A Bit of a Rant

I hate calling the doctor.  I hate going to the doctor.  I hate making the appointment, the time spent on hold, the time spent in the waiting room, the verification of my health insurance.  I hate the whole thing, which is why I don’t go nearly as often as I should.  I made my appointment for my annual exam yesterday, and it has been nearly two years since I have been.  Before that, it was five.  And before that, I pretty much only went when I either suspected I was pregnant, was pregnant or wanted to ensure that I didn’t become pregnant.

And it’s silly, really, because I have no trouble at the doctor.  Hardly ever.  I am exceptionally healthy, despite still being overweight.  I exercise often.  I eat healthy food.  I have always had very few problems gynecologically.  I don’t smoke.  I do drink, but rumor has it a glass of wine a day isn’t a bad thing. And I am exceedingly fortunate to have health insurance.

The insurance card I carry when I go to these multi hour long, mind numbing doctor visits is like the golden ticket.  If I want to enter those hallowed halls, I better have that little rectangle of plastic to gain admittance.  We had a major change to our policy two years ago, and it was amazing how profound the effect was.  Our primary care doctor would no longer accept us.  We had to pay out of pocket if we wanted to still use their services.  Fortunately the kids’ doctor still accepted the insurance.

We were given what is known as a high deductible plan.  Basically, we pay out of pocket for everything except for preventative care until we hit our deductible.  Kid running a fever?  $80 if I want a doctor to tell me why.  My daughter’s ADHD meds?  $144 a month until we hit that deductible.  MRI?  There’s a thousand bucks down the drain.  Last year we hit our deductible very quickly because my husband had to have an outpatient procedure done at a hospital.  Several thousand dollars had to be paid, all at once.

This year, things are a little better.  We’ve had time to adjust and save up money in our Health Savings Account, so now we have funds built up in there in case something happens again.  The HSA helps us plan out and budget for those pricey meds or the x rays the kids might need after that spill at summer camp.  And we are very, very fortunate that we are so far able to meet these costs, and that the preventative stuff is covered entirely.

I mention this because as flawed as our insurance feels like on the consumer end, it’s better than nothing.  My sister’s family will be losing their health insurance next month and will be forced to buy a private policy.  A policy that likely will make ours look like a Cadillac to their Hyundai.  A policy that will likely be very hard to find due to her daughter’s physical and mental health issues, which will become known as the dreaded PreExisting Condition.  My husband’s cousin has a PreExisting condition and has found herself virtually insurable under any private policy.  What they’ll do when she needs to be hospitalized or needs an MRI or any of the inevitabilities that come with her condition (she has Multiple Sclerosis), I have no idea.  Go bankrupt, I suppose.

It just seems astounding to me that in our country we can let this happen.  Let people starve or lose their homes rather than protect their health.  I don’t know if the current law being debated by the Supreme Court now is the answer, either.  It seems like a cobbled mess put together with the compromise of political interests in mind, rather than a true system that universally offers care.   Everyone must know someone, or have had experience themselves with how flawed this system is.

So I will go to my doctor visit in a few weeks.  I will complain about the wait, the tedium and the seemingly uselessness of having another clean bill of health granted to me.  But this time, I will stop myself before I get too far into it, and remind myself how truly lucky I am to have inconvenience be the only negative outcome of that visit.

 

No Finish Line

I watched my daughter race into her girlfriend’s house, all giggles and smiles and excitement, and I smiled.  More than anything else, I felt….relieved.  Grateful.  Finally, finally she seemed to have found a group of girls to bond with and share typical for her age experiences.

It hasn’t always been that way.  While I always found it relatively easy to make one or two close friends, Missy has struggled.  She had lots of girls she knew, lots of girls whose mothers I was friendly with, and so she kept getting thrown together with a certain three or four girls over the years.  But none of the girls, while friendly, have really blossomed into that classic Best Friend Forever that I always seemed to have growing up.  I watched other girls her age do this seamlessly, effortlessly, collecting friends like they were stuffed animals:  one for every occasion.

