We, the storykeepers

(a poem I’m afraid to reread)

I learned about my family from my sister, the one everyone hates to be around, hates to talk to, hates to talk about. We sat in a diner. I had to brush past her telling me she didn’t see the point in apologizing to me as part of her twelve steps. I didn’t come for that. I came for something I didn’t already know.

She told me about a mother whose parents bought cigarettes and booze before groceries. I’d heard “one-room schoolhouse,” as charming and unique but I didn’t know the pantry was empty, and yet at only eight she was scrubbing a tile floor with a toothbrush. Priorities once realized made me regret judging the once shameful now heartbreaking condition of our overstocked fridge growing up.

I remember my sister doing that with a toothbrush of her own accord at twelve. Me waking up at 2 a.m and seeing her. She called it OCD. Maybe it’s older than her. Maybe it’s in her bones.

She told me our father didn’t pick up the last call from his brother, too busy studying. After that, his brother dropped off a building and he dropped out of school. My dad named a son after him, but he doesn’t speak about the man I’m named after. He doesn’t speak about his mother, either, the one he was studying for. Trying to bring justice to a crooked cop who beat his mother to death.

In that diner, late at night, it finally dawned on me that our “crazy” grandmothers, the ones I never got to meet, were women held hostage by violent, insecure men. Their children grew up with the pieces in their hands.

I knew a grandfather who bought me a bike, who sent a check on my birthday. A man who swam every day and had a hot tub at his beautiful house. I didn’t know about the drinking rage. The shame. My father throwing his father over the couch to tell him to never lay another hand on his brothers. On his mom.

Neither of my grandfathers had their children at their funeral.

I don’t remember much of gardening with my mom, or going birdwatching at the Audubon. The red clay trails, so distinct. I don’t remember much of the three-story slide my dad took me to in the park across the street, the one with the cool abandoned zooo and the sledding hill that went on forever. A life measured in hot cocoa, in a neighborhood where six-year-olds traveled in packs to play in the street.

I had not remembered until now that for a brief moment, the two people I was born into had everything they hoped for. And I remember watching them fight to get it back, watching them let it slip away.

I remember my sister being thrown out of the house for ten too many things. I remember my mother saying she doesn’t love her daughter. I remember the way that sentence has made me stare at the word love like it was a foreign object I am supposed to understand. I’ve agonized to make it real.

We were eating fries, my sister and I. It amazes me that someone who has had so little control over herself hasn’t eaten meat since Thanksgiving when she was five. That was the last time we hosted Thanksgiving on a long table. I make up for it now. I invite everyone to my home.

I remember a dad who never once raised his voice. A mom who never once forced us to clean. And I lived with the mess it made I got to live without the mess it didn’t. Without these new stories, there were moments I saw them as impossibly weak. There were moments I felt shame, pure, hot shame, to come from where I did.

A sister living in the shadow of her family’s love helped me fall, immutably, in love with my family. My heart breaks and I can see how the lives we live, the people we become, are shaped by fear and violence and longing, and also by small kindnesses, the gifts of breath, going back generations.

My grandfather was nine when he was made stateless and forced to move. Those stories are happening right now, right here. It might take three generations for someone in those families to feel safe again. Or longer. Will the children being sent away now - be kind to their children?

My parents’ deepest kindness is that they are not their parents to me. And I know, without a doubt, that has been true for ten thousand years.

My only friend was a beagle named Buddy. I blamed him for a mess in my bed, and he was put down. He had cancer, but he didn’t make that mess. I was nine. And the rope didn’t work. And therapy didn’t either.

I watched my sister get pulled into a stairwell. I watched her fight through the legal process of being heard, of getting a restraining order. I watched a boy not much older leave the lobby of the building when I came in, because he had to. I was twelve. And I did nothing. And a mental hospital and Wellbutrin and Prozac didn’t help. And Tylenol didn’t kill me.

My sister sat with me on the roof, diapers in my backpack because I was planning to run away. I still wet the bed. She told me, “What if jumping doesn’t kill me? What if it only breaks my legs?” That fear kept me on the roof.

Not much later, up there, I attacked my dad with a fire extinguisher. A spray of dust is not what I expected to come out. He tried to stop me from leaving. We don’t talk about that.

Love didn’t work at eighteen, not the way I wanted. But oxy and brandy didn’t either. The hospital, more deeply this time, accidentally taught me the way to be free is to pretend to be okay.

At twenty-one I swallowed foxglove and lay on the couch behind my father as he worked on the computer. More than anything, he has been on his computer. God, how I want any job that isn’t on a computer. Did I want him to notice? I don’t know. But it didn’t work. And it didn’t work.

I can remember these stories with such vivid pain. But it takes relaxing to see them. It takes breaking my heart to feel that the stories that shaped me shaped them, too.

I can’t imagine a parent struggling with their nine-year-old. Their twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one-year-old. But I can imagine two people still married after all of these years. Still bothered by the same little things. Still celebrating their anniversary.

I’ve known very few people who can sit with someone on the ledge. I haven’t ever given my sister credit for being one. I’ve faulted my parents for not being there for me in those moments that I hid my pain masterfully.

And I hate this. The writing decades of hurt boiled down to sentences in a scattered poem, exposing stories I’m not supposed to speak. I hate that part of me knows so well I’m crossing a line, writing what’s meant only for late-night diner fries and coffee.

And still, I need to say it.

I need it to be heard.