reunion
It will likely take weeks to feel as if I've made sense of everything that happened while I was in Ohio for the last two weeks. There was so much deep joy and deep sadness contained in the days I was there, so much worry and so much healing. It is overwhelming, really.
My father's health and financial situations are so confusing that it makes little sense to explain them here. Suffice to say that my father will have to make some difficult decisions about his health care, and I will have to either accept or try to intervene in some financial decisions he is making; I've not yet decided which strategy to take. But, he was in good spirits, and very willing to do all he could on his own; he seemed to get better before my eyes. When we arrived, he could barely walk--but the time we left, he was walking without much difficulty with a cane. There are concerns about more tumors; he'll have to decide whether to treat them aggressively (staying in the U.S. for longer) or to let them go and take his chances (moving to Greece).
The trip also involved reunions of many kinds--a dinner with an old college roommate, whom I hadn't seen in 15 years, a lunch with my best friend from grade and middle school, whom I hadn't seen in 20, and the actual high school reunion activities, including a pre-party at an old friend's home and a post-picnic in a park with families.
Seeing N (the college friend) again was incredibly healing. We hadn't been on the best terms at the end of college; we'd tried to live together sophomore year, but I wound up moving out halfway through the year because we couldn't agree on anything, from how often to wash the dishes to how to respond to the first Iraq war. We had never really managed to work through the series of confrontations and eventual ending of our friendship, not completely--and yet we'd stayed connected in college, making some small effort to see each other. We had similar groups of friends.
We talked openly and easily with each other as soon as we were in the same room. We'd both been through a very bad relationship after college, and although the similarities in our paths ended there (she is now married to a good man, and I went through a second separation after a much healthier partnership; I continued schooling and she did not; she decided not to have children and I adopted S)--we are both happy now, and able to talk about the present without any of the weight from the past. We were even able to joke about our different political beliefs, and she told me without telling me that she was OK with my coming out, though she didn't need to hear the story. I figured she knew (the wonders of Facebook, which also is how we connected), but I didn't expect the kind of nonchalant acceptance I received from her that night. Afterwards, she posted to her Facebook page how glad she was that we had reconnected, that we'd picked up our friendship as if we'd been seeing each other regularly over the last 15 years--I couldn't have agreed more.
A couple days later, in the midst of sorting out my father's health issues, I had lunch with S and my best childhood friend, whom I hadn't seen in 20 years. I don't remember exactly how long we have known each other--only that she and her family loved my mother, and that they'd been weeping uncontrollably at her funeral, harder than I was, actually. I remember her father's large hand holding mine soon afterwards, when I went to her house to talk. We grew apart in high school somehow, but we maintained a heart-connection--although we didn't see each other often, or hang out together, we did manage to talk about the things that mattered. She came to me when her first love broke her heart; she was one of the few who knew just how crazy things had gotten at my house during high school.
Seeing her was, again, phenomenal. She was insightful about my relationship with S even after only seeing us together for about a half hour. She wanted to know how I'd come to realize I was a lesbian; it was important to her to hear the story, and although at first I thought there was no point in telling it, it turned out to be good for me to tell it all to one of my oldest friends. She had to hear it, and we had to talk about how she would have been there if only I hadn't shut her out. I was afraid at the time of losing more people, of being rejected by more people. It was too hard.
That night S agreed to spend the night at my cousin's--the first time she's spent the night away from home without me or her dog--and I went to a pre-reunion party. B, who was throwing the party, having moved back to the area after graduate school and an ended marriage, looked exactly the same. She and I had been communicating in writing on and off over the years, always going to deep places in our communications. We have a lot in common, and I was excited to see her again after 20 years.
It is hard to explain what it was like to be at her party. She'd invited some people I knew well in high school, and some whom I barely knew but always admired--I remembered all of them (something I can't say about the official reunion). Somehow in the candlelit yard, among appetizers and wine, many of us managed to have deep conversations about what our lives were about now, how we had grown. Five of us held out until three in the morning, joking and telling our truths. As I write this, it seems so inadequate--most of us were in deep pain in high school, and at least two of us didn't necessarily expect to make it much beyond that time. And here we were, sitting in B's living room, talking about how happy we were, how despite suicide attempts or bad marriages or coming out we'd managed to become who we wanted to be. Lest you think it was all completely serious, we also spent some time poking fun at some seemingly perfect women who had friended us on facebook but had not bothered to look us in the eye in high school.
