The Impact

"I'd cover my heart and hit the deck--
I'd brace myself for the impact if I were you..." DC

I remember very clearly, one family dinner in particular. Most minor family events (absent holidays, which included dozens of people on either or both sides) my brother's soccer games for example, or my dance recitals, Mother's Day, and so on... were comprised of four or sometimes five of us. Always present were my mother, my brother and I, and my paternal grandmother.

My grandmother and mother, unlike most mothers and daughters-in-law, through initially rocky terrain, became by the time I was born, the very best of friends. And in the absence of my father during our formative years, (his role was to earn the money and stay out of the way, right?) she more than fulfilled my need as a child for two parents. And so I was lucky, perhaps, since my first real memories of him don't occur until around the age of thirteen. That was right around the time that my brother lost his mind and my mother was consumed by the full time job of keeping him from killing himself or others. My father had no choice but to assume a more active role in my life. Otherwise I might've gone awry. More on thirteen later.

In this memory of a family dinner, I was probably eight, ten at most. We were out to eat, which was my favorite thing to do, and all five of us were there. My Nan, my mom and brother (who for the next ten years or so, until after years of anger and misunderstanding we stopped speaking altogether, was where my sun rose and set), and my father who I might or might not have liked at that age. Again, his image is fuzzy until later in my life.

The restaurant was in Washington, where his office was and my brother and I were born. Not more than half an hour from our house, but it felt like a road trip to get there. (Understand, at the time, that my world was triangular; consisting primarily of my own home, and the homes of my grandparents, both 15minutes away.)

I remember that my father seemed particularly engaged that evening. He told a story while we waited for dinner, my brother and I laughed without reservation, rolling our heads back in the exaggerated way that children do when something is both funny, and in response to the pleasure registered on the faces of their now laughing adults...hoping to produce more laughter with their fit. When you're small, there is nothing like that feeling. My mother, who drank only water with lemon for the first twenty years of my life, was sitting across the table from me, chatting and twisting the rinds in between her fingers. I thought she had the most beautiful hands. The juice, however, instead of dropping as instructed into her glass, shot across the table directly into my eye. I shrieked "my eyeball!" and my grandma (always situated between my brother and I to discourage fighting) as if automatically, produced a moist napkin and dabbed at my face. My mother gasped, while trying to conceal a spontaneous laugh. She covered her mouth quickly. "I'm so sorry, honey!" She giggled. My brother was uproariously laughing. After overcoming the feelings of woundedness, I laughed again too...which gave license to my parents, and at a glance, we were a seemingly happy family.

The dinner was otherwise characteristic. There is no reason, from what I can tell, that I should remember this night with any more clarity than another. Except to note that my father was insistent that I sample his Calamari, and I liked it, but it felt like eating rubberbands, I said. Then my brother told me it was squid and I nearly cried. These were the moments, no different than any of the moments in any of your families, that made us whatever we were then. They are our stories, like your stories... and the reasons, a million of them, tiny and some inconspicuous, that my heart is broken at my family's dissolve.

The word divorce wasn't what stuck in my head. I can hear her saying, although I was semi-conscious at 7am that Tuesday, that she was asking for A and that they'd be doing B and there wouldn't be any drawn out proceedings and everyone would arrive on the other side unscathed. It wasn't the concept so much as the clear blue sky out of which the concept fell. After 9/11...one of the most recurring statements from New Yorkers who'd been there that morning, "It was the most beautiful, normal morning. It was a day just like any other day. The sky was so blue that day."

No one expects the blue sky to fall.

Here it was though. At 7am on a Tuesday in May, the sky was laying on my bed, crushing me beneath. "Hello?" She asked, after what must have been a pause on my part of some length. I don't know what I said. I fumbled, I mustered some questions, I tried to stand but shaking from the sheer force of the blow, found it to be more comfortable fetally on the floor. I couldn't think. I had to go to work so we didn't talk much longer. There were nothing but stupid questions coming out regardless. And I think I cried a little at one point, "but we were a family." We weren't really a family.

It turns out, according to my loving parents, (who are "still great friends") that the definition of a family, which has been employed as either a defense mechanism or out of sheer failure to understand how else to reconcile this to themselves and the world, are just four people who happen to known one another. Sharing DNA mustn't hurt, I'd assume... but we're "still a family" is something I'm hearing more often than "we're still going to be great friends" these days. It doesn't occur to them perhaps, that my brother left ten years ago and for all intents and purposes, never came back again. That my relationships with them, are in my adulthood, completely independent of each other. We haven't all been in the same room in years. And once all four of us are living in different zip codes, we will have become four adults who know each other. And I'm trying not to be angry.

They want me to come "home" and see the house before it sells. They send me floor plans for condos and they talk about holidays and how neither will ever try to impose any guilt upon me for choosing to Christmas with the other. Why not just spend those apart too? Four people, in four different states, the semblance of what once was a family. The common onlooker would never be able to spot it. But upon closer examinations, you might see the wounds of the impact. The bruised ego here, the inability to communicate properly there, and on the faces of a few... maybe even a wince when images of dinners with lemons and calamari jump to their memory, spontaneously. Unfairly.

This isn't a family. We didn't survive the impact.