You wait a lifetime for a family, you go a bit insane thinking it will never happen. You make your peace with that, and accept the other good things in your life, and remind yourself that not everybody has a family and it's not the end of the world. Who needs primary relationships anyway?
Then one year, it apparently happens, you let your guard down, you think, "I give and receive love," and you permit yourself to feel comfortable within a new (to you) family unit. Then, in the immortal poetry of Ralph Kramden, "POW! Right in the kisser."
How does something go from unbearably painful and ugly to uglier and more painful like this? My heart has been breaking continuously -- moebius heartbreak strip -- since we found out our darling beautiful perfect daughter-in-law has leukemia. All we want in this world right now is to help her, help this little family, in any way possible.
And it appears that what we are expected to do is to occasionally take the little granddaughters off of their Daddy's hands, but other than that, back off. Your help is not needed with this, nor with that, nor certainly most of all with the other thing either; you are not welcome here; please, obey the boundaries you did not know were in place.
At first, I thought I was being paranoid. The dirty looks from her friends when I would come to visit at the hospital. The very nasty glance at my hands from my brother-in-law's girlfriend, with a hissed, "Did you wash your hands?" as if I were not responsible or aware. The "Oh you don't have to do that" from my husband's son in response to every gesture, every offer. The most painful, "Well thanks for offering, but you guys don't have to feel obligated..."
We offered to help plan the benefit evening... not invited. My husband offered to get some fellow musicians together for it, actual pros, for free... offer ignored. I offered to emcee the evening (and I'm most definitely an actual pro)... offer met with hemming and hawing, the polite phrases an actor expects to hear when rejected for a role but never expects to hear when rejected by... family. We offered to help with cleaning up and organizing the house... not invited. I brought food -- good food, I'm one helluva good cook -- and while it is eaten, it is also met with the hemming and hawing, the thanks but don't feel obligated, the polite phrases so the old folks won't quite catch on that they're being asked to step off.
And now, a new website appears, and we are requested to sign up for an appointment to visit her in the hospital, no doubt to keep the wrong people from bumping into each other. We are requested to sign up for when to bring meals, no doubt to demonstrate that there are plenty of cooks among preferred family and friends. Attempts to open chat online are ignored. And my brother-in-law has stopped talking to my husband, won't return phone calls or emails.
Wow, we must suck.
And what can you do? Nobody wants to hear our feelings are hurt from being cut out of her cancer-recovery plan. How selfish can you be, right? Who the hell wants to hear that being edged out, made irrelevant to the first-life-and-death crisis this family has faced, may be painful to a couple of f***ing Boomers? Immaterial at 53 and 54. Not wanted. Not. A part. Of this.
Nobody in this family has been out to hear my husband play a gig in six years. Nobody in this family has ever seen one of my shows without us buying their tickets for them as gifts. We hear about great parties where the other set of boomer parents were there, but we hear about it after the fact, never as an invitation.
The list goes on... we spent much of yesterday comparing notes and looking to see if (a) we were being selfish, hypersensitive jerks, or (b) a discernible pattern emerges.
Yep. There's a pattern. Without our even being aware of it until a cancer diagnosis brought it out into the light, we have been assigned a compact little role to fill, and no further. What we thought was an embrace, is a holding-at-arm's-length. So this is what it feels like to be an embarrassment to the kids. Wowza.
The only one in this who seems not to want to dismiss us is the lady with the cancer. But who knows? Did she make requests that we be subtly encouraged to back off so that she wouldn't have to deal with both leukemia and with having to hurt us to our faces?
If you see a stunningly attractive, stylish older woman walking around the Warehouse District, with a look on her face like she leaned in to give a kiss but got gut-punched instead, she's me.
Also here are some pictures of a delicious dinner I made recently for the two of us, mainly by cleaning out what was laying around. Yeah...
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