The beginning

I have a story to tell you.

It is not a happy story. Maybe I will tell it in half truths in the way that life is often a mash of truths, retellings, intuits, and wistful thinking. You will have to decide your own feelings about the crux of it.

I have to preface this with saying you all know some of it. If you’ve followed me at all. And I had a week off after a minor surgery. Very often, anesthesia does odd things to the mind. I was put under twice in two months. Then after the second procedure, I was off work for a week with the children gone at school, a quiet house, a comfy new couch, Netflix and Amazon video, and a subscription to Ancestry.com. Plus a slow degrading circumstance and a pervading sense of blue.

What did I watch?

Polderdark

Outlander

American Horror Story Asylum

1922

And just today: Alias Grace

That should give you a small frame of reference if you’ve seen any or most of these.

I started thinking. Always a bit dangerous, I guess. I started remembering. I think of my history, I’ve told you most about my father. The brooding insane cruel foreigner from a Shangri-La country he built in my mind. Luckily he is dead. His story became a roadblock I have long tired of. I’ve been to his country. I’ve been to the mountain. I’ve seen the crumbling ruin of the house. I’ve seen the mist roll down from the mountain top in the very early morning of autumn. Felt the cold and the rain. Visited the barren graveyard. Heard the singing pour from the doors of the yellow church. Saw a photo of a dark man child from ages ago. Politely shook hands and heard accounts of a person I have no such knowledge of. I sat in a flat over a tiny cafe and realized closure had come. Done. No more.

I think I’ve told you of only one soul (other than the organic love of mother/child) from whom I truly knew the taste of love. My grandmother. No truly, my great grandmother but we’ll get to that. I felt love and returned love really only from and to her. It was brief. She died when I was 18 and I have missed her every day and every year since then.

But there was me. The couch. The stories. The grey days and rain. Alone in the house. Alone in my head. Alone in my heart. And I began to think. Read. Study. Wonder.

I logged back into the genealogy website. I had started a family tree years ago when my mother and her twin and one integral brother were still alive. I’ve grown up with rumors and insinuations and backhanded criticisms and the old-fashioned kind of begotten shame. You know, the sins of the father kind of thing. I gave up trying to find facts. My family would only react with aghast tears and vague stories and wild conspiracies (Were they really so wild?) I gave up. Gave in. Told myself it didn’t matter. I’d never know. Past was the past. Better off not to be certain because I never would be. Hurt too many feelings. Step on too many toes. Let it be. I yam who I yam. Won’t change me or anyone around me.

Got busy with the messiness of living and birthing and hurting and being hurt and trying over and over. And over.

And…here we are again.

Me (on the family tree). Above me, my mother. And my father. Above him, one side a name. A set of names over that and that. A man in Australia who is a cousin a couple of times removed did a complete genealogy of the village his parents are from. I do believe even he was born there. The same village on the side of the mountain my father came from. The space beside his mother? A stubborn unanswerable question mark. But because of the Aussie, I know my father’s maternal lineage. And for now, probably forever, that is enough.

But my mother’s…She is a twin. Identical. That is the last pure fact I know of her. Next to her space? Another question mark. But a hazier one. Murky even. Like I said, this is far from a happy tale. A subject of consternation and accusation. One of aspersion and taint. Still, it makes me shrug. If I felt any of the familial guilt, as my mother and her sister and her erstwhile siblings did, I’d stop here. I’d paint a pretty picture, white wash the walls, hang smiling photos of unknowns purchased from Goodwill and call it my own.

Anyway.

I have to think how I will frame this. I am in the middle of the pile and it’s unraveling in spirals. Stuff I knew. Stuff I didn’t. New clues. New technologies. Forming new bonds. Reworking old relationships. Seeing it all in a new light. Reading between lines I wasn’t truly sure were there. Don’t worry. I’m not going to be offended if this doesn’t interest you. Or if you find it too distasteful. Offensive, even. I am beyond it all. It doesn’t touch me because all my life, I’ve believed I was a bit of a mushroom. Sprang from darkness and a bit of shit. It is all I knew. But I believe I know more. And I need to tell it slowly. Not so much for you, but for me. And for any living being who takes an interest in this tale of dna and woe.

I should probably disclose something more. I am not trying to sound all mysterious and shit. But I am at perhaps the final crossroads of my life. No, not from illness or anything like that. Or not that I know of. Both my parents did die of cancer before they were 70. (All in good time. Patience.) But no. I am just tired. I’ve had a lifetime of poor choices and of the last few weeks and months, I keep drifting back to…I am tired. There is nothing left. I am out of do-overs. Probably why the genealogy fascination has been so potent. Gives me something to think about. I’ll get to that too. Please, no platitudes. I will either turn notes off or delete them. I’m too tired for those, too.