Happily Never After

So my lovable family has guilt tripped me into going home to visit them. I have now committed myself to a Labor Day weekend that I was hoping to spend uncommitted. (And a few hundred miles away from Pittsburgh.) It isn't that I don't love them.

Everything in my life is changing. Everything. And as long as I'm here, and dealing with myself, I don't have to be there, and dealing with them. It isn't to say I wouldn't normally love going home to visit. That was before the divorce was announced and my parents decided to sell the house I grew up in, my grandparents bought a condo in a nursing home community and began the months long process of moving out of their big wonderful old house that I also grew up in. Before all of this, I would go home for almost no reason at all. Just because I loved home. And regretablly, it seems, those times for me have gone.

This will be the last time that I am able to walk into the only home I have ever known. It will be the last visit to my family when my family is still my family. I will have to say goodbye to two thirds of my childhood, to the first twenty-two years of my life, and the yards and walls, windows and ceilings that own every memory of all of those years. I will be in the bedroom of my childhood for the last time, looking out of the window that I used to watch thunderstorms through. I will stand in the backyard I used to sledride down and beneath the basketball hoop my brother and I played on during the summers before he left us. I will see the trees that held our christmas lights every year and I will take a bath in the baby-pink porcelin tub with its broken drain for the millionth and last time. I will lay on the couch in the livingroom where I laid the Christmas I had strep throat and fell asleep watching Rudolph by the light of the tree. I will probably cry the last tears I'll ever cry there.

But I assume they won't be the last tears I cry ever.

I'll go to my grandparent's house then, and again face saying goodbye to the place I spent almost as much of my life. I lived there for a time, in the room my mother and her sister once lived in. I'll say goodbye to the pool where my cousins and I played, the basketball court where our roller-hockey tournaments were held, the basement that to this day scares me beyond adult reason, the air hockey table, the baby grand piano where I learned to play the cannon in D and my grandmother played all fourteen pages of kitten on the keys. The den that smells like wood polish and carpet. I'll probably sit on the swingset, and look across the flagstone yard to the hammock, where someone was always laying or playing all the summers of my life. I will stand in the stepdown and look out the windows and cry. And I will remember the summer I lived there, how during a thunderstorm my grandmother taught me to jitterbug, and I played an old black sabbath record for her and generations collided during that storm. I will say goodbye to the chalk room where I used to draw and to their bedroom and it's green carpet and sliding glass door.

And while I understand, as I have always understood, that a time would come when I would lose those times of my life, it makes it all the more harsh that I'm losing them all at once.

I realize it's hard for my parents, to hear among other things, that I am angry and sad and would rather ignore it all than to come home and see it with my eyes. They are both being very rational about the whole thing, and are friendly and lovable with each other moreso it seems sometimes than normal. They tell me that when I see they're OK...it will remove the power of the divorce, and become just a fact with which I can deal.

When I was little, and I had a bad dream, I would run to their room and my mom would take me back to my bed and she would sit with me while we deconstructed my dream. "It's only scary because you didn't feel control over it," she'd say. "So let's change it now, to end how you want it to end." And I would take great joy out of developing tales of heroism in which she herself would track down the big bad wolf and punch him in the nose. Or Dracula turned out just to be lonely because he didn't look like everyone else, so we invited him over for dinner. Or when all else failed, we would just talk about Christmas until I fell asleep.

I can't change the ending now. And Christmas is going to be spent apart, a family divided. I am grown-up enough now to understand the absence of happily ever after. But the bad dream is kicking my ass on this one, and even my mom doesn't have the power to change it. Which is why it's very important to me not to lose sight of what exactly is required to maintain control over my feelings. Being immersed in so many goodbyes, all at once, seems almost more than I can bare. And I want, more than anything, to change the ending to a happily ever after that it seems will never come.