Family time

This evening, I spent about 3 hours on the phone with family members, sometimes talking about other family members. This is a unusual, especially the long conversation I had with my brother in Denver and his wife. We typically speak to one another only on holidays and birthdays or if someone is very ill. But he had just watched the video he'd made about 5 years ago from old family slides and Super 8 footage, and it prompted him to think about how, way back when before 1975, we'd been a family that did things together. He called to remind me. This coming from someone who'd once said he had next to no memories of his childhood. It was strange, and sweet too.

My dad had outpatient surgery today - the day after his 69th birthday - & is apparently doing very well. After the surgery (which took place while my brother was watching this family video with my father's mother), my dad took my brother out to lunch. My dad had a hamburger and two beers. What's odd about that is not the post-surgery beers (he'd had a urinary external catheter inserted). That's not odd at all. What's odd about the lunch that he had appetite for hamburgers and that he had (apparently) money to pay for it. After lunch, my dad went back to the van where he now lives with his dog. By choice. How do I feel about this? Detached. Of course. Detachment is my tool of choice around dad. It's one of the skills I honed as a child (along with minimalizing danger and second-guessing everyone) as a coping mechanism for living with him and his skewed way of interacting with people.

My sister called between calls from my brother to talk to me about summer plans, and my father-in-law called after that to talk about a get-together with D's aunt from Bulgaria and D's sister and her fiance. (A fiance we haven't even met yet!)


* warning - neurotic Rambling follows. Feel free to cut & run now. *

It's family time. I'm not sure how that feels. Which is, itself, a strange feeling.

I am comfortable with these people, but again, a large percentage of me is very detached. I hold back. I say the right words. I even know what a healthy response to them might be, but I seldom reveal all or even represent most of my truest self to anyone - among my siblings especially - for fear that they'll only use that integrity against me. How sad is that? They're not even manipulative or cruel people. I just feel like they might be. After all, we were all four shown examples of cruelty and manipulation on a regular basis by the same father. They might have picked up some of his tricks. I might have. One can't be sure.


Bleh.

Stoopid coping mechanism.