"The hand you hold is the hand that holds you down..."

A few weeks ago, I went back home for my grandmother's memorial. Of course, everyone was in a weird mood, and everyone was at odds with each other, but we got through it. We always do.

But there was a point during the memorial when the children (my aunts and uncles) shared memories of their mom.

The first portion that struck me funny was that my dad didn't share anything, he didn't prepare anything. I thought, at first, that it was because he simply didn't know what to say - because he keeps those things inside. I know emotions make him awkward. But he said later that it was because he had different relationship with his parents than his siblings did. He said his mom didn't try with him - that she just left him to grow on his own, and that he didn't get the nurturing he needed to call her his mom and get what he needed from the relationship. I still don't know what to take from this experience. What could cause a mother to leave her child on his own? And what could cause a son to bury this for so long?

The second that struck was my aunt’s reading. I don’t know that the attachments or the history behind it can be explained, or that it will ever stop bothering me.

To set up this situation, my aunts and uncles still called my grandparents mommy and daddy up until the day they died. These – names – have such a childish attachment – a dependency attachment. To never let that go is...almost disturbing. Something happened in that family; something that is now destined to lie in secret forever.

But my aunt’s reading went deeper than that.

She spoke of how my grandmother was her closest companion – how she knew my aunts deepest secrets, and how no one could ever replace her. It was eerily reminiscent of a lover’s relationship – the life-long partner who knows the darkest places in your mind. It displaced me. Your mother is your guidance and your driver, someone you run from and yet, the one you fall back on. But for her know everything – to be your everything – is…pedophilic. It’s incest. It’s oedipal in a…stretched interpretation…sense. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, aside from addressing my discomfort.

Since this instance I haven’t been able to shake the feelings from that day. It’s not something that is trapping me or really bothering me, but it’s just there. Could she really have found so few worthy of her love, that she was left to turn to her mother? Could she really have had so little that she couldn't grow past her infancy - grow past her mother at the center of her world?

We bury so much, and we think it’s taken care of, and it isn’t. Things like this stay with us forever. Your past is a part of you. Although I have no control over how my grandparents were, their actions and their affects on my aunts and uncles, and on my father, are a part of me. And in a sense, they didn’t have control over my grandparents’ actions either. They did what they could to cope. But burying so much so that it comes out in these twisted, eerie concepts is painful to observe. Someone needed to reach out to them before the damage began.

Someone needed to love her so she could see beyond the matriarch engulfing her mind, so she could move beyond this obsession. 

I live to be that person, to someone. I reach out in all directions for a hand to grasp.

Find yours and lead or be led.

We often blur the edges or our minds; sometimes all we need is a focus on the truth.