This is not my entry.
I got waylaid by the Rude Cactus this morning, reading his post and finding myself welling up over his words today when he usually makes me laugh. He's usually my internet lift, I enjoy just about everything except for his unpronounceable Friday post about current events because I have my head in the ground and fail to keep up with American news, my fault, not his by any means. I'd just rather read his words about his family, the job he seems to dislike or just about anything that rolls through his freaky brain.
His post today was about a journey to the town where his grandmother lives to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, and he talked about his close family ties and how it made him feel. I'm paraphrasing badly, go and read instead, I'll wait. I'll get coffee.
Ready to continue?
I apologize in advance, I didn't plan to go here, I'm on my way to the doctor shortly but my brain runs a billion miles an hour on days like these, and this is eye-bleedingly esoteric at Bridget's finest.
It made me think. I don't really have that. That small town stuff, the closeness. I never have. This isn't a woe-is-me rough childhood post, hell, I've had my thrills and my knocks too. Typically average. Just like everyone else.
Or not.
I spent my childhood talking to the Atlantic Ocean. She holds all my secrets, my hopes and my fears and my dreams. I was monitored intermittently through the window as I grew up alone on a beach, to fend for myself in the changing tides, bleached and then burned to a crisp by the sun, content to prattle on as children do, and never expecting the reply, only the comfort of that sea that goes on forever and is always going to be right where I left it. Then I went straight to the freak circuit with Loch and it may have finished me off. I'm about as mature as a lollipop, stuck in your hair.
Maybe that's why I can write for hours and hours without feedback, I can talk to my doctors and not feel the least bit self-conscious about the lack of appropriate response.
Jacob really cannot fathom the exact depth of my emotions regarding this. He only ever hit the tip of the iceberg with his penchant for taking me to the beach as an adult. I was usually headed there anyway. I believe I'm acquainted intimately with every single wave. The ocean has tasted me and I have tasted it right back. We've been lovers.
But as a grownup there is nowhere to go now. And so I made my own family out of my male friends who serve as brothers, uncles, babysitters, heavy lifters, confidants and sounding boards. I would call any one of five or ten of them in an emergency first, before my family.
Let's just say I've always been an outsider, content to keep in touch, whatever that may be, but really I'm not close to anyone I was born related to. Sometimes it feels weird. I had an average suburban seventies childhood and eighties adolescence. I was alternately spoiled and deprived. I was often ignored and so maybe when I grew up it was an unconscious payback. Now I find them stifling, suffocating and judgemental, absent when they should have closed ranks, stonefaced when sought out for advice, never once venturing out of their ivory towers until it was too late, and then they looked around and decided I would keep my secrets because they were perfect and life would go on. This is the same flesh and blood who refused to acknowledge my hearing issues which led to a lifetime of shame on my part, hiding it and adding insult to injury as I try to manage getting used to hearing aids on top of everything else I'm trying to deal with.
Cole was a perfect fit, in their eyes, finding perfection at the expense of comfort. And while they love Jacob, it's mostly because he cleans up nicely and they can say there is a minister in the family. I don't think they don't know a thing about him.
They don't know a thing about me.
And oddly, I'm not bitter anymore. Sometimes, like when I read that post today, there's a twinge. But looking back it's mostly wistfulness. Instead of being permitted to thrive and bloom I was permitted to exist.
And they'll read this and not understand. And I don't really care.
I made my own family, one that brings up all of those feelings now, and I'm grateful for it. I think that God puts all the people together who don't have that, and they make their own little families. That's what we've done, because as I said before, I'm no different than anyone else that I know. It was less of a commune, and more of an effort to fulfill all of our needs. So those of you who capitalized your obscenities at me for still being close to Loch or anyone else shouldn't bother, because you probably have relatives you can go to in a crisis, family you love without hesitation, without having to skip a beat and then make your affirmation because it's the right thing to do. I never hesitate when I say how much I love my friends.
Never.
Congratulations, you are blessed and apparently so much better of a human bean than I am.
Did I ever once argue that point with you?
I'm not sure if writing this out makes me sad or makes me feel better.