The official reunion was mostly boring. Many people I didn't recognize or couldn't place greeted me by name; I had some good conversations with friends I might not otherwise have seen, but I left early, feeling tired and overwhelmed. The next day, though, there was a picnic organized by another old friend, and we met each other's children and laughed a lot. And then, when it was time to go, I found myself weeping. It was hard to hold it together, honestly, after all of that. I had no idea that these connections from my past would, in any way, actually matter in 2009.
If the trip was about healing--about realizing that all of the feelings I had in high school, not fitting in, having so many family secrets I couldn't share with peers, not knowing where I belonged or how I would possibly make it to 38, much less be happy in 20 years, were past me now--it was also about confronting childhood memories, and memories from earlier, difficult times in my adulthood. My father is limping just as my mother did during her second round of cancer; I can't go back to Ohio without thinking of her, and of losing her, even after 25 years.
And then there are the memories of my father's nervous breakdown. At the reunion, several former classmates commented that they had put an offer on my childhood home (which my father lost to foreclosure in the process of literally almost losing his mind and life). Of course they couldn't have known how calling my childhood home their "dream home," lamenting that they weren't the ones to finally purchase it, would affect me.
I was not only confronted again by my father's mental health issues, but also by the life I might have lived if I'd never come out--one of my peers told me how happy she was with her Greek doctor husband, living the life my father had always wanted for me (wealthy, happy, two children, teaching Sunday school, very involved at church, etc). In truth, it was also the life I imagined for myself when I was in high school.
But then, the moment was gone. I looked over at the people who had been at B's party the night before, who were living lives that made them happy, even if they weren't the lives they had imagined. And then, I missed S, deeply, and wanted to go home.
Home--that illusive, nonexistent place, the place S still hasn't found for herself. ("I want to trust you, Mom. I want to feel like this is really home, but I still don't believe it's real," she said to me as we were driving back to Minnesota).
After several days of meeting with doctors, cleaning my father's house, rearranging his kitchen so he could reach what he needed when we left--we were finally on the road, heading toward a suburb of the Twin Cities, where I would officiate the wedding of two of my favorite former students. Up until the guests were arriving, it was pouring rain, the sky full of lightning--and then, suddenly, the sky cleared, the sun came out, they said their vows, and we hiked and played frisbee and relaxed in the park, catching up. Today, they are on their way back to China, where one of them started a nonprofit, and the other flew on a whim to profess his love.
"Everybody is making it out to be some kind of crazy, romantic story," he said the night before the wedding, as we talked about the details of the ceremony. "Like, he flew all the way around the world to be with her, he changed his whole life!"
"Well," I responded, "It is pretty crazy and romantic, if you think about it."
And they smiled at each other, and then, before I knew it, we were at the reception, and S got angry because the dog, who had been invited, wouldn't get into a mud puddle, and then she began to cry about the beloved horse she rode, who died back in February, and then we made a quick exit back to the hotel room.
She was, of course, embarrassed after the fact--and sad because she realized how much I'd wanted to stay, to finish the day with the students-turned-friends I won't see for at least another year.
"You did so well for two weeks," I reminded her. "Really well. It makes sense that everything is getting to you now."
"I thought about killing him. The dog, I mean. I thought about..." and then she cried some more.
"You're remembering the violence in your home," I said. "You're going to get through your past, memory by memory, shedding each one as you go." But that wasn't exactly right. "I mean, they'll always haunt you, I'm sure, but you have to feel it all again so that it won't keep you from being...who you are."
And as I said that, I closed my eyes and pictured B and I on the night of her party, how we had leaned in toward each other so she could light my cigarette, how the ends of our cigarettes touched and then there was a little fire. Somebody caught it on film. There is something immensely beautiful about the photo, and not just because two mostly-non-smoking-women in their late 30s are letting loose a little, laughing over the lighting of cigarettes, leaning elegantly into each other. There had been fires in both of our lives, and we'd spent our childhoods avoiding them, figuring out how to walk around the secrets and dysfunctions of our childhood families, rarely speaking of them, never realizing, even, how bad they were. And then, afterwards, we'd both come to a point in our lives when we were ready to be tried, when we knew we had to walk through those fires, bodies exposed, and come out on the other side. Finding each other again after 20 years felt like some kind of resurrection, the transfiguration made complete.
And now I'm walking S's fires with her, and in that moment, I couldn't have been more sure she'd end up on the other side, too.
"You're going to be OK," I said to S. She was lying on the hotel bed, petting the dog she'd earlier imagined killing.
