Today was a sad day for me. It marked the end of a life for a very dear member of my extended family. It was sad to sit inside the church and listen to the priest bless and ask God to forgive my aunt of any sins she may have forgotten to address when she was alive. And yet, as I sat there... I realized that the loss of my own mother had allowed me to be in the church to say good-bye to my aunt. And yet, while I was losing my aunt here on earth... I realized that I was gaining something that had been stolen from me for so many years.
You see, for whatever reason my mother had in her head, we were kept apart from her family and especially my father's family. And this became so much clearer to me as I went thru the pictures that my parents had taken during my life. When I was born, we were surrounding by their families. They were there to take me to church the first Sunday I was allowed after I was born. I could see them at my baptism and christening... Easters, Thanksgivings, Christmases... They were always there for me, and my parents.
And then we began the series of moves... Each move brought a new level of distance. The photos of our whole family grew apart. It started with months, but about 30 years ago... It turned into years. And while I was still surrounded by my mother, father, and brother... The other connections with family seemed to be trimmed away from my life. The family became names and stories that my mother would tell me from time to time. And I began to feel lost.
I already knew that I had ruined my mother's ideal of what her marriage to my father should have been. I divided my father's attention, and added a burden of providing for me. Yet, it was one he took on willingly. It was my mother who wished I had never been born, because I began to take away the people she needed to know loved her. And the biggest issue was that I took away her desire to constantly seek God. Even now as an adult I can't understand how something as simple as my birth accomplished all of this. It is like trying to explain our salvation with only talking about Christmas.
And with my mother passed on from this world... I have been able to work on fixing the connections that were taken from me. I in taking the step to acknowledge the loss of my aunt... The person who was always smiling even when she was in pain and sick from chemo... I found again... my aunt and my uncles... cousins and their children... and even my great uncle and his family... I found family that I held in my heart wondering what they were doing and why we shouldn't call them... shouldn't go see what might be up... And over time with my mother's distance to all of our extended family... I found that we were prisoners of her in her house. The hardest part of this all was the fact that I became a child who didn't value her own life, and felt like I didn't belong in this world.
So today, in the pain of yet another loss in my world...
I found connections...
I found my family...
And I found that I belong and have value to my family.
The sad part is that it took my becoming an orphan, to learn my value to my extended family. It took the pain of years of living with my mother to be able to now begin to see where as much as she was trying to protect me, in that process she hurt me. She took me away from the very family who loved me and wanted to spend time with me. In that process, she also took away my sense of belonging to something bigger in our world... and in many ways tried to kill the part of me that needed to know I belonged and had a purpose...
Even if that purpose at times was to just be able to share smiles, hugs and kisses with my aunt and uncles to brighten the day... To be able to know that my desire to learn and understand this physical world allowed my family to watch me learn and grown.
So now, I wonder where these connections will now allow my daughter and I to be showered in love... And to know that we both belong to something that is much bigger than the walls we live withing...
We belong to a family, and it is that family that encourages us to keep trusting God when we stumble. And I now understand... I have always needed to belong!!!
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