“Contrast is everything in life.”

My mother — this was one of her favorite things to say.  And my childhood was a series of contrasts.  Working on the memoir is what I want to be doing but it’s so effing hard to here.  I need music sometimes when I write and around here I’m told to turn it down, all the time.  Or?  Do you have to play that song over and over again?  Eff it.

13 suitcases is how my little brother moved to Australia, and one GMC truck was how he moved to Vallarta.  He drove the Baja way, alone.  And took the ferry across.

So here is what happened this week.  One of the roofs had a leak, and of course there was another emergency for someone else that always comes first.  Then?  There was a little emergency room visit, because he had a muscle spasm in his upper thigh.  He’s a runner, pounding it for years.  Was it that?

My mother told me she left my father because she didn’t like the sound of the knife scraping the plate while he was having dinner.

She left my brother’s father for a different set of reasons, and that lasted years until she came to the finality that she was going to.  He was the love of her life too.  There is usually one, for everyone.  Or, if you are like me there will be many.

They often say you marry into your family system the first time.  Therapists learn that.  You marry the problems you grew up with because it is familiar to you.  My mother used to get sick a lot.  She was a somatizer, and so is he.  I’m not.  So, he’s in bed and once again I’m having to be Florence Nightingale.  I’m so isick of being married to a selfish baby.  God.

Another thing my mother said about my fathers, was that neither of them ever helped her once when she was in pain with her back, or  the cramps.  Well?  It’s been the same for me.  Nadasville.

What I do know from my training to be a therapist is that the generation of babies who are born during wartime (as he was in London) have pre-verbal wounds like fissures.  Hence the infantile Self.  It will need a lifetime of pampering.  And it will expect that.  So, anyway, yesterday or the day before as I had to get the wheelchair out to the car at the clinic and he said “I was born for this.”

A red flag went up for me.

A big one.

And it made me think of my mother.  And how she also said, “It’s yes or no.”

Contrast is everything in life.  It really is.