last day with the fam

These past weeks and months have been difficult to write. These past days with my family are also difficult to put down. Some events and feelings have the ability to short circuit language and metaphor for me. I can describe an occurrence but lack the skill or objectivity to convey what it means for me.  

Mom and dad and I visited Lee in St. George. She's doing surprisingly well: working two jobs, living in her own apartment, running, and taking yoga several times each week. We went for several decent jogs, a yoga class, and a hike up Snow Canyon. We went to a movie, and celebrated her birthday and Thanksgiving early. In the evenings, mom and dad showed us the digitized 8mm films they'd made of my infancy and early childhood. It was a peculiar sensation for me, but particularly difficult for Lee who didn't have particularly functional nor protective parents when she needed them. 

So it was no surprise that she talked a lot about the way I stepped in and raised her. She still thinks of me as her mother. I suppose that I was her mother in nearly every way that counted when she was young. And now, I think I love her more than I love most people. I'm glad she's off the drugs and doing alright. 

Dad needed time to go hiking and biking with me. Which was fine, since I like to do these things and I like him. We hiked up Rattlesnake Ridge, and he found a "short-cut" down the mountain. Two days later, we took J's boys up Big Cottonwood canyon for a hike, too. 

I spent a lot of time with the boys on this visit: reading stories, rough-housing, playing make-believe, and tucking into bed. In the evenings, after a tuck-in, I stayed up with J and we chatted. 

I took Mom shopping, and we bought a bicycle trainer, to get her healthy. 

I've taken things a day at a time. And today was my last day. I'll miss them. 

Bicycle ride with dad

Dad took the day off of work because I was in town and he wanted to spend time with me.
"I feel like my best friend just came into town," Dad told me when he collected me at the airport last night. Me too.

I let him pick the day's activities. If he had his preference, it would have been hiking and biking all day long, but he had a flight of his own to catch at 1700 so there was a cap on the fun.

It's really freezing here. From what I hear, it's freezing all over CONUS. But this doesn't stop dad from wanting to ride. So we bundled up, and let the various exposed bits freeze off in little chunks during the two hours riding trails in the biting wind. We rode completely shit bikes with crummy helmets and wore enormous coats dad bought second-hand from Deseret Industries two decades ago. Dad rides this crappy bicycle every day for his PT because his knees won't let him run anymore. But he loves it. I will absolutely not tell him that his bike is crap because he looks at it fondly as he puts air in the tires and says, "you know, this has been a really good bike."

One of the things I like about dad is that he's game for anything. Anything. Ask him to Zip-line from the Eiffel Tower or hike in the Himalayas and the answer is yes. Doesn't matter if he's never done it before or even trained for it. Doesn't matter if he may not have the right gear. No problem. We'll figure it out. When I was younger, this embarrassed me because the lack of appropriate gear felt like amateur-hour and hick-ville. Rich and attractive people always were suited up to look like some magazine version of an expert climber or hiker while we had mismatched pieces assembled from the local second-hand shop. In college, I dated the son of the CFO of a major corporation and was mortified when he took me skiing - because his ski gear was perfect and olympic-grade and matched while absolutely nothing I brought looked like it had ever belonged to the same decade, let alone the same closet. But it's always been about the adventure for dad - never about the appearance. He skis because he loves to soar down the slopes, yodeling as he goes, not because he gives two shakes about what anyone else thinks about it.

For the past few years, my parent's church "calling" has been to hold religious meetings in the mental health unit in the nearby women's prison. This calling completed three weeks ago and its driving dad crazy because nobody else has been selected to fill the role. He worries about the women he's been ministering to. He talks about them, about their issues and their families and their sorrows. He worries that they will think nobody loves them since they've been left alone for three weeks. It doesn't occur to him to feel pleased that his new church "calling" is as the Elder's Quorum President - one of the biggest and most important positions in a Mormon congregation. If he was looking for accolades, he would stop thinking about those mentally ill women in the prison and get to work being an important person.

Dad had just arrived in Italy in July 2013 when the shit MIVD threw at me actually stuck and I lost my job. I was in shock, horrified, and saddened to lose my programs and work. It was also embarrassing to know that my father, who had come to witness my success and to learn about the work I'd accomplished, had to see this awful destruction instead. But, true to form, he didn't give a shit what it looked like to anyone on the outside. He was proud of me because I maintained my integrity. In fact, he's so proud of me for the way I stood up for the truth, he gets choked up when he talks about it. Fucking amazing.

As I get older and see the world for all its games and arbitrary rules, I realize now that it was probably the best preparation to have dad as my example. If people are trying to use shame and innuendo and social pressure to get you to do what they want, it helps to be raised by a man who doesn't give a shit about these things, and who plunked his 11-year-old daughter on a beat-up snowmobile and said, "this is the throttle. Turn this when you want to go faster. This is the brake. Pull this when you want to stop. Follow me."

Today, I was totally happy to get on that crap bike and wear that beat-up coat and mismatched helmet and gloves today and follow dad up the mountain.

surrogate

I offered to be a surrogate for S. I've thought about this for some time. I may not have the opportunity to be a mother myself, but I can give her and her husband the chance.