incredibly strange regarding family.

1) My siblings found their father & siblings on Facebook.  I say “their” because technically they are my half siblings (though I have never thought of them that way), so their dad is not my dad, their other siblings not mine.  It was so incredibly strange to watch them going through that, dealing with that, and have nothing to do with it.  For once all 3 of my siblings were united in something that I was not.  It was weird.  I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect me.  Not always in a good way.  But no ones perfect, right?  We all feel threatened.

2) My stepfather died suddenly of a heart attack.  We were not close.  But the fact of the matter is, he came into my life when I was 12, and died pretty much on my 30th birthday.  That is not a short time.  Again, we didn’t have much of a relationship, but Kenny was there.  It seems so weird to go to my mom’s place now and not see him.   To know that it’s hard for her to deal with his passing.

3) In May last year, there was an article on the front page of my hometown newspaper about my Dad.  I haven’t had a relationship with him since I was about 12.  He is, at his worst, a violent alcoholic who ended up living on the streets begging for change.  This article was a journalistic feel good piece.  Most people I told about it thought I should be thrilled that this police office helped my Dad find “a new life”.  And I did, in a way.  But a lot of parts of the article just read as such utter bullshit to me.  This man, who beat my mother, who had no problem beating pregnant dogs with a hammer, had “a kind and gentle nature”?   The article stated that my Dad’s next steps were to try and “get in touch with his daughters”.  Well, I decided to let him make that move.  Mr. Police Officer could google me and find me in a minute.  And after 35 years of drinking, I wasn’t about to celebrate for 8 months.  Not when the man had been sober for 2-3 years in my childhood and ended up on the streets.

4) My oldest sister.  The one who was given up for adoption when my mom was 17.  We found her when I was about 8 years old.  Purely and weirdly accidental.  She had a son at the time, and would have another about 7 years later.  So I’d say we had a relationship with her for about 7 or 8 years, maybe a bit longer.  Very sporadilcally.  VERY sporadically.  But I was only 8 years older than my oldest nephew.  I babysat a few times.  Then she dropped out of our lives, her sons dropped out of our lives.  This past christmas she called us all.  It’s — awkward.  She told me “If you every want to talk to your big sister, call me.” and I couldn’t help but think “You’re not that.”  I think I’m angry with her for letting us know her and her kids just enough to miss them so much when they were gone.

And I get that she was given up for adoption and has no obvious emotional ties to us.  But the boys.  Now that I have 7 other nieces and nephews that I feel very close to, I miss those boys. What we could have had.  I’m now friends with them both on Facebook, but after the initial contact, there’s nothing.  And you can’t force that.  We haven’t been a part of their lives, nor did we have any right to.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss them and love them as much as I do the 7 others.

5) My grandma is in the hospital, potentially close to death.  This is the third time in 5 years she’s been on the knife’s edge, so to speak.  I am on alert.  I am caught between wanting her to pull through, and wanting her to have peace.  To be with my grandpa. I worry that my mom can’t deal with another death this year.

6) Having lost touch with my Dad when I was 12, I lost touch with all his family too.  And I knew them, just enough to be a tease.  He took me “up north” to visit them a few times as a child, and I can’t even describe it.  I remember being 8, running around the acres of my Aunt’s property with my cousin Venessa, thinking: “they all look like me.  They’re all indian too.”  It was nice, that warm feeling in my chest.  I wanted to be a part of it.  And for a small time, I was.  I visited a few times after that, and then when my Dad started drinking again I lost touch with them.

This past Thursday my cousin, my playmate, Venessa, found me on Facebook.  I almost cried.  I saw pictures she posted from back at my Aunt’s place, and it looks exactly the same.  They are my family too.  I hope this can be a reconnection with them.

I cannot help but wonder if they think of me the way I think of my Dad, my half sister, my nephews on Facebook.  The ones that are so close but so far.  The lost ones. Do they wonder about me?

But then I fear that they don’t.

I love this one.  My Mom used to play this on 45 all the time, and sing the chorus.  She really liked it, maybe because her mom is Italian.  I had forgotten about it until about 6 or 7 years ago, when thanks to the internet I found it again.

It’s only as an adult that I realize how much music played a part of my childhood, particularly the music my mother listened to. It stays with you, the songs you learn as a wee one. I remember, about 2 years ago one of my nieces got an MP3 player, and had a Beach Boys song on it.

This flabbergasted my mother, who asked “why does she have THAT on there?”, to which my sister replied, “She likes that song because *I* like that song!” It brought to mind all the many songs I love today because my mom loved them and played them at home.

This is part ONE:

Remembrance Day is always an interesting experience in centretown Ottawa.

