There's No Place Like Home For The Holidays.
I woke up this morning thinking of my mother, which made me cry. Because my mother always ends up making me cry one way or another.
I haven't spoken to her in months and the only phone number I had to reach her at is disconnected. We've never been close, as faithful readers will recall, and I have felt these past few years like she really has all the family she wants since my brothers and sister and niece and nephew are all still living with her. I was always a bit too much my father's daughter for her taste.
It's stupid, I know, but this is the time of year when wish I had a family to gather with and celebrate. I have a chosen family of sorts--the cappers--but they're all so far-flung you have to be the proverbial cat-herder to get them together. Besides macgeek427, who is my rock and absolutely the best thing that's ever happened to me outside of my children, there's no one here that I can call up and say "Hey, I've missed you. Let's get together and have coffee or lunch or something."
The people at my temple come close, but there's a real class divide between me and them for the most part. I don't always feel comfortable around people so much more well-off than me, and sometimes I feel palpable waves of pity coming from them: they're comfortable casting me in the role of plucky single mom who's drawn a bad hand from life and struggles through anyway. That's fine for a Lifetime movie but there's more to me than that.
Robert Frost once famously said, "[h]ome is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." I don't have a place like that. I don't have a place where I can look around and say, "I'm home." I am lucky to have an apartment in which to live and where all my things and my little family's things are stored, but it is far from feeling like my home. My marriages vouchsafed me entry into families for a while, but I found myself doubly alone when those marriages ended. Each time, I suffered not only the loss of a loving relationship but also the loss of support from a family which closed ranks around its son and reminded me that I had all along been only a visitor.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth. You can comment here, or there using OpenID, or hell, both places if you want. It's all good.
I haven't spoken to her in months and the only phone number I had to reach her at is disconnected. We've never been close, as faithful readers will recall, and I have felt these past few years like she really has all the family she wants since my brothers and sister and niece and nephew are all still living with her. I was always a bit too much my father's daughter for her taste.
It's stupid, I know, but this is the time of year when wish I had a family to gather with and celebrate. I have a chosen family of sorts--the cappers--but they're all so far-flung you have to be the proverbial cat-herder to get them together. Besides macgeek427, who is my rock and absolutely the best thing that's ever happened to me outside of my children, there's no one here that I can call up and say "Hey, I've missed you. Let's get together and have coffee or lunch or something."
The people at my temple come close, but there's a real class divide between me and them for the most part. I don't always feel comfortable around people so much more well-off than me, and sometimes I feel palpable waves of pity coming from them: they're comfortable casting me in the role of plucky single mom who's drawn a bad hand from life and struggles through anyway. That's fine for a Lifetime movie but there's more to me than that.
Robert Frost once famously said, "[h]ome is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." I don't have a place like that. I don't have a place where I can look around and say, "I'm home." I am lucky to have an apartment in which to live and where all my things and my little family's things are stored, but it is far from feeling like my home. My marriages vouchsafed me entry into families for a while, but I found myself doubly alone when those marriages ended. Each time, I suffered not only the loss of a loving relationship but also the loss of support from a family which closed ranks around its son and reminded me that I had all along been only a visitor.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth. You can comment here, or there using OpenID, or hell, both places if you want. It's all good.