Which Came First – the Family or the Soul?

1.10.07, North Hollywood, CA

So long ago – when I was 16 or 18 – ok, not that long ago - I was struggling with my father. Daily. Getting good grades, going to church, popular at school, in a lot of clubs, getting main roles in the school plays, running cross country, but just growing up. That’s all. It’s not much more than that.

But Dad wasn’t handling it well. I could leave the iron on, and he would freeze me out for being his irresponsible daughter for weeks. I could come in 3 minutes later than my 11pm curfew after a night of ice cream cones with friends after a Homecoming Game, and he would tell me he doesn’t love me because God doesn’t love me. If I begged to go spend the night at a not-so-pretty friend’s house, his concern was when I was coming home and doing my Saturday chores of cleaning and waxing all the kitchen cabinets. But when the pretty girl called and asked me out to a play at the local community theatre, he could care less about curfews or the when, the where and the what.

It’s a wonder my dad didn’t just make me angry AND a lesbian. It’s funny that all I got was angry from Surviving Dad. Or some other uncomfortable adjective other than funny.

Anyhoo, I’m bloggingly off-topic …

There was a family friend that stepped in for my dead mom and my remaining OCD father and she saved me. I attribute any success and/or sanity that I have had as a person to a.) the times I was left alone in the silent aftermath of mom’s cancer, and b.) Ms. Plunk.

Ms. Plunk was key in confirming that my dad was crazy. All the times I spent in her car detailing the irrational demands he placed on me as the only one left standing at 3172 Estes, she recanted with her own Plunkian Edits to Survival as a Dowda outside Dowda rule.

It doesn’t take years of therapy for a child with loss to clearly put out to the world how irrevocably damaged their outlook is. The kids left fatherless/motherless after 9/11, and even teenagers with those externally less traumatic losses related to the bad lungs and the complicated health issues that the Ground Zero cleanup workers incurred – kids left with empty chairs at the dinner tables, depressed surviving parents behind closed doors, and no good excuses as their attention waxes and wanes during biology class.

I was among the lucky. I had someone pick me out to foster, someone who needed to mother something while her teenage kid went to college. Due to timing, geography and a genetic code of disease, Ms. Plunk came and put into my head words that have whispered to me over the years, infuriated my attempts to secure a man in my life and given me the reprieve of a lost girl playing with an inferior deck of cards.

It’s what really motivating this move to Brooklyn.

Ms. Plunk said to me one night – she said – after I confessed to her a disturbing dream that I had of my dad’s treating me like a wife, expecting me to sleep in his bed, expecting me to have sex with him. Just a dream, a metaphor of the daily demands placed on my 11-18 year old self, but Ms. Plunk heard beyond the trauma of my emotions shaking out the chaos of mixed signals of a limping family unit. She said to me, words that curse and bless me:

“Don’t worry – you hear me? You just go and make a family for yourself.”

Now for any other motherless daughter in any other generation and any other geography, this may have resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. And it did. And then it didn’t. But mostly, it’s resulted in an unwanted loneliness and a compulsion to seek a safety at home that I’ve formulaically laid out and a family that I’ve only imagined.

“Don’t worry – you hear me? You just go and make a family for yourself.”

So… it’s not about home at all - home is where I live. Home was Memphis, TN. Home is a structure and a place where I can fit some soft pillows in the corner of a worn couch, throw together some good food on a lousy tableclothed table, and invite folks over to talk about the day, the government, the mundane, my hair. Home is a dream state that’s always in flux. And for this washing machine life, Home will be Brooklyn.

But is Brooklyn about family? Is it about soul?

I’ll start with a soul and a mortgage, and maybe the family will come after? Or maybe family will just happen to me.