After the kids and husbands left to the pool, Middle and I sat in her backyard. I told her I wouldn’t really leave her completely alone to take care of Dad, Mom just needed to hear it that way. I felt sick saying it, not knowing if it was a lie or not.

Then we talked about something similar to what Jenny Grace alluded to a few posts back, how each kid has a distinct role in a family.

“She tells you things she would never tell me,” Middle said, somewhat wistfully, over my complaint of Mom’s venting Friday night. “You definitely got parentified, but I’m usually in the dark about Mom.” And it’s crazy, but I think Middle felt left out. And I understood how she could feel that way.

It’s always difficult to put together the facets of a parent, to understand them as a whole. Maybe as the kid, you’re not supposed to. They are good when you like them, and horrible when you don’t. The personality quirks that hurt you sometimes also saved your ass.

#

Middle’s confessed she was the kid who broke our family.

“Why would you think that?” I was totally caught off guard.

“Because I was the one who got in the fight with {The Exes}.”

This is true.

In my version of events, Middle’s the hero. Before her, there was just me, complaining over and over about the Exes, and my mother’s assurances that all the things I thought wrong were really OK if I just looked at the same facts in a different light.

Middle’s “Hey, wtf?! This is totally fucked up, right?!” suddenly made us two voices instead of one. It amazes me, the power of my sister’s confirmation. I spent twenty years unable to act on my own, but knowing she saw things as I did transformed me from ever wondering if I was right again.

I could not let Middle feel guilty for that! Not when she saved me with her indignant Well, this bullshit will not stand! determination. I told her how what she’d done changed everything for me, and that she should be proud of what she did, and that I was proud of her.

We talked about how fucked up it is we both created narratives in which each of us were the black sheep.

“Why would you feel like the black sheep? You didn’t do anything,” Middle said.

“It’s stuff like you mentioning those avocados from {one of the Exes} at Tahoe. You guys made up. I didn’t. And it’s fine, I’m happy with my choice. I know you all see each other, and I don’t see them, and so it’s going to happen that sometimes you are all together as a family and I’m not there.”

Middle shook her head as if stunned I could think such a thing. “{One of the Exes} comes up to see Mom. If I happen to stop by Mom’s house when they’re here, we’re stiltedly polite. But {the Ex} never speaks to me when Mom’s not there, never calls me, nothing. They’re only here for Mom and basically shun me because of my part in the fight.”

I could see how those kind of interactions could make Middle feel like a black sheep.

#

As we picked at this idea of  childhood roles, I brought up going to boarding school when I was 14.

I hate that when I’m with my sisters and we get shit-talking our parents, I inevitably bring up being sent off to boarding school. It once felt like the defining event of my life, but I’ve had enough other experiences so that it no longer has that weight.

What makes it hard to let go these days: my oldest daughter is 15 years old now. A year older now than when I left home.

According to my childhood map, she and I are in uncharted territory.

Since they were born, I’ve had fears about my kids’ high school years. But as they’ve gotten closer to (and in one case surpassed) the age I left home, my white-knuckled anxiety has mostly dissipated.

My kids are the same people they always were. There has been no huge shift in which they are suddenly strangers, or I am unable to muster any further mothering. Most reassuring is that I have never felt a compulsion to send them away.*

It’s comforting to discover that what feels strange for me – teenagers at home! Patiently letting them spread their wings! — is just the normal trajectory of their lives. Kind of like when they were babies, they don’t know I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Wheee!

In relation to my talk with Middle, re: why did Mom send me away and not any of my sisters (spoiler alert: every once in a while, my mom jettisons me. It’s part of my role in our family. I don’t know why, but I do understand I should just accept it and let go of the baggage that comes with it).

Middle averted her eyes the way people do when they feel pity you/the whole situation and don’t have a good answer (maybe the same way I did when Middle confessed to being shut out of Mom’s private thoughts at the beginning of our conversation), and said, “We were just raised by different mothers.”

Something about her explanation made me so angry I wept. “Don’t say that!” I shouted at her. “You were there. We had the same mother.” I guess because I couldn’t take the idea of being alone again, that somehow there had been a perfect version of our family out there somewhere, and I just wasn’t a part of it.

Middle started crying too. “I was ten when you left,” she said. Almost the current age of my youngest kid, who is:

in the fourth grade,
wild about sleepover parties,
always eager to tell you which friend sat with her on the bus ride home,
still loves snuggles,
forgets to feed the cats without a prompt.

My very-adult-with-two-kids-of-her-own sister, Middle said, “All I remember are things like setting the dinner table for five and then remembering you weren’t there anymore.”

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except it happened.

We hugged, and made up, and decided we didn’t need to talk about bullshit anymore that day. Instead, we should put on our swimsuits and go find our families. We did. As shiny upside, I was so exhausted and wrung out that for the first time in a long time, I did not care at all how I looked in my suit, I was just 100% happy to put that fucker on and go swim.

We drove to the pool. It was perfect weather. And this is kind of ridiculous, but my kids had never been on a diving board before. This pool had TWO, and my kids were still wild about jumping off both the high and low, doing all these flips and screaming cannonballs and the occasional near-miss belly flop that left us gasping on the sidelines. The water was all sparkly and inviting, and my husband smiled when I got there like he was glad to see me, instead of how I would’ve reacted  if I saw myself roll up, which would have been more along the lines of, Oh god, here comes crazy.

Out of nowhere, he said, “Hey, I know we talked about leaving tomorrow morning, but I was thinking we could head out tonight if you want. We could leave after dinner.”

Which meant he’d have to drive 5 hours, most of it in the dark, and we’d get home around midnight, and the kids and I would probably sleep while he did all the work.  It was as if he answered the question of my heart before I thought to ask it.

*I mean, they’re teenagers! Of course they are sometimes suddenly strangers! Of course I want to boot them on occasion! And inadequacy is part of daily living. But it has never been in proportions that scare me or make me feel like there is something really wrong in our dynamic.