We’ve all got our crap—you and me, we—us. Complex family dynamics, I’ve begun to call it. I see (and acknowledge) the psychopathic tendencies—crazy—in you, and you in me, of course, having known one another so intimately in a previous life.
We carry our old selves off planes, out of automobiles, through the front door, and into the living room, clothed in all the assumptions of who and what we once were, as if all this time we’ve been neatly boxed up and wrapped under the tree for who-knows-how-many years. But we’ve all changed—waded through the once-thought-unfathomable—and yet here we are—family, the same as ever.
It is a great gift to change, and it starts with looking inward first, and then out. We are family, after all. I’d hate not to have this—a home. And yet, time and again, I’ve attempted to rip up this gift and toss it in the bin, but you’ve always picked up the scraps after I left, crying, holding them together, saying, “It’s okay. One day we’ll be whole again.”
We’ve all got our shit—some of us certainly more than others—and at times, we’ve crapped all over one another. Family is anything but perfect, and if yours is, then bless your bloody hearts. But it most likely isn’t. Though—is that not what love is? To acknowledge another’s most crappy bits and accept them nevertheless? Family has a way of bringing out the worst in us, best as well. And little children—how they have a way of helping us forget—or perhaps remember—however, they, of course, do not have their own crap yet. Family is most certainly not perfect, and yet here we all are, still together—the same as ever, imperfect, significantly different. Hopefully wiser in time.
A bit like the river you come back to, the one you fished as a kid—similar, the same name, yet different, still intact, no worse, no better. Its banks shallower, the once-thick coppice that hung over the water’s edge chopped down to stumps, the riffle you loved so much—used to sprint towards, but now slowly walk—gone, along with the big deep pool with the big brown fish at the big glide’s beginning—everything, it seems, has moved downstream with time.
We’re all headed there, toward some larger body of water at river’s end—where all bodies—rivers, streams, and creeks—collide, where the illusion of separateness can no longer persist. Before we get there, though, I’d like to have said we spent as much time—the little bit which this life gives, we unfortunately—or fortunately—get—as we possibly could, separate yet together.
