The Ties That Unbind Us

My mom had a few years of living wildly after her mother died and her father emotionally abandoned her and she graduated from high school and before she had us, her children. It must have been amazing. The world was new to Stevie Nicks and free everything. She met a handsome, quiet boy. They had a world of their own. They were 22.



This is a photo of my mom on her honeymoon. As a young woman I myself recently graduated from high school and free for the first time of household and familial obligations I used to look at this photo and long to be like her. I wanted that contrapasto, hand-on-hip, uber-sexual, self-assured adulthood.

Her love affair with my father was turbulent and short-lived. Under other circumstances, I think it would have been a relationship she could have gotten over and moved on from. But, I think she had really loved him, and she had me, and a year and a half later, my sister, Julia.

It couldn’t have been easy for her, once to have been unencumbered and growing out of her own painful childhood to be suddenly alone and poor with two children of her own. Me, a constant reminder of an ill-fated relationship. She never once treated me with any kind of resentment or ambivalence. And it couldn’t have been easy when it became obvious that as a youngster I so wanted to be a boy, and my little sister, by contrast who so wanted to be a girl. It must have seemed like she had given birth to a couple of aliens. One all too painfully not right in her own skin and the other completely enamored with the very traditional vestiges of girlhood that my mother had rebelled against so adamantly in her free years in the late seventies.

I complain a lot about my mom. We all do. It is human nature. It is how we learn to be better parents, or at least we think we will be better. But, really what could my mom have done better? It is important that we talk about these things now. Straighten things out.

I moved home 8 months ago with this intention after 9 years of living away and ignoring the problems of my childhood. Or silently crying while my mom talked on the phone to me about my sister.

When I got here I had my first-ever panic attack. It hit me how emotionally delicate this situation was for both of us. As the reality of what it meant to be living with one’s mother started to sink in it became obvious that we were never going to have the kinds of conversations I had envisioned. The past is over and off-limits.

I went to visit my sister in the city. We had talked some before I came home. She knew I had a lot on my mind. We had a little bit of a strained relationship after I left for college. It is sad really, because there is no one in the world that knows me better than her, even with the big time gaps. We are so very different on paper. I am a chubby, genderqueer, ex-athlete who has spent the past seven years working towards a silly undergraduate degree in a small Midwestern city. She is a tall, thin, successful businesswoman.

I decided one night while I was visiting her that it was time for me to unload my brain. There had been a birthday of mine that my mom and her had fought through while we were in high school. It was symbolic of my role in our nuclear family, spectator to the clash between my over-worked mother and my free-spirited, strong willed sister. I have developed, for whatever reason, genes, youthful experiences, etc a tendency to put my feelings and desires aside. I have kept a very low profile most of my life and I have decided that I would like to have a little more fun. In order to do this it was important that I learn how to stop being the spectator, the quiet reflective one in the back, watching the drinks and coats while others dance and sing and carryon.

So I gently began unleashing some of the wellkept secret feelings I have had since childhood. There at dinner with my sister, I spoke candidly about my childhood fears and tragedies, about things that had tortured my little adolescent psyche, about insecurities, injustices, sexual desire and about death and to my surprise she looked me in the eye and we both laughed uproariously about these things that had troubled me for so many years. We laughed until we cried. We laughed the whole walk to the subway station. We laughed entering the train. We laughed until I couldn’t see for the tears in my eyes.

Here is a snippet from my journal entry:

On the train ride home Julie told me a very funny story about a sad poem she had decided to read for a public speaking class at BCC. She had rehearsed it in he mind but had never said it out loud. Well, when she started reading it in front of the class she busted out in tears and spoke in broken, unintelligible phrases. She looked up an saw that some of the other students were crying too. She said, “There was no way they understood what I was saying.” They were crying out of compassion. She was so distraught that she decided to stop the poem short at a natural point about half way in. But in her state she lost track of her place and had to keep stammering though the whole thing. She ended the story by saying, “I could have read anything I wanted: A happy poem, a letter, the back of a cereal box! But I chose a poem about death. Well, at least I got a B+.”

I think Julie and I are more alike than we know.

The best part of the storytelling was that there was a young girl of perhaps ten or eleven sitting with her mother on the train right across from us. Julie and I were both laughing so loud and hard we were both crying and leaning into each other. This young girl was listening to Julie's story and laughing along. She looked at us like we were great. She looked at Julie as if my sister was just what she wanted to be when she grew up. And I felt so happy.

We are more alike than we know. How can I explain how meaningful it is to me that there has always been a little person by my side, and such a wise cracking fire-cracker at that? How can I explain how in awe I am of her? That she has grown up to be such a funny, smart and wonderful person who has forgiven me of every trespass I have committed against her (and trust me there have been many) and has accepted me just the way I am, even when it required a lot of work on her part. She is probably the most important person in my world, and I am happy to say once again, my very best friend.



I love you, Julia.