SeventyFive Saviors

seventy five year celebration last night

and it was poignant and telling and revealing

i new marjorie was nervous upon reaching sixty nine as that was the age her mother, my grandmother, mama maria passed. but i heard she was nervous upon hitting seventy as it was called time up on the bible.

and i write that and realize i am stuck in a twilight zone among people who say one thing but the reality is another and far deeper. i was just recalled to how blithely and regularly marjorie will talk about dying and how it is her time for a good ten years now. and we all thought it absurd, i in particular, for she is a sterling aged woman. in shape. she walks every morning, gardens regularly, several times a week most times and is the primary caregiver to her two teen aged grandaughters, thirteen and eleven, soon to be a year older in a matter of weeks. but only to realize while she casually called death she was actually nervous if not scared? wow

but it reminds me as the day before her birthday , she and i were in conversation, and she shared with me that "me and your mom were close but we really did not know each other's intimates; we did not share a lot, and the one time i bared my soul to her was to tell her she was not standing up for family, and their nephew, my cousin, kurtis, when my father refused him from eating in our house...i was hearing for the first time. now that was a bomb revelation where i shared no response. not to hear that she has turned and done the same thing she complained to my mother about. or to hear of the dynamic with my father. i just focused on the internal shock i felt , like a clock stopping, to hear as close as they have always pretended, they really were not. it floored me. and it is not just these two, it is the lot of the five siblings in family. leroy, pat, marjorie, marina and mona, and the additional two outside the family: sylvia and carlton. shock of all shocks. 

 

 

 

 

 

but i am the one in therapy. this is a culture of lies, pretense. and those who bear and betray the truth are the ones who will be excoriated. but i dont want to go off track, which I already did. I was really wanting to write none of that stuff but something else.

I was not posting any of these pics but they are so beautiful. our home, the way we do things mostly, even though last night was a comedy of errors and poor behaviors. the flowers were magnificent, huge and fragrant.

but i wake up this morning with a revelation.

 

if it were not for marjorie , this seventy five year old woman, those two young girls would have seen trouble. they would have been functionally abandoned and neglected. i am given pause to admit that. from the time they left the family house at maya age three, they were dumped at various caregivers, nannies and babysitters, and the people these were, and the constant change there started to be early behavioral problems. it is why marjorie stepped in to correct it. to avoid the path that was being mapped. there have been times when maya will remember and state or refer to how things were off back then at the babysitters. i am seriously touched by that cause you see up close and personal what a child or children would have been left to if it werent for one person. one solitary person. and you see the different expeerience another child is having, kaylah, under the abandonment of her mother, and the checked out into catatonia, her grandmother inez. where she is raging and exploding on her mother. from going to a placid quiet, reflective child. with the leaving of her sister to jamaica, for medical school and being left alone most times with that grandmother in a scary big house, the child as started to explode and unravel her mother;s tales.

what is the story of these two young mothers? both vanessa and michelle are what would be called big time middle management professionals. yet. their home life and children are in a mess and suffering.

but i am the black sheep. cause i have no work.

and no one seems to see these balances

 

 but give praise for functional relevant working elders who keep children on clear paths of safety, for god knows what would have been the story otherwise. sigh