R e a l i t y F i s h

To go to my cousin’s wedding, I needed to trek back to the land of the ancestors. To say that I had mixed feelings on the subject… it underplays the situation so much that I can’t even think of an appropriate analogy.

I wasn’t raised here. My mother emigrated to the coastal suburbs, and I grew up surrounded by K-Marts and McDonald’s, driving everywhere in minivans. But for most of my life, week-long trips to the homes of my extended family were expected every holiday — Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July. My cousins were nearly as close as siblings. I chased chickens at the farm, and watched the coal trains pass in front of my grandparents’ house, and accepted that I was related to most of the people I passed in the street of “downtown,” which doesn’t have a stoplight and sometimes suffers from goat-herd-caused traffic jams.

There’s something about a grandparent’s house that’s made of magic. It’s the sort of place where you know you’ll always be loved and pampered, where someone’s always going to be on your side (often against your parents!). Where all you need to do to make someone cry with pride and happiness is learn how to fry crabapples from the tree in the backyard.

Then you get older, and more cynical, and you start to see all the rot under the surface.

About five years ago I stopped going entirely. My grandparents were long dead, and I simply couldn’t close my eyes to the sickness running through my family. The drugs and the alcoholism. The narcissistic personality disorders. The religious bigotry and the racist bigotry and the way some of them treated my husband for daring to be northern and how they looked down on me for living with The Wookiee before we married. When you’re a child, you miss that behind the hugs and the smiles, your aunts and uncles and parents are shiving each other in the back at every opportunity. You start to see your own generation growing up and stepping into the same roles.

So I stayed away and cut off almost all contact, aside from the occasional Facebook wall posts. I moved to the Midwest with The Wookiee, and I fashioned my own little family out of the people around me. And things were so much better that for a long time, I didn’t notice the little ache in my chest.

Whether we like it or not, there are places that our bones recognize. On one of these hills, there is a private graveyard that holds six generations of my family. My blood has lived in this land for over three hundred years, and somehow, I think that even if I’d never been here and no one had ever told me our history, I’d recognize this sight.

When I heard my younger cousin was getting married, I knew The Wookiee and I would have to go. She and her family trekked across the country for our wedding, and even though they made such nuisances of themselves that I wish they’d stayed home, I’d be damned if I’d let them make snide remarks about us not returning the favor. Besides, I can never pass up a chance to wear my shoes.

The time to go got closer, and my feelings began to polarize. How can they not? How can we not feel the pull of those familiar places and memories of happy times, at the same time feeling the dread of what we know we’ll find — whole new reminders of what drove us away in the first place?

I went, full of I-don’t-know-what. I got everything I expected — the good and the bad, the push and the pull. But I also got something I’d never had before: quiet time to myself, time to just look and listen and remember. And something loosened a little.

These things are what they are. The good, the bad, the heartsickness and the loosening. I can’t rid myself of my family any more than I can change my eye color or say “Hotdish” instead of “Casserole.” Sooner or later, I’m going to have to accept what I am and who they are and what this place is, without also taking on the burden of their disappointment in who I turned out to be.

I will go back again. But not any time soon.

The wedding itself was nice enough, when you consider that the family bickered the whole time and almost no one thought the marriage was a very good idea. The only alcohol was Coors Light but the groom’s cake was Mississippi Mudslide ice cream.

And I danced in my red shoes.

Can’t ask for more than that.