"I hope so," she said, nuzzling her nose into the dog's neck.
"I know so," I answered.
My father's health and financial situations are so confusing that it makes little sense to explain them here. Suffice to say that my father will have to make some difficult decisions about his health care, and I will have to either accept or try to intervene in some financial decisions he is making; I've not yet decided which strategy to take. But, he was in good spirits, and very willing to do all he could on his own; he seemed to get better before my eyes. When we arrived, he could barely walk--but the time we left, he was walking without much difficulty with a cane. There are concerns about more tumors; he'll have to decide whether to treat them aggressively (staying in the U.S. for longer) or to let them go and take his chances (moving to Greece).
The trip also involved reunions of many kinds--a dinner with an old college roommate, whom I hadn't seen in 15 years, a lunch with my best friend from grade and middle school, whom I hadn't seen in 20, and the actual high school reunion activities, including a pre-party at an old friend's home and a post-picnic in a park with families.
Seeing N (the college friend) again was incredibly healing. We hadn't been on the best terms at the end of college; we'd tried to live together sophomore year, but I wound up moving out halfway through the year because we couldn't agree on anything, from how often to wash the dishes to how to respond to the first Iraq war. We had never really managed to work through the series of confrontations and eventual ending of our friendship, not completely--and yet we'd stayed connected in college, making some small effort to see each other. We had similar groups of friends.
We talked openly and easily with each other as soon as we were in the same room. We'd both been through a very bad relationship after college, and although the similarities in our paths ended there (she is now married to a good man, and I went through a second separation after a much healthier partnership; I continued schooling and she did not; she decided not to have children and I adopted S)--we are both happy now, and able to talk about the present without any of the weight from the past. We were even able to joke about our different political beliefs, and she told me without telling me that she was OK with my coming out, though she didn't need to hear the story. I figured she knew (the wonders of Facebook, which also is how we connected), but I didn't expect the kind of nonchalant acceptance I received from her that night. Afterwards, she posted to her Facebook page how glad she was that we had reconnected, that we'd picked up our friendship as if we'd been seeing each other regularly over the last 15 years--I couldn't have agreed more.
A couple days later, in the midst of sorting out my father's health issues, I had lunch with S and my best childhood friend, whom I hadn't seen in 20 years. I don't remember exactly how long we have known each other--only that she and her family loved my mother, and that they'd been weeping uncontrollably at her funeral, harder than I was, actually. I remember her father's large hand holding mine soon afterwards, when I went to her house to talk. We grew apart in high school somehow, but we maintained a heart-connection--although we didn't see each other often, or hang out together, we did manage to talk about the things that mattered. She came to me when her first love broke her heart; she was one of the few who knew just how crazy things had gotten at my house during high school.
Seeing her was, again, phenomenal. She was insightful about my relationship with S even after only seeing us together for about a half hour. She wanted to know how I'd come to realize I was a lesbian; it was important to her to hear the story, and although at first I thought there was no point in telling it, it turned out to be good for me to tell it all to one of my oldest friends. She had to hear it, and we had to talk about how she would have been there if only I hadn't shut her out. I was afraid at the time of losing more people, of being rejected by more people. It was too hard.
That night S agreed to spend the night at my cousin's--the first time she's spent the night away from home without me or her dog--and I went to a pre-reunion party. B, who was throwing the party, having moved back to the area after graduate school and an ended marriage, looked exactly the same. She and I had been communicating in writing on and off over the years, always going to deep places in our communications. We have a lot in common, and I was excited to see her again after 20 years.
It is hard to explain what it was like to be at her party. She'd invited some people I knew well in high school, and some whom I barely knew but always admired--I remembered all of them (something I can't say about the official reunion). Somehow in the candlelit yard, among appetizers and wine, many of us managed to have deep conversations about what our lives were about now, how we had grown. Five of us held out until three in the morning, joking and telling our truths. As I write this, it seems so inadequate--most of us were in deep pain in high school, and at least two of us didn't necessarily expect to make it much beyond that time. And here we were, sitting in B's living room, talking about how happy we were, how despite suicide attempts or bad marriages or coming out we'd managed to become who we wanted to be. Lest you think it was all completely serious, we also spent some time poking fun at some seemingly perfect women who had friended us on facebook but had not bothered to look us in the eye in high school.
