Reunion

When I got word that four of my sisters would be flying in to celebrate my 60th birthday, I was grateful for the seven-week warning. I needed that time to wrap my head around this idea as the last time I recall any members of my family being on hand to commemorate my birth was when I was sixteen. 

It’s not that I didn’t want them to come. But as the black sheep and one true escapee of us nine siblings, I was nervous how things would go. I split just before my 19th birthday and my returns to the home planet grew increasingly infrequent over time. As I felt judged by my family of origin for the choices I made in my life, so I judged them for theirs.

There were two things I did not want during this reunion. I did not want dramatic arguing. I did not want anyone to actively challenge my memories of how shit went down in a house full of constant chaos and perpetual Catholic guilt. I spent the time before their arrival urging myself to be mindful, to not myself be a button pusher. I also bore in mind what I knew from past experience—it is so hard not to slip back into childhood dynamics. For this whole thing to work, I understood much slack-cutting would be required on everyone’s part. 

It had been at least six years since I’d seen any family members in person, not unusual as distance has been my favored way of coping with the fallout of having been raised in terror by a severely mentally ill parent, a narcissist who got his rocks off pitting his children against each other. To wit, while I was being born, he was informing my next older sister—then three—that a new baby was about to take over and there would be no time for her. So traumatized was she by this news that she hated me before she met me and this disdain lasted nearly fifty years. 

I know this because she texted me on my 48th birthday, though by then we hadn’t spoken in seven years. I didn’t even have her in my contacts and had to use context clues to guess who was sending the message. I could have told her to fuck off or ignored her. Instead, I invited her to come hear me give a talk in New York a couple of months later. She agreed. This was the beginning of a friendship that has only strengthened with the passing of time during which we have slowly untangled the roots of our half-century rivalry.

Recently I came home from work to discover that Milo had somehow managed to pull a stack of papers down from a high shelf. Among them I found a letter from this same sister, dated 1984, in which she informed me how much I disgusted her, that I was too ugly for her to lay eyes upon and could I please keep any contact to the written word so she wouldn’t have to look at me. The catalyst for this proclamation was that I had, months prior, buzzed off all my hair and fully embraced my inner punk. 

It was this same haircut that prompted our “father” to disown me for the first time but certainly not the last. A desire to still see my mother and siblings would bring me back temporarily into the fold only to have him find some other fault in me that led to him kicking me out yet again until, finally, in my thirties, having had more than enough, I turned the tables and I did the cutting off. 

It took me decades to stumble upon an epiphany about all of this. When my “father” exiled me it felt very much like everyone else fell in line with his proclamation. It is so painful to be the outlier, the outcast, the most rejected. Only in recent years and with the help of much therapy did it dawn on me that my siblings were not so much dismissing me as they were doing what they needed to do to survive, just as I was doing what I needed to do. 

To my astonishment and delight and disbelief, the reunion went amazingly well. For while we still all have very different versions of how things went down, I felt a palpable shift in how we communicated this to one another. There was a level of active listening that had not existed before. This listening did not culminate in any one of us suddenly proclaiming they were wrong and I was right or vice versa. It was more like the murderous wedding scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail in which one character shouts, “Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed whom!”

My best guess is that getting older has mellowed us into understanding that, like blind men trying to describe an elephant—each while touching a different part—we are always going to have different perspectives shaped by so many factors from birth order to that wicked game of favoritism and condemnation the lunatic at the helm played to keep us all on our back feet, unable to form alliances, forever competitive with and suspicious of one another.

To be clear, the visit was not one big impromptu group therapy session. Any deep dive conversations were happily counterbalanced by much laughter as we observed with wonder how, despite all of our differences, we share some very similar, pretty wacky quirks. For example, I had no idea that one of my sisters uses a mole to differentiate her left from her right side. Upon hearing this, I remembered how, as a child, when pledging allegiance to the flag, I needed to glance at my hands, my eyes seeking out the mole near my right thumb that would remind me which to place over my heart. 

As we bonded, I remembered the 2006 movie Waltz with Bashir, an autobiographical story of a group of Israeli soldiers who fought in the 1982 Lebanon War. When they reunite, they discover each has processed (or not) their experiences very differently, ranging from vivid haunting flashbacks to drawing complete blanks about the conflict. None of them were “wrong” or “right” so much as all of them had internalized trauma very differently. 

I also remembered the parable about the monk who lives alone in a cave for a very long time, eventually believing he is close to enlightenment. Then one day a traveling monk stops by unannounced. The cave monk has no choice but to invite the traveling monk in and offer him tea. When the traveling monk puts his cup down “in the wrong place,” the cave monk loses his shit. This, in turn, recalls the wisdom of Ram Dass who said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”

I have no delusions of enlightenment. But I recognize how, like the cave monk, I have often used isolation and control freakism to feel like I’m making progress. Which is why, over the years, I increasingly scripted the narrative for how my birthday would go. Most years I’d do a big lead up—joking with friends about x number of shopping days until my celebration. But almost always on the actual day I hid myself away, preferring to reflect on my life and, also, I see now, striving to eliminate any chances to be disappointed. 

Agreeing to let my sisters share the day came with knowing they’d surely set down their emotional teacups all over an environment—my mind—that I strive to tightly control. I didn’t know if I could take it. On the other hand, I recognized the huge investment of time and money they put into this plan to honor me for the first time in more than forty years. 

I sat with my baby sister in front of the fireplace on our last evening together, rare one-on-one time we had not had in decades. I told her about the first dog Henry and I ever had. Satch was crazy and high strung. I would take him with me, walking Henry to elementary school. Then Henry started rollerblading on these trips, leaving him far ahead of the dog and me. This always freaked out Satch as he strained at the leash, trying futilely to keep his pack together. 

I told her my heart feels like this, will always have some anxiety over the splitting of the pack, the impossibility of us all being together, of feeling safe being together. One keen observation that got shared during our brief time together is that all nine of us are incredibly nice people and yet we cannot all get along. Not one among us speaks to all of the others, each of us having to limit which of us we can communicate with, with plenty of estrangement remaining, residual fallout from ancient pain experienced both collectively and uniquely. But we are trying, those of us who can, to do some repairs before it is too late to undertake such efforts. 

Less than 36 hours after the last of them had gone, I received unwanted news reminding me of our dwindling window. One of us (not me) has just been given a diagnosis of the worst variety, a prognosis so poor that it is highly possible that before summer there will be only eight of us left. This is one of the siblings I have not spoken to in many years and could not imagine ever speaking to again. But having just spent time experiencing a softening heart courtesy of my visiting sisters’ efforts, I loosened a little and sent a brief text message expressing my concern, my first attempt to connect in many years.

I do not expect the short exchange that followed—which was kind in both directions—to lead to some happy Hollywood ending, all of us gathered around the sick one in perfect loving harmony. Still, it was something, the best I can do for now, an effort fostered by the others showing up for me, for doing their best, too. 

NOTES:

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