It has been hard for her.  She knows, of course, that there are friends she has that are closer to other girls than her.  It doesn’t feel great to her when the girls have sleepover parties and can only choose three friends; she’s hardly ever one of the Top Three.  And it’s hard to help her through this, because I don’t understand it myself.  Why don’t girls like her or bond with her?  She is smart, a little bit of a tomboy, and enthusiastic.  Maybe that’s it.  Maybe she’s too enthusiastic, too ready to show others how much she cares (that part, I get).   My mother never seemed too embroiled in my interpersonal relationships, but I worry all of the time about my girl.  My girlfriends, throughout my whole life, have always offered me a special support and security that I never found in my family.  Is it because we have a stable family that she doesn’t have to hunt for it outside of the home?  But other girls with stable lives at home do have good friends.  I wring my hands, wondering.

And then, this year, something changed.  My daughter moved onto Middle School, which is supposed to be a Personal Hell for most kids.  It certainly wasn’t my favorite time of life.  But for my girl, things changed.  She was forced to sink or swim, and she swam.  She made new friends, rekindled some old ones.  Six months later, she has a stable group of three close girlfriends that share everything.  They call each other for homework help, they video chat in the evenings, they go to the movies together, they have sleepovers.  Today, they are all cabin mates at their school’s camping trip.  Four days that will change and hopefully strengthen their bond as they move into a world where your peers are more of an influence than your parents.

It is both terrifying and rewarding to watch her grow, and learn about life and herself.  I want to protect her from the worst of the lessons I have learned, give her the gift of all that I know after forty plus years.  But I can’t.  All I can do is show her the boundaries, show her the signposts along the way, and hold her hand when she needs me to.  And I know, I know very well, that there is no final quarter, no finish line, no end to this game of parenting.

That’s the best and the worst part of it, all at the same time.

What Are The Odds

“Do you ever wear it?” he asked me, looking down at the ring, not meeting my eyes.

What a question.

No.  The answer was simple.  No.  I never, ever wore the ring.

I’d actually forgotten that I’d kept it, for many years.  Which seems rather amazing, considering all that the simple band of gold symbolized.

Ray had given me the “promise ring” (I called it an engagement ring) late, late one night in August, 1991.  He’d arrived home from Iraq via Germany.  We’d been corresponding via letter and a few stray late night phone calls while he served in Gulf War I.  After our on again, off again high school relationship, the moment had seemed wonderful and perfect.  We spent his three weeks of leave inseparably, slowly letting my family in on the depth of our commitment.  But then he’d gone to his new assignment in Georgia, and then things fell apart.

But I still had the ring.  I must have put it away in one of my velvet jewelry boxes back then, keeping it as the one, tangible reminder of moments of happiness we’d shared that summer.  The promise and the weight and the surety I’d felt at our future together.  I pulled it out every so often, just to make sure it was real.  But then it was put away again, locked away, like the memories I’d had of him taking my virginity and everything else we’d shared.

I was unprepared for the emotion on his face when I sat next to him and showed him the ring.   Sitting next to Ray at all is an event of note; he now lives in Germany with his wife and daughter, and the odds of our paths crossing are as remote as one can imagine.  But somehow, we managed to meet at the most mundane and American of places as Starbucks.  There were pleasantries, hugs, emotionally charged small talk, as if this kind of chance encounter could happen any time.  Never mind that it had been fifteen years since we last were in each others’ presence.  Never mind that we were now both married, with children, and lifetimes in the gulf between us now.  Here we were, me with my mocha and him with his chai tea, as if this kind of thing were an every day occurrence.

I’m not sure what I thought his reaction would be at the sight of the ring.  Surprise, perhaps, that I hadn’t chucked it in a fit of rage after our engagement was called off.  Or pride, maybe, that I still had kept it all of these years, that this small bit of gold and diamond had meant so much.  But it was neither of those things.  It was pain.  Physical pain, that I’d brought rushing back to him, in the middle of our perfectly wonderful, normal, meeting up again after fifteen years.  He seemed surprised, taken aback, moved.  Moved in a way that I simply hadn’t anticipated.

