COMING TOGETHER

About 1960. From left: GJ, PM, Mom, NC, JL, PL, me, Dad

In a few weeks my family will reunite for a celebration. My next oldest sister, by just 13 months, is coming to visit from Seattle. We haven't seen her for more than 1-1/2 years, although we talk almost weekly.

There are 6 siblings--5 older sisters and a brother. My mother died over 10 years ago, but dad is stoically 87 years old and counting... His hearing has declined, but his health is good.

Anyway, families are by nature dysfunctional and ours toed that line! I carry and have shed lots of baggage from those growing-up years, but being a part of a large family is a huge part of the tapestry of who I am. God made me and guides my life, so this is what he dealt me. By almost any measure, it hasn't been a bad deal. Scars? Yes! Baggage? Lighter each year! But, the overwhelming definition I attribute to my growing up years is: sufficiency. God is sufficient, and has filled the bags of my life full to overflowing with blessings.

And, as Sue Miller so very eloquently puts it in her novel For Love: Everyone has a story. It's what you do after that counts.

RETHINKING DYSFUNCTION

Whew! Just read Paula McLain's memoir, Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses. This should redefine my version of family dysfunction. I still have stories I don't and stories I can't remember, but McLain's story is a tribute to tenacity and determination and overcoming. As Sue Miller said in For Love, "Everyone has a story. It's what you do after that counts."

I will still tell my stories because telling them helps put things in perspective and lightens my baggage. I have just added a new filter.

We are all survivors. Life is hard. Whining is sometimes helpful. Thriving and celebrating life is the true measure of survival.

HEALTHY WOMEN

I don't know why we have all done so well in our marriages and raising our children. Without exception they are exceptional, loving, successful children. Without exception. And, there are 13 nieces and nephews.

Well, I do know why--all those prayers for the five little girls and the baby brother--grandma and grandpa, great aunt VS, aunts, uncles... we were a family of prayers. We sure had our dysfunctions, but still they prayed.

"Nobody grows up in a home such as ours. You just wait to be done with it, and you hope you'll have the opportunity to grow up later."

For Love

by Sue Miller

THE CLOSET, PART 2

I don't remember if this was me, or not. I think it might have been PM. Some of us were playing hide-and-seek and after awhile we quit. No one noticed that one of us was missing. Later mom led us on a full-house search and found PM? me? I think PM sleeping on the floor of the coat closet under the short rack on the left.

"It was like the feeling she'd had once as a little girl when she hid under the front porch, behind the broken lattice, because her mother had yelled at her. She'd waited on the packed dirt through the long summer afternoon and into the evening--perhaps actually no longer than a few hours, but it had seemed endless to Lottie then--and no one came. Her mother called her once, at dinner, but then not again. Finally Lottie had crawled out and gone inside. And though it wasn't until much later that she was able to articulate the resolve she took from this event, even at the time she somehow understood the feeling, the knowledge that there was no one out there for her. That her mothering would have to come from someplace in herself."
For Love
by Sue Miller

ORPHANS

In 1994 I came unstuffed. I had a couple of experiences over a short period of time with dehydration and shot the blazes out of my electrolytes. The end result was that I asked a friend for a referral for a psychologist and won the big lottery. It wasn't that JF was so full of wisdom; mainly she just listened and nodded. I do remember during our first session as I told my stories of growing up, she said, "It was like two kids trying to raise kids and not really wanting to."

"Lottie told Elizabeth of the permanent silence that had fallen between her mother and herself, of the sense she'd had of being orphaned from very early on..."
For Love
by Sue Miller

To cover up the pain we use relatively unhealthy ego defenses which give us fewer possibilities and choices in our lives.

Healing the Child Within

Charles L. Whitfield