I forgot to post this @ Christmas

I’m going to miss my house. After my parents have divorced, which feels to be taking forever, they will sell our house, the place where I grew up, and move into condominiums in separate corners of their worlds. My house will be gone then, the way that houses sometimes go. Until then, and I guess after it’s over, I will have to remember this Christmas as one of our last memories together. My parents, me, and our house.

I landed at Pittsburgh International Airport and my father picked me up as he always does. We drove home and discussed the state of the family, the various levels of sadness, senility and disaster in Pittsburgh this Christmas season. We tried to predict whether or not my brother might make an appearance. My father seemed out of sorts. He’s been that way since Memorial Day, or D-Day, as I refer to the day they announced the pending divorce. He looks older, too.

The next morning my mother and I left for two days at the spa. We had a lovely time. Facials, pedicures, paraffin wax treatments and endless money spending aside, it was so nice to just spend time with her, minus the usual distractions of home. We talked about my father, and she asked me to please not bring down the mood of the weekend. Every time we spoke about it for too long, one or the other of us cried. No one felt like crying on Christmas weekend. I noted, however, that if I did start crying, I may never stop.

Instead we decided to focus on the exciting changes awaiting us back at home. Once we left our champagne and chalet in the woods and headed back to a world where no one offers you a fresh heated neck wrap while you’re busy drinking herbal tea submerged to your knees in mineral mud, we would be facing the introduction of my boyfriend and my father. An introduction that Carl J. Smith has probably been dreading since he first heard the words “it’s a girl,” some twenty-four years ago. My mother was confident. “He’ll be fine,” she said. “Give your Dad some credit. They’re going to get along just great.”

I frowned.

Not only did I doubt my father’s capacity to be “fine” when presented the proposition of shaking hands with the guy who is about to move in with his daughter, I doubted my capacity to be “fine” in the face of it. When I was a teenager who hated her older brother and all of his friends, and thus boys in general, I used to assert regularly that I was to be convent bound. “I hate boys.” I’d say. A late adapter in the relationship arena, at twenty-four, this is actually my first real relationship. My father was thrilled with the convent idea. Less so with the shaking the boyfriend’s hand idea. Understandably.

But much to my surprise, perhaps I did underestimate him. They got along quite well. Better than well, in fact. They seemed to actually like each other. Strange silences aside, and differences in politics and religion, they smoked and drank and chatted about law and the family, and whatever else I don’t know. I didn’t see a whole lot of either of them for three days. After the boyfriend left, I was getting ready to go out with my friends. My father found his way into my doorway and said, (in a grand gesture for a man who rarely shares his thoughts) “Yeah. I liked him. I shook his hand when he left and told him I was sure I’d see him again.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said. And all of the parent/boyfriend angst was over. Unfortunately, the parents weren’t the only ones with opinions. I fielded a barrage of questions from the rest of my family and friends about our relationship and our plans for the future and all other things that generally make me nervous. I answered them to the best of my ability, while my mother smiled, and I could see her thinking she told me so. I have, in fact, fallen into real love, despite my best efforts to avoid it.

There were sad times too, and moments when it became clear again, that despite the show of friendship and affection from my parents, that their marriage was in fact about to be over. My brother surfaced briefly, for one dinner that my family for the most part ran to with open arms. I cried and called Manderz to come pick me up before he arrived. We ate salads at Eat N’ Park and I wondered aloud how I became so hopelessly fucked up. Whose family was this? And how the hell it got this bad. Then we drank white Russians, and I took a bath and went to sleep. It didn’t feel like the last time I’d ever take a bath and go to sleep in my house. But it was.

By the end of the week my time had come. It’d been a lovely and sad Christmas, but it was over now, and I’d need to let it go with the house and family it accompanied. The boyfriend was back in New York moving his things into what was about to become “our” apartment. (A combination of “my” apartment, “Marc’s apartment” and now with the boyfriend addition, his apartment too.) I wanted to get home to watch helplessly as he moved all of his worldly possessions into what I still very much considered only MY apartment. That isn’t to say that I wasn’t excited. Mostly, I just wanted all of these dramatic changes to be over. Changes, it turns out, even changes for the better, can be terribly uncomfortable and complicated at times.

All in all, this Christmas marked as many new beginnings as it marked endings. There were memories about to be lost and new ones being made even as I watched but could do nothing. I felt helpless, saying goodbye to the past and trying to understand the new way that everything was about to be. Only one thing was absolutely certain at the end of this Holiday season. And that was my new and undeniable role as an adult. My changes were making me a grown up. The house and family that raised me; that captured the moments and memories of my childhood, might be fading into the background. But I had my own emerging house and family now in New York. And it was time to go home.