Tea With Me: 19th August, 2023 Saturday
So Dream Kite flew behind dense fog which might have cleared if it weren’t for several pee and poo calls from three of the Pack of now Eight. What I can grasp out of the Fog is images of Fire. Not as a Destroyer but as a Reviver.
Light Angles have shifted. Fall is coming. Temperatures are trending down. August is a subtle messenger of things to come. Mornings are early for me these days. Pups are up and their frolic and relieving lasts long enough for my relievings and brewing tea. Then a morning snooze before breakfast.
As Lung Rabies bloomed in my body, my ability to engage with stresses generated further than my garden walls had fled leaving my reach for calm as I hacked up what Lung Rabies had created in my lovely air bags so intensely insistent that any outside stimulus I chose needed to be non stimulating.
I reached for every British Costume Drama ever made. Why that? Well, one of the only rituals still alive in my teenage home was Sunday evenings with Masterpiece Theater. It was time with my Father.
His patterns were so consistent. Off early in the morning and home after dinner for the rest of us.
We kids had been five. I am fourth in the lineup. And the fourth girl. Then there came, finally, the Boy. The only one of us who was planned.
All that is another chapter.
By thei time I was in high school, my older sisters were off in their journeys away. My brother had registered by 14 as unmangeable in my parents’ middleaged life style and had been squeezed into a almost top tier boarding school for 10th grade.
I was the only home. My Mama was tired, lonely, flattened by the age old rhythm of all those kids flying away and what the fuck was she to do with her massive creativity now. The plight of many amazing women who married men who afforded their ability to stay home and manage all those kids. Middle age and menopause hit them like a plague and medicine culture and their men at the time saw this organic female mayhem as something to be controlled. Prescriptions for tranqs and uppers mixed with the alcohol culture of the time felled many.
My Mama in my teens was terribly terribly depressed. And my Papa, who adored her, left every day for work, and played golf on weekends. His toolbox for this lifetime was to provide and commit. The subtleties of his Heart had never learned the language of navigating the complexities of his magnificent wife’s registration of loss.a
I loved her. And she wept every afternoon on my shoulder if I came home after school. I was 14 when it really kicked in. My teenage angst and need to rebel against an intact parent got put on hold while I tried to help her.
She needed. So I stepped up. My sisters would call and check in with news of their growing in the expanding women’s lib culture which only made my Mama feel less than as she had spent her life making them strong enough to break that Glass Ceiling. The messages of their successes or outright failure to launch as in the case of my Eldest Sister, carried accusations of why didn’t you do more.
All mothers and fathers face this syndrome of children’s blame for what we find oursleves ill equipped to deal with as we move through life. Some of us move through and grow a pair and face up to our autonomous failings and some of us are felled.
I went through my blame period for sure. In memories of later years when the Family Culture seemed to have lost its moral compass after my Father passed, I can so easily castigate her for not pulling her Matriarch Power Cord to end the Bullshit which did irreperable damage to two generations.
But she didn’t. She was what she was. And her confusion about life’s transitons and her rage at having been so tightly controlled by her so capable Husband drove her erratic behavior in those last 18 years after my Father passed.
Yes, there is much grief in what I write. And chapters infinite about the story of this family lie beyond me at this moment with this morning’s tea.
So as I hacked up Lung Rabies artistic splashes of yellow brown globs, I reached for my distant past of when it felt secure.
Those Masterpiece Theater nights, well, they gathered the three of us in mesmerised community. In the tackily paneled family room. In the winter there was a fire. In the spring, the opened windows wafted in the opening of the Earth’s Connecticut Winter’s store. The Fall we gathered again after Summer’s outside calls to move.
So the Masterpeice Canon lulled me through Lung Rabies’essentially mild but unignorable visitation. And yes, my Mama and Papa were cuddled with me and the dog kids for those three weeks.
And somehow, on the other side, forgiveness and understanding has grown.
I had good parents who did the best they could and gave us so much and they failed the way we all do.
I miss them.
Tea was creamed and honeyed.
Ta.
Tea With Me 