“No, I don’t wear it,” I answered slowly.  “I never have been able to.  At first it was painful,” I said slowly, acknowledging his own pain, “And then life just sort of moved on, and it didn’t make any sense to.  But I kept it, still.  As a token, a reminder.  Something to hold onto.”

He reached out for the ring, taking the small circle of gold in between his fingers.  “It was a promise ring.  A promise I didn’t keep.  I guess I understand why you don’t wear it.”

“It’s not like that,” I said, trying not to remember what those dark days, twenty one years ago almost, were like.  “I look at it as a lovely reminder of the time we were happy.  It was brief, sure, but it was a wonderful time.  That’s what I try to remember when I look at this ring.” I paused.  “I suppose I should ask if you want it back.”  Wasn’t that the right thing to do, the protocol after a broken engagement?  Or did the 20 plus years remove that statute of limitations.

“No, keep it,” he said sadly.  And he looked at me then, his pale blue eyes full of all twenty years that stood between now and then.  Twenty years of living life, growing up, moving on, having regrets and coming to peace with all of it.  “Keep it with you,” he said huskily.

I tucked the ring back in my bag, my face glowing red with all of the things we both were leaving unsaid.

Adrift…And….Feeling Stupid

You know what I hate?

I hate when you go and read someone’s blog and you discover that, through their own words and takes and experiences on life, that you really don’t like them.

This doesn’t happen often to me, of course.  I go to blogs that are written by people that I am sure I would like, if I met them in real life.  I like the way they write, their take and view on the world, I see in them something I connect with.

But there’s this one blog I keep going back to (no, I’m not going to say whose it is), and I am not sure why, because I really don’t like the woman who writes it. There’s something about her that bugs me.  She seems to take for granted all that makes her life wonderful, and envy worthy.  She judges others and makes a living off of doing it.  She complains about her weight, even though she seems perfectly healthy and fine.  She is far too focused on material things and awfully preoccupied with having that which others have that she doesn’t.

I honestly don’t know why I keep going back.  I discovered her blog last summer when she was dueling with another blogger (whom I *do* like), and it was like the train wreck that you can’t stop watching.  I just kept going back to see how much more cringeworthy she could get.  And she didn’t disappoint.

Fast forward to Just. This. Second when I typed into this blog a whiny little post about how I ferry my kids around and how I drink too much and how my husband isn’t nice enough to me and how running is the only thing I seem to be doing right these days when it hit me like a freaking Mack Truck.

I’m her.  I’m the whiny blogger that doesn’t appreciate all that she has and how lucky she is.  Here I am whining about how all I had to do today was run to Target and do some laundry and ferry some kids around.  Sheesh, not a bad life, right?   Who complains about that?  I titled it “Adrift And…?”, a nod to one of the ridiculously too many Grey’s Anatomy episodes I had plenty of time to watch this weekend in my free time.

When I clicked off of my blog entry, the next page I clicked on was a BlogHer entry from Shannon Des Roches Rosa.  About a parent of an autistic child so stressed and so freaked out that she went all Crazy Insane Person and killed her son and then herself.  Me?  I read a book back and forth aloud with my autistic son and then we had dinner (steak and salad and bread) and then he willingly put on his shoes and got in the car so I could take his sister to play practice.

There are lots of people out there with problems.  My whiny, angsty boredom is not a problem.  It’s a blessing.

Consider my ass duly kicked.

 

A Different World

When I met my husband in 1995, I thought he and I had a lot in common.  We were both crazy computer people, in an age still well before personal computers and internet access were common place.  We both were independent, working hard at our careers and had a lot of ambition at the starting line of life.

