By: Revanche

Home for the holidays

January 6, 2016

It’s easy to forget when it happens once a year. The twinkling, winking fairy lights and the festive holiday wreaths lull me into a false sense of peace. Then I go home and my heart breaks into seventeen pieces again.

It starts from the moment I pull up outside and see the state of disrepair. Much of this is the Sibling’s fault. The half finished lumps of “art project” still litter the browning lawn, the fence is more decayed, and is that a whole section missing? Dad’s gardening projects are scattered around the foyer, messy but less depressing than the signs of a mind far in decline.

A cat darts underfoot seeking a way indoors. This is new. Since we liberated the health-challenged Seamus, stray cats have taken his place.

I step inside and none of the furniture is familiar. Mom’s photos are everywhere, snapshots from my childhood on, and my breath catches. I think of her everyday. Sometimes it almost feels like she’s watching over LB. Maybe she is, I don’t know. It doesn’t make me feel better or worse to believe it. But to see her image, from when she was younger and healthier? I’m not ready for that flood of pain. Am I ever?

I retreat to my room and everything is nearly the way I left it last time. It’s my room, I could sit back in the chair and get to work on figures and making things work again just like fifteen years ago.

***

Dad and I have several conversations, all avoiding the issue. Finally, it comes to a head. My frustrations with his inability to really hear me, to give me the one thing I’ve ever asked for, it all bubbles up. I can’t take one more of his “I thought it was best not to tell you, then it all went to hell” scenarios. So we talk. Really talk.

I tell him that it hurts me when he lies or omits important information. It doesn’t matter if I can do anything about it, chances are likely I can, but even if I can’t, I need to know before it becomes a BFD.

I tell him that it’s nonsensical to say it’s for my protection when, in the end, it has always cost me more stress and more money.  See, car towing, for one example.

I tell him that in 17 years, I’ve busted my butt for him and Mom willingly and happily, and only asked him for one thing: honesty.

I tell him that while he may think hiding things is for me, it’s not. It’s his unwillingness to sacrifice a bit of his pride to spare me pain in the only way I asked him to.

I tell him that he has repeatedly promised it and never delivered when it mattered, and this has had a lasting impact on our relationship.

I tell him that in the depths of my health decline, I seriously considered getting a life insurance policy big enough to take care of them for at least a decade and offing myself because his actions made me feel like my only value to him was monetary. That he didn’t value me as a person in the least, that he was only willing to pay lip service to his gratitude for all my willing sacrifices.

I tell him that his latest, going behind my back and then confessing only after I had inadvertently trapped him, was exactly what Sibling would do. It’s exactly what he’d done his entire life: taking advantage of my trust, and then tearfully apologizing after he’d already gotten what he wanted.

I tell him Sibling’s pattern of behavior ruined that relationship and I was not prepared for it to ruin ours.

I tell him that Mom’s dead, Sibling’s as good as gone, he’s my only family left. He needs to remember that. He also needs to remember that LB is his only shot. He is unlikely to have any chance to try again with another grandkid so he needs to make choices that show he knows that. He spent years trying to make up for not being there for us as kids, this isn’t the time to repeat that pattern.

I tell him that I wasn’t telling him to get it off my chest, I don’t vent for emotional release. I was telling him because I expect it to change. It has to change. 

*

I don’t tell him that I don’t ask him questions because I don’t want to be lied to.

I don’t tell him that because of them, if you plan to ask me for forgiveness rather than permission, you don’t deserve either.

I don’t tell him that I’m at the absolute end of my tether with them all and I almost no longer care if LB has a relationship with hir grandpa. Because it’s not entirely true. I care a lot. I stopped caring for me, so much, but I will be damned if I sit back and just let Sibling’s wreck of a life and poor life choices, and Dad’s guilt complex, deprive LB entirely of hir maternal grandparents.

*

He apologizes.

He admits that he’s been wrong this entire time, and most especially this last time.

He explains that he’s been pushing himself to earn any income because he needs to cover Sibling’s expenses, because at the very least, the few dollars that go toward Sibling’s care aside from shelter should come out of his pocket, not mine. At least not directly.

He admits that he had been planning to hide his health issues from me, particularly if it turned out to be cancer, on the premise that burdening me with the knowledge when there’s nothing I can do would be selfish.

He acknowledges that it is my choice to insist on having the full picture, no matter for good or ill, big or small.

He promises to stop hiding things.

*

I don’t know if he’ll keep this promise, or if it’ll go the way of the hundred other broken promises. I don’t know if this is real progress, even. I’d say that I can only hope but I’m not sure that I can do that, even. I can only wait and see.

I understand his instinct to hide dire health issues, I’d do the same. Hell, I have done the same. For 15 years I hid my chronic illness from them. They knew I had some pain issues, but didn’t know how severe they’d become, and I didn’t tell them because there was absolutely nothing they could do about it except hurt for me as my parents. But there’s a huge difference between a chronic illness and a potentially terminal one, and still, either way, I’d want to know because there are things that I can do to ease discomfort and to help. I don’t just sit in my hermit-cave and worry uselessly, I do things. I get shit done. I can’t fix the world but I can help, a little. 

Understanding is not the same as agreeing.

***

The holidays were never particularly special in our family. We couldn’t afford the time and energy to celebrate, and really didn’t have the money to. But they are now the time we go back to spend time with family, and they are when all the miscommunications (intended or not) are brought to light, and all the facades get knocked over. They’re the time for regrets over the years we lost, for nightmare fights with Sibling as my subconscious wrestles with this reality it hates, for pretending good cheer even as I discover how much worse things have gotten since last year.

Someday, the holidays won’t be preceded by six weeks of nightmares about Sibling, or an acidic gut from anticipating what truths will out this time. But the way things have progressed, I’d be lying if I said I was optimistic about what someday holds instead.

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