Becoming Mother

I could smell the pot roast as soon as the kids opened the door from the garage to the house.

I told them I would make them the pot roast that their grandmother would make for lunch after church on Sundays when I was a child–and they were beyond excited. Before we left for church, Felicity watched me brown the chuck roast and place it over the carrots and potatoes. And then came the best ingredients–a true indication of our family’s solid working class background: Lipton onion soup mix and cream of mushroom soup.

Yum and done.

I followed them in our house, shut the door behind me, and closed my eyes. I imagined walking into the house on Brandt Pike, the one where we lived when I was in fifth grade to eighth grade.

A knot was twisting in my stomach now, as if some previously separated threads, ones that I had worked hard to untangle were now snapping off an external Loom of Truth that I’ve constructed over the years, lined with pegs of individual truths that I fully believe. Truths like Mom and Dad loved you, They tried their best, They were human beings, You are also trying your best, All you need to do is Love the people in your life.

But right now, it’s all snapping off the loom and collapsing into a tangled mess. It’s sadness mixed with resentment and anger and jealousy, always followed by waves of gratitude, love, and centering. I remind myself that these feelings are normal and this is the way it moves.

I walk into the house and get busy with finalizing the Sunday lunch. I’m pulling the hefty Lodge Dutch oven out of the oven. It’s a much nicer roasting pan than the one that my parents used, that black aluminum roasting pan, speckled with white dots. The one that rusted on the bottom over the years.

When I pull the lid off the Dutch oven, the aroma almost makes me weak. Delicious isn’t the word. It’s more than that. It’s a recognition that what I’m about to eat is going to transport me to another time and another place. I know this is true–because I already have one foot there.

I pull the tender roast apart into soft chunks and arrange the pieces on a platter, surrounded by the soft potatoes and carrots. The recipe on my phone tells me to strain the liquid at the bottom of the pan, add some cornstarch, boil, and then reduce the heat until the sauce thickens. I’ve never done this before, but it doesn’t feel hard. I’m partially remembering and partially imagining my mother doing these actions on the stove and in minutes, I have a gravy that she would be proud of.

And when my teeth sink into the first bite of roast, I’m filled with a feeling that is hard to place at first. I want to fall through the floor and into the world that should be surrounding this bite of food.

It’s homesickness.

A deep longing to return to a time when my parents were alive and navigating their own Messy Middle part of life.

At the same time, I feel the knot in my stomach tightening, twisting around this feeling of being back in that eleven-year-old’s, twelve-year-old’s, thirteen-year-old’s body.

Back in the time when our family started coming apart at the seams.

And just like that, nostalgia and homesickness shift into something much darker. Some memories are coded like this. Moments of love and belonging are sometimes bound up together with moments of alienation and loneliness.

Some memories, you go to great lengths to remember because they are so dear to you. But then you are assaulted by all the tumultuous emotions that are set free by reliving these memories.

Have you ever felt this way?

I can’t be the only one.

***

Here’s a common story of a family being torn apart: parents start fighting and then they get divorced. The reason for the fights can vary, but with that narrative, you can find other kids, just like you, going through something similar.

There was no such common narrative for understanding why and how my family was torn apart in the 1990s. No one could even tell that we were coming apart. My parents were still together. In fact, they clung to each other through the worst days.

But what do you call it when your oldest sibling implodes and suddenly your parents cannot protect you from the emotional fallout?

At the time, we called it sin and bad friends and what happens when you listen to too much rock music. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I finally got a dose of reality that had evaded me for my whole life.

My brother…

…the one who grew his hair out to fit in with the “goth” crowd, the one who put on eyeliner and dyed his hair black and said he was a vampire and informally changed his name to Dramir and later to Vladmir on his Columbia House account and changed his religious affiliation from pagan to Wiccan to Satanist…

…was transgender.

My brother identified as a woman. Wanted to be a woman.

He changed all the things about himself that were within his control–and every change was a message to my parents, I will be who I am, even if you hate it. So go ahead. Hate me. Get it over with and hate me.

But they never did. They were frustrated and overwhelmed, but they never hated him. Never said awful things about him. I remember thousands of times, the voice of my mother saying, He’s doing a lot better.

Still, there was no room to be transgender in our faith as Southern Baptist Christians. Male and female, created he them, according to our KJV Bible. And God did not make mistakes.

So get over it. Stop being weird. Pray. You are a perfect creation of God as you are. God loves you as you are. Just stop getting confused.

Those may not have been the words that any one specific person said to him–but it definitely represents our church’s response to being transgender. Not that we knew that word. I think the only word that we had at the time was transvestite. And that was for truly weird people, like the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs.

When my brother said that he was transitioning to becoming a woman, I was 37 years old. I combed over my entire memory of him. Every conversation that didn’t make sense. Every interaction. Every cruelty and insult. Every scream and tirade he hurled at my parents that they just accepted. They were his punching bags, over and over again. They called it a parent’s love or being long-suffering, but from my perspective, it sure seemed like abuse.

It does something to you–watching violence and abuse being answered with silence or unfounded positivity or rationales/excuses for awful behavior. Especially when it’s called love.