What I didn’t realize until months later, long after I’d committed to him and he’d carved out a significant spot in my life, was how different his upbringing was from my own.  It happened one night shortly after we’d moved in together, when his father called our home.  I’d still never met his parents at this point in our relationship.  All of the sudden this man I’d just invited into my home and my life started speaking a foreign language.  Rapidly.  A language that didn’t sound like any foreign language I knew, like Spanish or French or German (the only three that were offered at our high school).

It was in that moment I realized perhaps we were more different than I thought.

My husband has 19 first cousins.  His father is a first generation immigrant, born in the former Yugoslavia in what is now known as Croatia.  They family fled after World War Two and spent years trying to reassemble their family in Canada.  His mother is a Washington DC born daughter of means, having grown up with privilege.   Like my parents, they met while in college.  Except his parents met while both studying abroad, in Spain.

My husband grew up in a two parent household with elements of the Deep South, Spain, Eastern Europe.  Three different languages were spoken on a regular basis.  His grandmother spoke no English.  Holidays meant tradition and ethnic food prepared in specific ways, and family.  Always family.  They ate three or four course meals and played classical music in the background.  They drank wine and before dinner drinks and after dinner drinks.  They danced folk dances from Spain or Croatia for entertainment at family gatherings.

It was, and is, a world I truly don’t understand.  I grew up listening to pop radio and eating Lean Cuisines boiled in a bag.  No one spoke anything other than English, and very few had ever traveled overseas; if they had, it was because they had fought in a war.  We were as American as could be.  No ethnic foods or traditions of any kind.  No booze unless you were celebrating something or upset about something.

In some ways, I love that my world includes this wonderful array of new experiences I might have never had otherwise in my life.  I love the foods, the drinks, the warmth of the family.  In other ways, I feel bewildered and lost and craving the simplicity of what I grew up with.

This summer, we are finally traveling with our children to see Europe, to visit Croatia.  I am both exhilarated and terrified at the thought.

Closing Doors

Someone I know is pregnant.

This statement is becoming increasingly rare as the years keep marching on in my life.  It used to be that everyone I knew was in a couple.  Then, couple by couple, everyone seemed to be getting engaged, and then married.  Back in “my day” (intone the Old Lady In Me here) this was around age 23-28.  Most of my close friends were good and married off by then, which I know isn’t exactly the case with kids that age these days.

Then the babies came.  Each time I was pregnant I shared my pregnancy with at least someone else I knew.  In my eldest’s case, these women were my older sister’s friends.  But with my younger two there were any number of contemporaries that were either in the same family way, or who had just had a child within the last year, or who would find themselves pregnant shortly thereafter.

My youngest was born when I was the ripe old age of 31.  At first, we weren’t really sure if we were done having kids.  I stubbornly packed up all of the tiny baby clothes as he grew out of them and put them in sturdy plastic bins in the basement; the kind that would last.  I put the Pack and Play and the swing and the crib down there with them. We kept thinking….maybe.  Maybe just one more.  But it never seemed to happen.

As M’s issues came to light, we actively avoided the idea of a fourth child in our house.  We had too much on our plates with him and his issues and needs.  So many therapy appointments and meetings at school and worries.  It wouldn’t be fair to bring another child into all of that. And then, after we felt like it might be an option again, our eldest went to college.  He turned twenty.  And then twenty one.  By then, it just seemed preposterous that we would give him a brother when he was old enough to be a father himself (Lord help me that I’ve actually put that in printed form).

That door has been closed for quite a while now.

But then, I heard about this woman I know who is pregnant.  She has two adopted children from China, hard fought adoptions after years of infertility issues between her and her husband.  It had been universally assumed that they couldn’t have children, and their two perfect cherubs made them all the perfect family from the outside looking in.  Except that around Christmastime, the woman somehow found herself inexplicably pregnant.  The weeks wore on, everyone quietly waiting for doomsday to occur, but it didn’t.  She is nineteen weeks pregnant, and forty four years old. It is an amazing thought, after all of this time, that she and her husband will have a biological child.

