TheBanyanTree: LA Update

[Monique]

Dear Lovely People,

I am in LA for a funeral. Yesterday I was in San Francisco for a conference.

I'm staying with my brother, Mike, and his wonderful wife, Nancy. Mike and I are like opposite twins.

Well, we aren't twins, if by twins you mean two people born at the same time to the same mother. He's slightly younger, but if we were twins, I would have been the carefree wild child and he would be the straight laced accountant who keeps his life in perfect balance.

I'm the accountant, strangely.

We have the same two parents, which in my family is no small thing. I'm here because my half-sister, Sandi, with whom Mike and I share a mother, asked me to come. Mike did not. I'm not exactly sure I even register on his scale of People Who Matter. Which is fine -- he has a large family, and his wife is very good to me. 

My stepfather died recently, and that is why I'm here.

But my family sees it as an opportunity for all of us to see each other, in case one of us has grown another head and neglected to mention it. 

So tomorrow is the funeral. Jerry, my stepfather, has 4 children, and they're taking care of the arrangements, just like my siblings and I did when my mother died. Mike has offered to take me and our sister and our cousins to dinner tomorrow night -- my cousins are close to my sister, and were close to my mom and Jerry. 

But that doesn't mean I'll be seeing all my brothers and sisters tomorrow. So Mike and Nancy are having a barbecue on Sunday -- with pool time, which is convenient since it's 197 degrees here. 

Showing up will be my brother Jeff and his wife and their two little boys, who are adorable. Jeff is not related to my sister, or my mother, but we have a father in common. My sister Patty and her husband will be coming. Patty had a different mother than all the rest of us but the same father. She had a slightly younger brother with the same two parents as well, but he killed himself in his early 20's -- by that time he was part of my traumatic past, the first in a series of male relatives who behaved "inappropriately" with me, and I was not sad to see him go.

Sandi will not be here because she only knows me and Mike, though she did meet Jeff and Patty at my mother's funeral, which they came to as a show of support or something.

Patty's son, C, and his wife and their several children can't make it Sunday. It wasn't until last year that I learned that Patty's first husband, who she was married to when C was born, is not C's father. Fortunately C knew that long ago, and while he has no relationship with his bio father, he is close to a half-brother from his bio father. 

I swear I am not making this up.

Tonight we had dinner with Mike's daughter, K, and her husband and their two adorable daughters. The husband has a couple of older children from a previous alliance, but I know nothing about them. Also on hand for dinner, and staying overnight, are two of Nancy's grandkids, two of three which are the result of her daughter's marriage.

Which, I just learned today, is not withstanding the test of time, and the three boys, ages 12 and down, are just starting to learn what it's like to have parents who live in two different places. Fortunately the grandparents (Mike and Nancy) are, as usual, helping out. 

Mike has another daughter, Heather, who has finally gotten over her fear of commitment and has found herself a man. She's been told, poor thing, that she's a lot like me, which probably gives her nightmares. I know it would give me nightmares. 

Nancy has a son as well, who has a different father than her daughter.

Here's the thing: everyone is having multiple babies who are all boys, or all girls. No one's mixing it up anymore. Three boys, two girls, two boys ...

None of this was my point. My point was, Mike is the only person with whom I share both a mother and father (though the point of sharing parents who are dead now is lost on me). This evening, as Nancy and I watched Mike admonish a tiny child who was having fun racing around  a fountain not to "get dirty," I said to Nancy, "It's like we're complete opposites."

"You're telling me," she said.

Mike and I experienced events when we were young that had a profound impact on us, when it was just the two of us sometimes. And then we shot off into completely different directions, as if we came to a fork in the road and couldn't decide which way to go, so he went his way, and I went mine. He's built a stable life, keeping his family close to him as much as possible. He's had only one employer, and he's been employed since high school, through college, and on and on. His life is exact, his schedule doesn't allow for much in the way of spontaneity, and he is constantly stressed that something might go amiss. There might be a spot of dirt on the floor, or a granddaughter might soil her outfit, or someone might make the mistake of trying to eat a cookie in his spotless vehicle. (All their vehicles are huge, whereas all of mine are little.) 

And just for the record, it wasn't me who was in danger of eating a cookie, but one of his grandsons. 

His occasional texts to me are short and noncommittal, formal in the way an oil company executive might send texts. That is what he is, after all. He tries to keep his emotions in check, or else he doesn't have any, but he loves his kids and grandkids and is a good father and a good grandfather.

I'm liable to text people I barely know with, "You rock," or little smiley faces, or xoxo, but I'm the emotional one. 

For the record, it's not just me. His daughters tell me that his emails to them are very formal, as if they work for him. 

He has control over his life to a great degree, and it appears to be a pretty good life. 

But I don't know how Nancy puts up with him. His attitude towards her is sometimes belittling, because he thinks he's so much smarter than she is. And maybe he is -- but Nancy's the one with the people skills. She's the one who takes me to meet her friends, and brags about my books, and then I have to say there was just the one, so far. She gives me far too much red wine, laughs with me, and complains about her uptight husband to me. She makes me want to visit.

My stepmother loved Nancy, and Nancy's a lot like her, in some ways, but only in the best ways. Then again, turns out stepmom was a psychopath, and Nancy is not. 

Mike married his stepmother, the person who could give him a fabulous well decorated comfortable home, the person who could plan a party AND carry it out, the person who would take care of the grandkids, befriend the neighbors, and give him the stability he needed. 

I ran from anything resembling that sort of life. 

I'm pretty stable, anymore, but it wasn't something that came easy to me. I never had children, didn't want to, never felt I had a life I could bring children into.

We're like two sides of the same coin, but at the moment I'm not sure what to do with that metaphor. 



Monique
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