Everyone in my family were victims of this collateral violence. His rage held us all hostage, and we had no where to go but to retreat to our rooms and wait for whatever storm he was feeling to be over. If he was miserable, everyone had to be miserable with him. And when he had unloaded all his hatred and frustration on everyone else and witnessed that everyone around him was feeling as empty and drained as him, he finally went quiet and retreated to his room.

I cannot tell you how many cycles of violence, just like this, I have witnessed.

It was the mid-1990s and there was no transgender awareness. No humane and inclusive language to talk about this as a real human experience and not some attention-seeking deviant lifestyle that people choose to make everyone around them uncomfortable.

The knot in my stomach comes from how it felt to be in my body at this time. How it felt to be so suddenly and completely hated by my oldest sibling. The cruelty. The vitriol. The constant taunts, insults, put-downs, the looks he gave me when everyone was around (mean, but tolerable) and the looks he gave me when no one was around (they said, I wish you would die.)

I didn’t understand what I had done to be the constant target of his rage and resentment. I just felt his contempt, day after day after day. It never improved. It only worsened. And no one could explain to me why it was like this. What I had done.

No one told me that what he hated about me was that I was becoming the woman that he wanted to be–and I didn’t even have to think about it. I could just be who I was–and everyone loved and accepted me.

I wouldn’t understand this for another twenty years.

Because that’s how long it took for my eldest sibling to say the words.

“I want to be a woman.”

But without this understanding as a child, without a context, without a reason, I was left to conclude either that I was a terrible person–or that he was a terrible person.

And so I worked on myself and tried to be the best person that I could be. I went to church every chance that I got. I prayed. I memorized the Bible. I did all the things to prove that I was a good person. Then, I could know for sure that the answer was that he was the terrible person.

Our lives moved in direct opposition to each other. The more anarchistic and immoral my brother became, the more morally righteous and Christian I became. He was reading the Satanic Bible and wearing pentagrams and I was memorizing chunks of Ephesians and 1 Corinthians. He dropped out of high school and I excelled in Honors classes. He joined a goth band and I went to college. This is how it went for years and years and years.

We also didn’t have language to talk about mental illness. At the time, we didn’t have the word schizophrenia.

We heard jokes about it–that it caused people to talk to themselves. But we didn’t know the warning signs that arise on the way to a person’s complete break with reality. So when my oldest sibling walked out into four lanes of traffic to bridge the gap between life and death, there was no single interpretation of the event that the family or our church agreed upon. My parents believed they were battling Satan or some other demonic force. Well-meaning church friends told us it was about identity and wanting to belong. Maybe also bullying.

But what did I think?

I wanted to believe that he was crazy. Because if he were crazy, then I could finally understand why he was so cruel to me. I could blame the insanity instead of blaming someone who was supposed to be someone I loved.

But after he pulled a knife on my parents and police officers pinned him to the ground in our front yard, no one had any more conjectures. No more advice. Just prayers. And perhaps unvoiced rationalizations that our family wasn’t right with God.

***

“This tastes amazing, Mom,” Henry says as he sinks his teeth into more pot roast. “Like, so amazing.”

“So glad you like it!” I say.

“No, Mom, I love it!” he gushes.

“It’s sooooo good,” Felicity says.

Just those words. It’s amazing what a handful of words can do for your sense of purpose in this world. I’m sure my mother also felt a deep sense of satisfaction when she made a meal this good. Even on the hardest days with my oldest sibling, he would never turn down a meal of my mom’s pot roast. It was just too good to decline.

I finally feel compassion for my oldest sibling. I still use the pronoun “him” because that is the identity in which he resides for me. I do not have a relationship with him. It is too unpredictable and painful. And with space and therapy, I now understand that I don’t have to feel guilty about not maintaining a relationship with anyone–even a family member–who isn’t a safe person to share my heart and vulnerability.

I’m rambling now, but that’s how it goes with memories like this.

We will fall down the rabbit hole together and sort through the knots, following the paths up and over and through, until I’m able to anchor these threads back to the loom that holds them, in the arrangement that finally makes sense. The one in which everyone–in all their failures and flaws–tried their best given the information they had and the culture in which they lived.

Nevertheless. It was still traumatic.

It still left everyone forever changed.

But at least now, it all makes sense.

***

I started talking about homesickness and I got lost in remembering that for every moment that I want to return to a moment when my parents were alive and close and guiding lights in my word, there are just as many moments when I want to run as far away from the past as I can.

Home in my teenage years was not the safest place for me. Not mentally and emotionally at least. There were pockets of safety and belonging, but there were far too many minefields for me to fully at rest in a memory from those years.

It’s not at all what I want to create for my children and stepchildren. I don’t want them to look back on this time in their lives and only see their families being torn apart. I hope that they’re also able to see the beginnings of how a new family was born.

“What do you think, Mom?” Felicity asks as I’m chewing through the pot roast.

“It’s amazing,” I say. “Just like grandma would make.”

***

What is a family?

What is a home?