It makes me wonder if my door is truly closed, as well.  There have been times in the last five years, perhaps six or seven, when I thought I was pregnant.  A few times so sure that I purchased pregnancy tests and took them.  But each time, the test slowly turned negative before my eyes.  And each time, I was a little disappointed.

I do wonder.

 

Dizzy

Back in my twenties, it seemed to make a sort of sense.  When I was searching for The One With Whom I Would Share My Life, I sort of got it.  You know, the idea that one person could just not possibly be enough for a person throughout their whole life.

At that point in my life I’d seen one too many movies in the ilk of “Sleepless In Seattle”, giving me that storybook fairytale belief that there was just one person in the world that would fit perfectly with me. But after years of dating people who weren’t even close, and after that one affair, I started to suspect that maybe it was true.  Maybe one person couldn’t be that all inclusive “Soul Mate” that Hollywood was trying to sell me on.  Instead of one person being everything, maybe all it was supposed to be was that one person was “enough”.

And enough has been good to me, don’t get me wrong.  Throughout my thirties, in my married haze of raising three children, enough was just right.  I was happy and glad to be settled, raising my family, with a strong man who cared deeply for me and provided well for our family.  I’m not trying to paint an idyllic picture here; there were years and years of hard times in my early marriage.  We still fight and argue, and he still drives me crazy.  I still envy the people I know who seem to have chosen better, found a better “fit”, more of the “enough”.  But overall, the fifteen years of my marriage has never caused me to revisit the concept again of More Than One.

But now that I am in my forties, I do sometimes wonder….is this it?  If this is it, is enough truly going to be enough for the rest of my life?  Because now that I’m in my forties, I’m well aware that there aren’t unlimited tomorrows ahead of me, ripe with possibility.  What I have now, this is all it is going to be.  And there are times when I wonder if enough really is enough anymore.

There are things that don’t exist in my marriage, that I wish were there.  We don’t hold hands.  We don’t sit together on the sofa.  We don’t go out to dinner, just the two of us.  We don’t have deep conversations about what I’m doing or his work, or anything really but the children.  He doesn’t massage my shoulders at the end of a day, or ask me what I’m reading next to him in bed, or any of the myriad intimacies I don’t even realize I’m missing most of the time.

This is where so many people my age stumble.  The men, they start to see some of those things they’re missing in the younger women they meet at work, the ones who are starry eyed (as I was) at the thought of a grown up person who has already figured it all out.  The women, they change their careers, they lose the baby weight, and they find maybe in their haste to be married and settled that they didn’t think through their choice as carefully as they should have.  And then one day, they rethink the whole thing.

I think back to what I was to that married man, now that I am his age.  And believe me, I am in no way considering having an affair, at all.  But I wonder sometimes, how amazing it would be to have someone so excited to be with me, to see me, to just spend an evening enjoying my company.  To have that awe and amazement.  That fire.

I kind of get it now.  I don’t want to leave my husband.  I love him.  I love our life.  I know all of these things with absolute certainty.  But to have a chance to fill some of the holes that have worn through the fabric of our marriage over the years?

It’s a dizzying thought.

Put Your Head Down and Focus

As anyone who has read this blog for more than a minute knows, I’m no athlete.  Field day was my least favorite day in the school calendar year; I was a scholar and a musician.  I got my geek on and enjoyed it, all the way through school.  It’s why I became a teacher, I loved school so much.  When I think of most of my favorite people in my life, outside of my family (not that all of them count amongst my favorites….), most of them I either met while I was in school or were involved with school somehow.  Well, except Rick Springfield, but otherwise the statement stands.  It’s no accident that most of my husband’s family are teachers; I immediately felt a kinship with all of them.

