I turned 41 this year, much to my consternation, as my real life hadn't started yet. I had coasted along on my youthful appearance and demeanor for quite some time, but when I crested the hill over the big 4-0, I was faced with the prospect of being at least halfway through my life having accomplished next to nothing.
At heart I'd always felt I was a writer, but I preferred up until now, the safety of being a writer who didn’t write. One's work cannot be rejected if one doesn't produce anything, now can it? I suppose it was the stereotypical fear of failure/fear of success/fear of hard work/fear of my own brain that fueled my years of avid procrastination, but now that endless procrastination had caught up with me and was biting me in the ass.
I began a lengthy and serious self-examination that resulted in the realization that I was profoundly unhappy, depressed even. I had always prided myself on my resiliency, my malleability, my chameleon-like ability to adapt to situations and to remain upbeat and cheerful--on an even keel. I couldn't rise to the occasion. I had held a mind-numbingly boring job for two years that offered me neither a living wage, any sort of challenge nor any hope of either. I was living with a roommate in an apartment where I never felt at home. I was in a quasi-serious relationship; (serious for me, quasi for him) that had been circling over commitment in a holding pattern for months as if it were an airplane trying to land at SFO in July. I hadn't felt like "me" in a very long time. I felt out-of-sorts, out-of-place and out-of-time.
I was miserable. Something had to change. It seemed the time was right to pay a visit to Mom.
But first I must backtrack just a bit...
My mother, in absentia from my inherently strange and estranged family from a few months after my birth, had recently been re-introduced into my life after I sought her out nearly three years ago.
My family, consisting really of my older brother and my father, had scattered to the winds years and years before. As a child it was forbidden to even mention her name--Starr--it always sounded beautiful and exotic to me. It was apparent to my brother and me that she had performed some unspeakable crime against my father and us, but we were never filled in, which led to years of speculation and the most interesting theories based upon overheard whispers between my grandmother and her friends and some clippings from the paper my brother found in a trunk. There were no pictures of her; we never met any of her relatives. It was as though her role in our lives consisted, by design, of our births and nothing else. We grew up motherless, except for an unfortunate step-mother episode that lasted less than five years. My father did the best he could, but whatever had happened between my parents had destroyed any sense of normalcy my family would ever have. My father, tormented by demons of his own creation and other's, finally decided it would be in everyone's best interest if he disappeared, and without any discussion did so and has remained invisible for over a decade.
After years of having no interest in meeting the woman who had abandoned us without any contact in my lifetime, somehow I felt now I was ready to at least hear her side of the story.
After a wild-goose-chase of a search (details perhaps best left for another blahhgh)I found her in Mexico, where she had been living for nearly thirty years. The first time I visited her was remarkable, in that I had never met any female that looked at all like me--we have the same fingers and toes, and the same colored eyes--a bright greenish blue. She was a tiny, frail little thing, looking older than her 58 years after decades of sun and cigarette smoking. She had small soft features and a very childlike face, in spite of her punished skin and ill health. I didn't know what I had expected--nothing I guess. But I felt a bond with her, this odd stranger, that I had felt with no other woman in my life.
This was my mother. My Mother. MY mother. After some fits and starts, it went well enough on this first visit that I came back six months later, with her promises of information about "what had happened" enticing me as well as a desire to have some sense of family identity after all these years.The second visit was longer, and some of the tensions underlying our relationship began to surface, making it more difficult, but we were forging something new out of a history littered with rumor, innuendo and resentment. I left her that time with promises to arrange a more lengthy stay, and she promised, again, to tell me "what had happened" when I came back "next time."
Please stay tuned for the next installment...
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