Notes to Self

http://www.greetings.ca/no-dirty-dishes-day-012056.php

Just the other day, I was sitting in a discussion group in which participants were asked to close their eyes and think back to their childhood homes, as far back as they could remember.
 
Not anticipating that the next step indeed would be to wander around the house, I'd already instinctually started doing so, happily walking from room to room, stopping here to touch the windows sill, there the banister.

There was the black asbestos tile of the kitchen where, at the age of seven, I remember falling down and chipping my tooth one Easter morning; my brother and I had been was chasing each other in our socks.  There was the bare, beige, asbestos tile floor of the sparse living room where the old couch was quickly falling apart.

Next, in my mind, I wandered upstairs to the landing with its sunny window, and then around the bend where I walked into my teenaged brother's small, carpeted room next to the bathroom, snooping around the odds and ends on his dresser while he was out with his friends as he often was.Next, I stepped into the larger middle room that contained two matching beds, where my "Irish twin" brother and I shared our space and where he would spend afternoons inventing crazy names and scenarios for all of our stuffed animals, most of which were dogs of all shapes and sizes.  Finally, I stepped around the corner from our room to open the door to the sunny, gray, wooden attic stairs leading up into the light.

But I wasn't really supposed to just wander around the house, solitary;  what we were really being instructed to do was to look for the people we would find in that house -- people who had the biggest effect on our lives.  And as we found them, we were supposed to have specific types of conversations with them.

That's when a few strange things happened, some of which I understand, and some of which I don't:

No matter how hard I looked, two of my three siblings were always missing. Why the oldest was missing makes sense to me:  he was seven years older, a teenager, and unlike anyone else in the house, he had his own room.  In real life, he was often out riding his bike or skateboarding with his friends, just like any kid his age might be.

I couldn't understand why I couldn't place my sister, though.  She was the youngest and slept in my mom's room.  Was this the reason? The thing is, my mother  was unemployed and depressed and never left the house, and my sister wasn't old enough to go to school yet, so surely she was always around.  Why couldn't I find her, even when I searched?

In fact, the only sibling I could find was the one who, ironically, is distinctly missing from everything now -- missing from week-long family gatherings, missing from phonecall exchanges.  Missing from my life.  When we do see him every few years, he is easily agitated and short-tempered. But when I close my eyes, what I see is that he is having our stuffed animal dogs interview each other, and he seems happy.  He makes me laugh.

Mostly, unsurprisingly, it's my mother with whom I converse.  There are things I want from her.  I want her to treat me like a human being, not just some kind of cooperative instrument of "God's will."  I want her to tell me about her own life, about falling in love, falling out of love.  I want her to seem human to me in every dimension and to acknowledge that I'm human too -- that one day I'll fall in and out of love, that I will have dreams I'll want to pursue.   I want her to give me some idea of what the world outside this house might be like.

Unlike in real life, she thanks me for my insight and says she will try.  Like in real life, she then pats me on the head, calls me smart, and tells me she loves me.

But the part that scares me most is this:  I try to get her to walk with me to the living room.  Every few minutes, I try.  I try to picture her walking up the stairs to the sunny landing, but she won't.

No matter how hard I try, I can't get my mother out of the kitchen -- the kitchen where, when she's not patting me on the head, she is raging over a sink full of dirty dishes, over thoughts of my father, her hands wet and slippery, making so little progress, her tears silent.