In fact, I was so nonathletic that when I wanted to become involved with the track team in high school, the only option available to me was the manager role.  Coach Tymrak (hey, didn’t I mention him in my last post?) was polite and all, but me and my short legs just weren’t going to be an asset to his team. In fact, I ended up bailing on the position because it made me just so damn uncomfortable to be around all of those people in such amazing shape (again, see my last post regarding my insane ability to compare myself to EVERYONE and not in a good way).  My favorite quote of all about running came from the 1980s flick “Real Genius” and went like this:  Q:  “Do you run?”  A:  “Only when chased.”

But listen…my inner high school athlete wanna be is kind of cheering these days, because guess what?  I’m a runner.

I’ve been attempting to run since last September.  I started off slowly with the Couch to 5K program.  I was religious.  I was diligent.  I told all of my friends so I couldn’t be let off the hook.  When one asked me how far I could run, three weeks into the program, I sheepishly answered…”Um, about three minutes.”  Because honestly, the program builds you up so slowly that that was the furthest I’d gone without stopping at that point.  And I was proud of it, because I’d never been able to run before, in my life.

I kept going.  I finished the program in November and ran my first race.  This was the critical juncture, because I knew that lots of people just fall off the grid at this point.  They finish, they do the race, they’re done.  They don’t know what to do next.  How to proceed.  How to keep progressing.  But I told myself that wouldn’t be me.  I signed up for another race to keep me in the training loop.  And then another.

I’m not going to lie.  The three races all kind of sucked.  It was hard.  It was still really hard, even after I’d done two of them.  Wasn’t it supposed to be easier?  When was I going to hit that easy groove people tell you about, and get that runner’s high?

I decided to start a new program.  Bridge to 10K.  I never had any real desire to run 6.2 miles, and certainly not in front of Other People and all, but what the hell.  The program would keep me going and force me not to stop.   The six week program ends when you can run an hour straight.  A freaking hour.  Sixty whole minutes.  That’s insanity, right?

Today, I did it.  I ran for 60 minutes without stopping.

There’s a moment that happens for me, in these long runs, usually somewhere just before the halfway point, where I want to give up.  It’s hard, too hard, and I want to let go.  I want to walk.  I want my heart to stop racing.  I want to stop sweating.  But somehow, I force myself to slow down, lose myself in the music piping through my earbuds, and carry on.  And always, always, in a few minutes, things seem easier.  And before too long, there’s only ten more minutes, or five, or two, and I know I’m going to make it.  I’m going to have run sixty minutes, over five miles.  And that knowledge is amazing, liberating, enlightening.  Running is just like every hard thing I’ve ever done.  It’s awful, it’s difficult, it’s something you think you can’t handle.  But you put your head down and focus, and you do it.  You get through it.  And you’re better for it.

So, look at that.  I’m a runner.  Take that, Coach Tymrak.

Compare and Contrast

Compare and contrast.  If there was a theme to Mr. Tymrak’s tenth grade Honors History class, it was that.  Compare and contrast.

Every assignment could be boiled down to those two simple words.  Every lesson required us to compare and contrast people, situations, policies.  Find the similarities and the differences.  Lay them out.  Intertwine them, link two dissimilar things together, and then find a way afterwards to tear them apart.

I find that I do that a lot.  Compare and contrast.  Except what I am comparing isn’t the social, political or economic ramifications of the Dred Scott decision or the Anti Trust Act.  No, I’m comparing myself to others.  And true to the insecurity that has always been bubbling up inside of me, I tend to find myself on the short end of the comparison.

I’m an equal opportunity comparer.  I will spend ten minutes on Facebook or Google comparing myself with girls I went to high school with.  Did they achieve more than me?  Are they thinner than me?  Do their posts show a happier marriage or more contentment with their lives?  Almost always the answer is yes, because when I’m engaging in self flagellation, I’m going for the gold.  I’m not going to look at the girl who moved down south and just divorced husband number three.  No, I’m going to look after my friend that started her own publishing company or the one that successfully runs her own insurance agency while balancing several kids and a husband and all that entails.

