Unpacking and Repacking

So peculiar.

It's after 11pm. In twelve hours, I am on a train to Portland, OR, to meet an aunt and an uncle and a cousin I have never met before.

I know I shouldn't really know how to feel, or try to imagine what someone else might be feeling and then be that. No, I should be authentic, and feel what it is I am feeling. Perhaps label it, or at least describe it in a gentle and objective tone. Truth is, I'm not sure what I am feeling right now. What I do know is that I've spent the day cleaning up for the girl who's coming over to watch the fuzzies. My house is practically clean, which is just shy of a miracle. My house is practically clean, and I have yet to pack a single thing. I just spent two hours in the bathtub, watching reruns of "The L Word". Being absorbed in someone's else's drama for a while.

This is the first Christmas I didn't go visit the family I already know. I recognized clearly in September what an emotional battleground it is for me to be with them. My defenses are always up, and I put up with some amount of degradation and obnoxiousness pretty regularly. I just wasn't up for it twice in one year. My mom understood, or at least took it amazingly well. I admit, I was shocked. But so, so, so grateful for her grace.

My choice to stay clear of the Schulers this year has now allowed me to accept an invite from the Devaney's. Well, from Bobby Devaney. He's my cousin, his mom is twin siblings with my biological father. I've met my biological father three times, for a grand total of two weeks. I haven't heard from him since the trip to Tahoe. The family reunion where I met Bobby. That was nine years ago. I was glad to meet Bobby then, and was even more glad to have kept in loose contact for almost a decade. A few weeks ago, he dropped me a line to say he was coming in town, and did I want to meet up? Of course I did, and while hanging out at his friend's graduation party, I talked him into letting me come visit him in the Las Vegas area. That's when he invited me down to Portland to meet the fam. Aunt Nancy and Uncle Robert (or Bob? who knows but me?) and my cousin ... damn I don't remember her name. She's got kids, though, two daughters I think. I don't know their names either.

So what I feel right now is some sadness, some grief. My mom and I were talking on Christmas about this trip and she said that it had been too long already. Meaning I guess that I should have met these people a long time ago, that I should have already developed relationships with this invisible family I've been toting around with me my whole life. A giant trunk full of mysterious heritage and genetics and traditions and infamous recipes and familial traits and stories ... there's a part of me that mourns the fact that I have been carting all of this around without having opened it yet. And I guess I have started opening it, back when I was fourteen and I asked my mom to help me find an address for my biological father, so that I could write him a letter.

But I think I'm also sad because it is this mystery that has defined me for so long, and, after tomorrow, that mystery is gone. More or less. It will no longer be Cecily, abandoned by her biological father. It will be Cecily, reunited with the other half of her birth family. In some way, my life as I know it will be over. It may still be some amazing story to outsiders, but it will mean something different because the ending will be different. It will no longer have that lusty sense of imagined neverhood... "perhaps I'll meet them....someday..." Instead, there will be a date and some time and descriptions and characteristics and actions and feelings. Very very very palpably real things.

I'm nervous they won't like me. More nervous that I won't like them. I'm getting sick of having family that I don't like. I've worked really really hard to like the family I know, with some moderate success. It's been some intense internal battles, and I have grown in incredible ways from having the family I have. But GOD, it's been a lot of work. And now...there is more family to meet. I guess I don't HAVE to keep in touch with them after this week. I mean, if we just really don't click, then we'll have that date and that time and those descriptions and characteristics and actions and feelings...and really we could just go on with our lives like nothing happened. It would be more like I was a boarder for a week, just passing through. There's no obligation to remember birthdays or to call or to track each other's lives. Because we've spent my whole life apart, they didn't even know I existed until a few years ago, so there's not like....god I don't know what this is like. I used to think that everyone's life is a bit fucked up and random like this, but I haven't seen this too often. There isn't a preforged path to read up on before I get on that train tomorrow. This is just me and my heart being brave and curious and ever so fucking hopeful that life is okay and that family is safe and loving and that I mean something to somebody. This is me feeling really frightened and awkward.

A few weeks ago, he dropped me a line to say he was coming in town, and did I want to meet up?

I have written this before. I have written this in a journal nearly a decade ago, when my biological father first called me on the phone. I wasn't home, and he left a message. I remember going numb. Stumbling into my bedroom and staring out at the pine tree outside the window of my Tallahassee apartment. I remember dropping back onto the bed, struggling to breathe. My heart was clutched with something warm and intense. It knew. It knew that This. Was. Huge. Huge and ultimately healing. It was excited to grow, regardless of whether it was into or past a relationship with this man, it was excited to grow out of the festering shithole of worthlessness it had been moping around in for 19 years. This man cared about me enough to pick up the phone and arrange a meeting. My God, did that just mean the entire world to me. I can't explain this incredible feeling of acceptance, of belonging, of beleiving, even for a second, that you're worth something to someone who is really important to you for reasons you can't explain and shouldn't have to.

I don't know what happened. I guess we just didn't click. I haven't heard from him in nine years.

But now there's Bobby. And Aunt Nancy. And Uncle Bob. And a girl cousin with her girl kids. And they are inherently different than my biological father and from each other. And I am willing to have no expectations of them. And I am willing to have this part of my life, the invisible family part with the victimology attached to it, die and fall away. I am willing to replace it with some memories of joy and surprise. I am willing to be whole, all on my own.

Ok. Now I am willing to pack for this adventure.