Anne Nahm

Hi. I’m Anne and I’m 32 today.

I’ve been trying to come up with a coherent story for you about turning 32, but the rough draft kind of looked like watching “The Vagina Monologues” on The Lifetime Channel, while you are eating a box of bon-bons, sniffling into Kleenex, and getting up to pee while a Kotex commercial is playing.

The only good thing about estrogen overdose is that I hear your boobs swell two cup sizes before you start foaming at the mouth. So good… Unless of course you are a guy. Grab your training bra and let’s go, shall we? I must be embarrassed for my birthday. So it’s either this or letting my husband spank me… In front of my second grade teacher or something.

***

There is a line in the Bible that says, “I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren; the entire family is affected – even children in the third and fourth generations” ***. And it has always scared the bejeebus out of me.

In my family of origin, there are a lot of ghosts. People are generally good, but sometimes they do bad things. Like my mother’s memory of her own mother, pouring kerosene on her husband and grabbing the matches. And thus negotiating the end of drunken brawls for a while. So you see? Bad act, but perhaps for a woman in a desperate situation, better than what might have happened otherwise.****

Or my father’s parents, who learned to say, “I love you” when they were in their sixties. And the ghosts that follows my father and aunt from having never heard those words growing up. The ghost that follows my aunt is like a blaring, crazy harpy who screams I LOOOOOOOVE YOU!!!! at ten second intervals and smothers you with hugs and sits in your lap even if you are ten and she is forty****. My father’s ghost follows him around and makes him say, “I love you” about twice a year in a chokey voice. And that includes some rapid shoulder patting and a hug where his butt sticks really far out like his lower half is trying to run away.

But the thing about ghosts in your family is that they do go back generations. A parent does something painful to you, but when you hear their life story, sometimes they are just doing the best with what they have. Sometimes they are just trying not to do the painful thing that was done to them. I guess you can keep unraveling your own family history, seeing how each person had something worse happen to them. By my calculations, I guess somewhere up my family tree, people were actually raised by wolves and the wolf parents were beaten by Satan.

Not that I had such a rough life. I spent a lot of my childhood being afraid of the sins of the past generation, I think because my parents were terrified they would somehow raise me like they themselves had been raised. And so they did things differently. It is brave to do things differently. But there are consequences to different just as there are consequences to everything else.

I spent a lot of my adolescent years in a rage over any mistake my parents made. I don’t think that qualifies me for being anything other than an average teenager. Loving people and being supremely pissed at them has not been mutually exclusive in my experience.

I thought that being angry was like vomiting, and that by getting out, it would be out of me. But it has been my experience that anger is not like that. The anger that goes out also goes in in equal amounts.

And so as much as I became angry with them, I learned to be angry at myself. And then I spent some time being scared, because if I realized I had come to know myself as a bad person. And I had been a bad person for so long that if I let that go, I would not know who I was any more.

I got to the place in my twenties where I felt fairly sure that I was going to Hell when I died. How could God cut me any slack when I could not do it for myself? It took a long time to see how arrogant that was of me. All I can say is that it didn’t feel arrogant at the time. It felt worthless.

The first part of the passage about generational sin is this: “…I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. I lavish unfailing love to a thousand generations. I forgive iniquity, rebellion, and sin.”***

This year, my birthday wish is to keep that part of the verse in my heart. The universe can give you more blessings than what you inherited or who you have become.

It is time to quit bitching and crying about what I got or didn’t get as a child. Now I have to look at who I am and who I want to become during the rest of my life.

The scariest, of course, is that I don’t know what my children are inheriting from me. But what I want for them is to be able to look forward instead of back. To be able to accept unfailing love for a thousand generations. If I want to pass that on to them, I am going to have to learn it for myself.

*** Taken from Exodus 34:6-7 (New Living Translation)

**** And holy cow, I am not recommending that to anyone anywhere for any reason.