Or, I’ll compare myself with the other bloggers I follow.  I initially went to Roni’s site for information and motivation about how to lose weight, but now I look at her, six whole years younger than myself, and feel like I’ve missed a step or five.  She’s working from home making a living writing, has a supportive husband, two cute kids and has managed to keep most of the weight she became famous for losing off.  Or Katie, who has suffered major tragedy, but through it all has built a successful career and has a wonderful, insanely happy marriage.  Or Sprogblogger, who not only writes but is married to a writer, and is adequately in awe of all of her blessings.  Every time I read their wonderful writing, I compare myself….what did they do that I didn’t?  Which thing did they do that I didn’t that made them so much more where I wish I was?

And of course I compare myself with my girlfriends.  Who has a bigger house, a happier marriage, better behaved children, better time management.  This is the worst of all of my comparisons, because then I find myself withdrawing myself from them, just a bit.  Not entirely, not completely, but sometimes for a day or a week until my funk passes.  Or until one of them picks up a phone or stops by, because they know me.  And they love me, despite my insecurity, my comparing, my melancholy.

It’s a bad habit, this comparing.  I know it is.   I know that there are wonderful things about me, and that the only person I should be comparing myself to is myself.  To improve.  To move forward.  To appreciate all that I have, and am. Because I have grown, over time.  I have accomplished, and achieved, and learned, and survived.  A million times, in ways large and small.  So what’s with all the insecurity I still engage myself in?

What if I didn’t compare and contrast?  What if instead I could try and learn from all of those people who have inspired my envy?

It’s a goal worth striving for.

The Family You Have

My sister emailed me over the weekend; she asked if it would be possible for me to visit Michigan next month for her daughter’s birthday and an event at her son’s school.

Her email initially bugged.  I’m not going to lie.  I’ve lived in the Northeast for seven years, and I can count on two fingers the amount of times she’s been to see me and my family here.  Yes, you read that right.  Two.   If I want to see my family, which I try to do once a year or so, it’s generally up to me to make the trip.

It’s not like I haven’t asked, or invited, or even begged her and her family to make the trip out here.  We’re so close to New York City, I tell them.  We can go in and eat great food and see a Broadway show.  Or visit Ground Zero.  Or Times Square.  Or we could go to Boston.  Boston is so great with all of the historical things you can do.  Or, we can visit my grandparents, who live just three and a half hours to my south.  There’s a lot here.

But no.  It never happens.  My daughter’s First Communion, my son’s college graduation, my son’s First Communion….all went by without her (or her family’s) presence.  And don’t even mention my brother….he’s never even been to the place I’ve called home for seven years.  Not once.  One year I organized a trip for us to all meet in Pittsburgh to celebrate my father’s 70th birthday, all three of us.  This way they could meet in the middle, it wouldn’t be expensive for them, and everyone could be together.  You would have thought I’d asked them for the moon.  Their drive clocked in at five hours, ours was nearly eight.  But whatever.

It’s made me bitter, frankly, and at least on my end, put a wedge in the relationship.  Because it all feels very much like a one way street.  I’m sure they would beg off, saying that we’re better off financially and in more of a position to do the visiting.  And in some ways, they’re right, which is why I have put myself in the car for the last several summers.  Summer trips that have been punctuated by knock down drag out fights between my brother and I.  Trips that make me angrier and angrier with each mile I travel on each side of the trip.

I am trying very hard to accept that this is my family.  They’ve always been this way, and they’re not going to change any time soon.  My being able to visit shouldn’t be about anything but whether or not I can swing all of the arrangements that need to be made to allow me away from my life for three days.  It shouldn’t be about the mental scorecard I’m guilty of keeping, or any bitterness I feel.  It should just be about the fact that these people are my blood, the only people in the world who have known me since I was born.  It certainly isn’t my niece or nephew’s fault that their parents haven’t made visiting us a priority in their world.  If I want to see them, it’s clear that this mountain has to go to Muhammed.

There are days, though, that I wonder truly how it is I ended up related to these people.  Truly.