These are questions that didn’t exist for me two years ago–and now they are ones that I find myself constantly trying to answer.

Because I am actively and consciously creating family and home every day now, in small and unspoken ways. Through what I say and do and how I respond, especially on the hardest days. Especially when I’m the most stressed. Especially when we need to have difficult conversations. Or need to apologize.

Now that the tangled threads of the Past are secured back in their positions, I’m figuring out how to make sense of the tangled threads of this Messy Middle of my life. I pick up each thread and trace it back to where it came from.

There is my history of a need for approval. My tendency to second guess my instincts. My preference for avoiding conflict. My upbringing to put others first, especially if I love them, no matter the costs. Each is a thread that surrounds me and stretches me in different ways across this Loom of Truth.

It’s too hard to see myself, my real self, apart from the complexity of all that has made me who I am.

But.

If I close my eyes and open my heart, I hear myself.

I hear that inner voice that I’ve told to be quiet at times when it challenged my plans or my reality. It’s still there. It hasn’t been starved by neglect. I hear my inner voice better now than I have in a long time. I don’t always hear it perfectly–but it is so much better.

And then when I open my eyes again to take in the complexity that still surrounds me, I have a better appreciation for the differences and the challenges that await me. I find myself more ready, more willing to remain open to whatever pattern emerges from this new weave of my life.

This all sounds very wise and thoughtful. As if I’m a person who does this stuff perfectly.

I don’t. Not at all.

My default setting is often judge-first and consider-later. I have to work at activating the slow-down-and-think processes.

Maybe it’s why I have been so slow to share much on this blog in the past year.

I’m thinking and considering a lot.

I’m trying to make sense of the new homesickness that overtakes me when my kids are at their father’s house. I feel it when I’m pulling the milk out of the refrigerator for my stepdaughter’s breakfast, only to see her stomp out of the room in protest. Putting vitamins into a tiny hand and hearing a huff. Saying Have a great day and sometimes hearing a You too and sometimes hearing silence.

It’s the understanding that they don’t want me to do these things for them–because it feels like I’m taking over something their father does for them.

And who do I think I am–trying to replace their dad? Or worse–trying to replace their mom? They have a mom and I’m not her. I didn’t ask their permission to be in their lives. And now I’m everywhere. And so are my kids. And now their dad spends time with my kids. And their grandparents also give gifts to my kids. And they are just DONE with sharing the people they love with anyone else.

And this is why sometimes I feel the loneliest when my kids are gone and my stepchildren are with us. I can’t be the caretaker that I want to be because my stepdaughters often don’t want me in that role. I can’t be the wife that I want to be because my stepdaughters sometimes hate reminders that their father loves me.

Sometimes, it’s more comfortable to just be the other adult who is living in this house, doing their dishes and laundry and buying the groceries. You know, the behind-the-scenes chores that don’t interfere with their daily interactions with their father. I’ve learned to not try to wake them up or pour their cereal or put a snack in their bag. It’s too close. They don’t want me there, in that way.

My stepchildren want their father’s time and attention–without me.

I understand the reason for this. Even though it’s painful to not be wanted. To wander through my house without purpose, trying to express care for my stepchildren by doing parent-y things, only to have those efforts greeted with silence on a neutral day and anger, frustration, or resentment on a bad day.

There are good days too, when one of them gives me an impromptu hug. But they are unexpected. Surprising. And they do not happen because of anything I’ve done. They are brief moments of Grace that remind me that I cannot speed this process. I can only make small steps and wait.

My therapist says that I should do something with my stepdaughters that they want to do. Like painting nails. Or watching a kid’s movie together. Or playing pretend or some game they like.

If you know me, you know that I’m not particularly into playing with kids. Even my own. Let’s call it a “growth area.”

Most of the time, I just give them their space with their dad. I retreat into books. I try to see my friends.

But the homesickness sticks and I find myself missing that time and place when home was a place where I always felt that I belonged.

I’m sure my stepdaughters feel the same way.

***

What will I think of this Messy Middle part of my life when I look back on it later?

I’m certain Future Me would be kinder to me than the Current Me. Future Me would not only know how important the journey was. Future Me would feel all the compassion in the world for how hard it is to step through the Messy Middle, especially when your sense of self and belonging are being redefined and reshaped by forces outside of your control.

Divorce is traumatic for children. I understand this more than I did when I made the decision to divorce. And I still don’t regret the decision. Even if it was a hard decision to make, it was the right one to make.

In this loosely formed household, we all experience the aftermath of the trauma of divorce in different ways.

But one thing that we all share is homesickness.

There’s nothing that my children and my stepchildren want more than to see the reconciliation and restoration of their former families. And this doesn’t mean that divorce was a mistake. It just means that we are a longing for a place where we feel that we fully belong–and we haven’t yet created a space where we all feel that belonging.

In the meantime, I’ll try to remember to give my kids and stepkids what I needed in my hardest moments as a child in the Messy Middle.

Acknowledgement.

Validation.

Presence.

I believe that we will get there.

It will probably take years of stepping through this Messy Middle.

But we will get there.