My search for home is not the result of aging or aloneness or economics or any of that. It's not a negative. The need to find home is like background static in my psyche. It's always there. It's a drive. Home is what I've wanted since I was a child -- a desire for a place to rest my heart, my being, my body; to truly be at peace when I get there, and when flung out into the world of uncertainty to know home is waiting for my return.
I was born into mayhem. Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1957, I was the first baby of a teenaged mother running from an abusive family to a down-and-out dreamer, my father. She was with him briefly, then pulled back and forth between her parents and men, and by 19-years-old had two babies from two men. Me, she kept. She gave birth to a boy in a home for unwed mothers, and against her will gave him up for adoption. (He found her in 2004 and has a wife and children. My mother is close to them.)
My grandparents then did what I've done ever since -- when things got crazy they up and left. They took me and my mother and moved to Southern California. I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, which was not a good idea, but my mother was not equipped to protect me. My connection to him was a mix of love and confusion.
When I was 5 my mother married a sexual abuser like her father and had another child, a daughter. I endured a lot and got out as soon as I could -- 15, 16 years old. There was neither a home nor a person I could trust. I was a tough girl and offered up my body to get by, because it was easy for me to disconnect. That was a lifetime ago.
Now I am back in NYC. I came here first in 1984, running from California, then left 10 years ago for Massachusetts and raised my children against a backdrop of tumoil that I tried to control. It's very hard not to repeat patterns from past generations. You think you have the patterns all figured out and then you learn you're submitting to the same disasters, under different wraps, that plagued your early life, and the lives of your people. That's the legacy of abuse.
I have to stay put here. NYC is my home and if I leave it will not be to escape. I've softened. I don't want to wander anymore. I want to understand who and what is home because each time I've run there have been sacrifices, just like my mother. I have to deal with this itching in my psyche and know what it is to feel peace in a place and in a person.
I hadn't seen my mother in many years. That's how it is. We go for years without talking or visits and then something breaks. She is still married to my perpetrator in California and that has caused a lot of tension and logistical problems. I won't let him near me or my children. My mother has visited by herself but I've always had to pay a price for not faking it and keeping her family intact, like she did. Earlier this year she was adamant about visiting me this summer. Her husband is now old and sickly and maybe that had something to do with it.
Last week my mother came from California and stayed with me in my Brooklyn apartment. My cousin joined us, also from California, for the first 3 days, staying at a nearby inn, then my daughter visited from Massachusetts for a couple days, and then my son and his girlfriend came over, and then it was just my mother and I.
Before my mother arrived last week, I'd been working on my book about finding home, and it occurred to me that while I am on a search for home, my mother is on a search for family. In essence, we both want to know where and to whom we belong. We go about these quests in very different ways. I sit on my ass and wax philosophical and analyze what home means and she shleps to destinations near and far looking at gravesites, Ellis Island logbooks, tenement museums. She's also comforted by the myth of family lore while I am a complete skeptic and believe none of it.
When she arrived with plans to go to the Jewish enclaves of Brighton Beach and Boro Park and the cemetery of her grandparents from Russia, instead of feeling my usual annoyance I felt something akin to empathy. I went with an open mind to places where she wanted to find her roots. I didn't feel moved emotionally but I had a lot of fun. I felt very relaxed around her. I'm wondering if maybe in our dual need to find what we never had, we can be both family and home to one another.
At Sammy's Roumanian on the Lower East Side. On the left is my mother's son's family. She met this family in 2004.
On the right are the people I know. From R to L: Back row: my cousin Sue, my mother, me; Front: Theo, my son, far right and his girlfriend, Kayla.
This is my mother, cousin, and me en route to Brighton Beach where the Russian Jews live.
Posing with a babushka in a babushka because I drew the line at taking photos of ethnic people just because.
My great-grandparents. I was named after Rose.
Mom and my daughter, Rae, playing Crazy Gin at my place.
Serious business.
No comments:
Post a Comment