Today on Westwordly: A lesson on process! Every Monday night (or Thursday, as the case was this week) I find myself at a loss for what to write about. I think, “there’s nothing terribly important on my mind at the moment”. So I just start writing about what I’ve been doing in a very basic physical sense. I spew out trivia about where I’ve been and how my time has been spent. Sometimes I throw in a fun anecdote from the past few days. And eventually, if I do that for long enough (and usually it doesn’t really take long at all) I accidentally write something that actually moves me. On Tuesday at about 12:15am, I started like this:
I’m not feeling terribly polarized this week. These are my reports:
-I’ve started training at Flemings, which is a vast improvement over the Chart House. The money, commute, and environment will all be a step up (or two). Not to mention working with Carlos. Not too shabby at all.
-It’s time to start tying up the loose ends I created by moving. I realized yesterday that my bank didn’t have my new address. Whoops. My car is also an enigma as far as the government is concerned. Where is it?? They don’t know.
-I got reconnected with my uncle Bob this week. He’s an amateur contrabassoonist who lives in Japan. He also says he knows a lot of music people out here, so maybe something will come of it… in any case, it’s cool to have a dialogue open with him.
With that last tidbit, it came to me. My excitement over reconnecting with my uncle is a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. And so, just like that, this week’s entry will now be on the subject of family.
With all due respect and love to the PHW family – Christian, Los, Steve, and Jordan get me through every day and are the best reason I’m 3000 miles from home – we’ll be discussing biological family today. My adopted family are so important to me because of how little “real” family I have. My nuclear family, for as long as I can remember, has consisted of me and my mother and nobody else. I have never had a relationship with my father, and subsequently his entire side of what would have been my extended family became ineligible from the outset. On my mother’s side, my grandmother Ruth died when I was two years old. From all accounts, she was the glue that tied the Weingarts (my mother’s maiden name) together. With her out of the picture, the tacit civility that keeps hostilities at bay in so many families evaporated, and relationships were strained in all directions. Without going into too much detail, suffice to say that I have always understood to some degree that my mother does not enjoy a particularly close relationship with her father or either of her brothers. Be it ideological differences or leftover tension from ancient quarrels, my clan simply does not get along.
As a juvenile member of a rather splintered family, a number of things happened for me. The first was that I enjoyed a relative degree of naivete during my youth, and didn’t really notice any hostility or unusual fragmentation. It was the only family I had ever known, so I thought of it as normal. As I got older, I gradually came to understand the different dynamics and relationships between the various members, but could not for the life of me tell whether they were situations developing in the present, or whether they had always existed and I was simply becoming more aware of them. My time line on how things happened is still very fuzzy, as some dates are “this happened” and others are “Walker realized this happened”. Somehow, I wound up a spectator in the dealings of my family rather than a participant. The second effect that I have become more aware of in retrospect is that because of my youth and the limited and trivial interaction I had with the adult members of my family, I got filed in the same box as my mother. When one encounters an unknown quantity, one tends to associate it with a known quantity of similar properties and assume it bears at least a rudimentary resemblance. For my family, by a reasonable process of assumption, I became a bite-sized extension of my mom. I was named the involuntary heir to her baggage, gripes, ideological differences, and relationships. I also inherited the empty space where relationships ought have been, which are the bread and butter of the Weingart family.
Because we developed childhood bonds, I know my four cousins best. We speak rarely, have little in common, but know each other passingly well and enjoy a mutual love “because we’re family”. Because he’s my cousins’ father, I would say my uncle Phil falls next in the familiarity power rankings. Except that three years ago uncle Phil up and skipped town, re-married, and no longer speaks to his family. So his stock is dropping. I saw Grampa Ed last year at my cousin’s wedding, and upon seeing him realized it had been roughly a decade since our previous encounter. But he had uncle Bob beat by about two years, during which time (10 + 2 years) the latter had gotten his TEFL certificate and moved to Japan, moved back with his new Japanese wife, gotten a divorce and a restraining order, moved back to Japan, moved to New Zealand, then China, and then once more to Japan (where he remains) but gave up on TEFL and instead spent his life savings on a bassoon. I think.
Truth be told, I’m not sure I know a damn thing about any of these people. I’m near-positive they don’t know anything about me. If somebody who last saw me when I was 14 tried to describe me, how could they possibly dream of doing so with any kind of authority? I have to assume my knowledge of my family members is comparable. Certainly, if they still think of me as an extension of my mother, they’re well off the mark. The more time I spend away from home, building my own life, being, seeing, and doing the things I want, the more I realize how fundamentally different I am from my mom. I think “cut from a different cloth” is the expression we’re supposed to use here. For me to have the same relationship with anybody that my mother has is completely outrageous.
So now that I have a little physical and temporal separation from mom, I can consider the possibility of having independent adult relationships with the various members of my family. This prospect intrigues me. I’m very curious about everything that went down with uncle Phil, for better of for worse. Uncle Bob seems like a person who, if I met him at a cocktail party through a friend of a friend and he had no previous relation to me, I would like to strike up a conversation and perhaps an eventual friendship with. (side note: try throwing your existing friends and family into that scenario. it’s an enlightening exercise. would you stay and talk for a while, or make a polite excuse and move on?) My cousins are wonderful people who, absent our differences on the subject of religion (granted, a sizable rift) I love seeing. I was excited to hear from uncle Bob because that relationship is now a real possibility, one that I am eager to explore.
On the nuclear front, for the first time in my life I miss my mom. When I was a kid I was always eager to go off to camp or sleep over at a friend’s house. When I went to college I was close enough to visit at will (though I took seldom took advantage) and busy enough that I rarely noticed the large intervals between visits. Now that I’m really and truly far away and a little bit more settled into myself, I find myself wishing I had made the effort when it was easy. I’m the only member of the PHW crew who hasn’t had a family member visit at least once. I’ve only been here a little while, but I frankly don’t anticipate my mom making the trip. My mom has had some major upheavals in her life since I left for college, and I don’t want to find myself in a situation years down the road where I feel like I don’t know my own mother. For all we’re very different people and don’t get along all that well in large doses, I love her and hope it’s not too long before I get to make a trip home (wherever that is).
I think my verbosity has run its course. The thought doesn’t feel complete, but this is a blog, not War and Peace. Plus I’m tired. So maybe I’ll pick it up next week, or maybe I won’t. Thanks for bearing with me, if you did.
East to West: A Chronicle 