The obvious ceremony at the National War Memorial is one thing (although I’ve only ever been once, myself).  As part of that ceremony the snowbirds do a flyover in the Missing Man Formation.  For me, 11:11a.m. is virtually impossible to miss because of this, at least for the last 3 years.  My apartment is directly in the flyover path.  Mere seconds after they fly over the National War Memorial, the jets are flying directly over my apartment building.  You can see them, still in formation, from my balcony.  And let me tell you, they are LOUD, loud planes.

So there’s that, the ceremony and the planes.  You walk around downtown and there are men and women in uniform everywhere.  And every year, like so many others, I walk to the memorial to read the wearths, see the personal memorials and flowers citizens have left.  I mentally catalogue all the flags at half-mast, including the one on the Peace Tower.  I remember and think of my grandfather, a veteran tail-gunner from the RAF in WWII.  I leave my poppy on the Tomb of the Unknown.

It feels lucky to be able to be here for Remembrance Day, to pass the day in our nation’s capital.

Today, is also another day of Remembrance.  My stepfather passed away this spring.  Today is his birthday.  It’s ironic that I mentally mark it this year with a dream about him last night (I saw his ghost on the front porch of our house in Guelph.  I asked him how the afterlife was — apparently all is well) and a call to my mother today.  Kenny was a Jehovah’s Witness — he didn’t celebrate his birthday.  But I thought of him today, and I thought of my mother who is still grieving.

Lest We Forget

Remembrance Day 2007

Remembrance Day 2007

Remembrance Day 2007

So this past long weekend was my Mom’s 60th birthday. I headed down to Barrie to celebrate. While things didn’t turn out quite as my sisters and I had hoped/expected, it was still great fun all around.

It was especially nice to see my family from down east. My aunt paula and uncle greg plush cousin Adam all joined us in Barrie. It’s been about 7 or 8 years since I saw them, so that was pretty awesome.

I do wish this country wasn’t so damned big. Visiting would be much more frequent.

I’ve just gotten home from 6 hrs at the museum of civilization. I feel like I’ve run 2 marathons.

My stepfather passed away April 10th 2008, the day after my birthday. We were not close, but it does not make it any less a loss for the family as a whole, and for my mother in particular.

“Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy.”

RIP Kenny.

I didn’t get to see most of my family this past Christmas, as I decided to visit my brother and his family in Manitoba instead.  While that visit was wonderful, I did miss seeing my Mom and Sisters and the rest of the nieces and nephews.  So I decided to go down to Barrie for this whole new Family Day holiday.  Cheesy name, great idea.  A long weekend in February is never a bad thing.

Anyway, I brought my friend Olga with me this time.  I thought she could stand some down time, as well as some general boring family-esque time.   It’s always interesting to bring family and friends together, because while they both know you so well, they know very different parts of you, and you play different roles with each of them.  I was glad to bring Olga with me because she’s my oldest friend.  I was glad for one of my friends to see “where I come from”, and how my family interacts and all that.

Plus it’s good to get an outsider’s perspective.  It’s only in the last 2 or 3 years that I’ve truly come to realize how great my family actually is.  I’ve spent many years being resentful of being the youngest, feeling abandoned, dealing with some of the stuff that happened in childhood, and while none of that stuff has necessarily gone away, I certainly have had my eyes opened.  I’ve seen how other people interact with their families — and frankly, they generally don’t, or at least not on any real or intimate level.

I’m glad we’re not like that.

When my time comes
Forget the wrong that I’ve done
Help me leave behind some
Reasons to be missed

Leave out all the rest

(Linkin Park)

I haven’t really lost anyone super close to me.  My grandfather, yes, but I was 15 years old.  Too young to really appreciate what a great man he was, and what I’d lost.  It’s only now, as an adult, that I realize that.  Especially last year, when I went to Ireland.  I wish I could have shared that experience with him.  It was his homeland, after all, and he was the reason I went there in the first place.

This past Tuesday, the mother of one of my best friends died.  She was very ill, for a very long time, so it wasn’t really a huge surprise, but still.  It’s been strange.  I’ve always been quite sensitive.  So these things tend to tear me up a bit, even though it doesn’t directly affect me.  I guess I just feel for my friends.  It’s strange, because another of my very close friends mother passed away some years back.  It was very, very fast.  This time it was long and drawn out and horrible.  Neither experience seems any easier.

I feel melancholy, and a little lost.  I want to be there for my friend, and I am.  But we all know that the days immediately following a death are insane and busy and crazy.  She doesn’t really need me right now.  I’m sure she will in the future though, and I’ll be there.

And of course these kinds of situations make you examine your own life, in ways that aren’t always comfortable.  It’s so strange and indescribable.  I find myself tearing up at times, and it probably seems strange to people.  It’s a little weird to be so emotionally…sympathetic.

And it came to me then that every plan
Is a tiny prayer to father time
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself
That I’ve already taken too much today
As each descending peak on the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me
Away from me

So who’s gonna watch you die? So whos gonna watch you die?

(Death Cab For Cutie)