Bygones

Bygones
January 5, 2017


’Tis the season to look back, she thinks. That slow-to-reboot first week after the holidays. Relatives gone. Kids ushered off to school. Spouses hunkered back into their work spaces. Streets and sidewalks pretty much emptied. The car silent now (save for the gentle purr of the engine) as she heads home from dropping her brother at the airport. This is the time to reflect on the things you’ve said and done—things said and done to you—in your life.

Through the haze of holiday conversations, as the oldest of the three siblings, she sees their childhood from the widest vantage point. She sees their mother, born in a time distant from her soul, thwarted in her desire to have a career by the logistics and demands of being wife and stay-at-home mom. She sees their father, stumbling as a new dad, wanting but lacking a sense of how to nurture his eldest son, likely due to the death of his own father when he was just nine. She feels the awkwardness, the sadness, the recoil from both parents’ struggle to express feelings and share emotion. She sees the toll it has taken on the brother closest to her in age, childhood recollections still stinging like tiny drops of lemon juice splashed into a fresh cut. She recalls the friendships her parents formed and their desperation to be accepted. “What will the neighbors think?” she hears now as flatly as she heard it time and again as a teenager.

But that was her parents as new parents.

By the time the youngest sibling was born, those people were replaced by a softly greying couple. Mellowed by a passed over promotion, the death of their parents, a run-in with breast cancer, a family suicide, and a country reeling from the after effects of Watergate and the Viet Nam War. Why is it that it takes misfortune to point out what matters in life? She sees the striking difference between her two siblings. The younger one at ease with himself, able to accept and express his feelings openly in such honest and humble terms that intimacy—and love—are a given. She sees herself as the teeter totter in constant motion to balance the parts of both brothers living inside her.

It’s the holiday rite of passage, she tells herself. The sobering end of one chapter giving way to the hope that lies ahead in a new one. Thank god for the calming purr of the engine, she says out loud as she pulls the car into the garage, turns off the ignition, gets out and steps into the house, closing the door behind her.

2017 Copyright, Denise Lynn