The official reunion was mostly boring. Many people I didn't recognize or couldn't place greeted me by name; I had some good conversations with friends I might not otherwise have seen, but I left early, feeling tired and overwhelmed. The next day, though, there was a picnic organized by another old friend, and we met each other's children and laughed a lot. And then, when it was time to go, I found myself weeping. It was hard to hold it together, honestly, after all of that. I had no idea that these connections from my past would, in any way, actually matter in 2009.
If the trip was about healing--about realizing that all of the feelings I had in high school, not fitting in, having so many family secrets I couldn't share with peers, not knowing where I belonged or how I would possibly make it to 38, much less be happy in 20 years, were past me now--it was also about confronting childhood memories, and memories from earlier, difficult times in my adulthood. My father is limping just as my mother did during her second round of cancer; I can't go back to Ohio without thinking of her, and of losing her, even after 25 years.
And then there are the memories of my father's nervous breakdown. At the reunion, several former classmates commented that they had put an offer on my childhood home (which my father lost to foreclosure in the process of literally almost losing his mind and life). Of course they couldn't have known how calling my childhood home their "dream home," lamenting that they weren't the ones to finally purchase it, would affect me.
I was not only confronted again by my father's mental health issues, but also by the life I might have lived if I'd never come out--one of my peers told me how happy she was with her Greek doctor husband, living the life my father had always wanted for me (wealthy, happy, two children, teaching Sunday school, very involved at church, etc). In truth, it was also the life I imagined for myself when I was in high school.
But then, the moment was gone. I looked over at the people who had been at B's party the night before, who were living lives that made them happy, even if they weren't the lives they had imagined. And then, I missed S, deeply, and wanted to go home.
Home--that illusive, nonexistent place, the place S still hasn't found for herself. ("I want to trust you, Mom. I want to feel like this is really home, but I still don't believe it's real," she said to me as we were driving back to Minnesota).
After several days of meeting with doctors, cleaning my father's house, rearranging his kitchen so he could reach what he needed when we left--we were finally on the road, heading toward a suburb of the Twin Cities, where I would officiate the wedding of two of my favorite former students. Up until the guests were arriving, it was pouring rain, the sky full of lightning--and then, suddenly, the sky cleared, the sun came out, they said their vows, and we hiked and played frisbee and relaxed in the park, catching up. Today, they are on their way back to China, where one of them started a nonprofit, and the other flew on a whim to profess his love.
"Everybody is making it out to be some kind of crazy, romantic story," he said the night before the wedding, as we talked about the details of the ceremony. "Like, he flew all the way around the world to be with her, he changed his whole life!"
"Well," I responded, "It is pretty crazy and romantic, if you think about it."
And they smiled at each other, and then, before I knew it, we were at the reception, and S got angry because the dog, who had been invited, wouldn't get into a mud puddle, and then she began to cry about the beloved horse she rode, who died back in February, and then we made a quick exit back to the hotel room.
She was, of course, embarrassed after the fact--and sad because she realized how much I'd wanted to stay, to finish the day with the students-turned-friends I won't see for at least another year.
"You did so well for two weeks," I reminded her. "Really well. It makes sense that everything is getting to you now."
"I thought about killing him. The dog, I mean. I thought about..." and then she cried some more.
"You're remembering the violence in your home," I said. "You're going to get through your past, memory by memory, shedding each one as you go." But that wasn't exactly right. "I mean, they'll always haunt you, I'm sure, but you have to feel it all again so that it won't keep you from being...who you are."
And as I said that, I closed my eyes and pictured B and I on the night of her party, how we had leaned in toward each other so she could light my cigarette, how the ends of our cigarettes touched and then there was a little fire. Somebody caught it on film. There is something immensely beautiful about the photo, and not just because two mostly-non-smoking-women in their late 30s are letting loose a little, laughing over the lighting of cigarettes, leaning elegantly into each other. There had been fires in both of our lives, and we'd spent our childhoods avoiding them, figuring out how to walk around the secrets and dysfunctions of our childhood families, rarely speaking of them, never realizing, even, how bad they were. And then, afterwards, we'd both come to a point in our lives when we were ready to be tried, when we knew we had to walk through those fires, bodies exposed, and come out on the other side. Finding each other again after 20 years felt like some kind of resurrection, the transfiguration made complete.
And now I'm walking S's fires with her, and in that moment, I couldn't have been more sure she'd end up on the other side, too.
"You're going to be OK," I said to S. She was lying on the hotel bed, petting the dog she'd earlier imagined killing.
"I hope so," she said, nuzzling her nose into the dog's neck.
"I know so," I answered.
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