Ready or Not, We Move On

I am 15 and a half years old.

My mother is sitting shiva for her father.

I am leaving home and it feels like something is tearing.

I don’t know that I will no longer have a home, that they will move to a new house while I am hiding in the attic at my boarding house, alone and afraid.

RIP

They will raise the youngest there until death do us part, embrace generational living, and have a bubby in the house in health and then again in sickness until death do us part while I stumble and fall and reach out to other people to beg for a way out.

RIP

They will live a lifetime, multiple lifetimes, with joy and pain and the ups and downs of family in a home where my seventh-grade drawings are on the walls, my rebel platform shoes are stored in a closet and there is a box that holds the bits of my existence somewhere forgotten or perhaps out of sight, out of mind,  a home where I never have a room and always come as a guest and only if I am invited…while I scrape at my foundation and build myself up.

RIP

And time will pass.

Decades.

And things will happen to break us and repair us and change us

I will find serenity and gingerly tape a strand.

I will start a home of my own and try to make it fit theirs.

My mother will show up when my son is born and sit with me in my grief of his death.

And then they will fail me when the past comes screaming at my door.

RIP

Trigger trigger everywhere, their life without me worst of all.

RIP

But then—

I will show up for them when they need me and stitch a severed thread.

I will play the part of daughter and sit with them as they grieve my sister’s death.

And there will be closure.

And an understanding that we are where we are and its ok to—

RIP

I will accept what is and embrace our separation and heal myself.

Maybe I will forgive.

And we will continue to live parallel lives weaving in and out.

But we will never share experiences.

Until now.

Here in my time and space and for the first time since 15, my mother is where mothers are when it is the end of the day and you are getting back to her because—sorry I couldn’t pick up Ma, I was in the office. What’s going on? Yeah the kids started school today and this is their schedule and how was your day?

Something is settling over me.

I recognize the strands that made me in the patchwork rope I made to pull myself to higher ground.

We don’t have to forgive.

And we may never forget.

But ready or not, we move on.