We Don't Have The Luxury Of Old Resentments Anymore
Our best chance of survival is in community
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The Village
It was easier to find a playmates in grade school, grown-assed folks like us need to make an effort. I’ve never had much family, or much to do with the family I had. In my 20s and 30s, my brain perfected an excellent Greta Garbo “I want to be alone.” I thought I was the Lone Ranger. Addicts and alcoholics were my playgroup. Still true, but now all my drunkies and junkies are in recovery. I joined a pottery studio and started Krav Maga training. Add that to my community of writers, many of whom are here, and it keeps the panicked feeling of defeat at bay. We have each other. Together we can. Sí se puede.
Family
My father’s family tree has a sprinkling of incest, unknown parentage and a few uncles and cousins who went MIA as Hitler took Poland.
The oldest living relative on that side, my father’s cousin Stan, is 95 years old and despite holidays, weddings and a few adult cousin gatherings, we’d never had an actual conversation.
I’d held a grudge against a few branches of that family tree. They went to the Ivies and became surgeons, judges, or C-Suite financiers, bankers and network media leaders. They had money, lived in grand houses in Long Island’s famed Five Towns—with its private schools, exclusive waterfront communities, in a word: affluence. We, on the other hand, well, my grandmother counted pennies in the Bronx. I went to community college, courtesy of TAP and Pell grants. My father’d occasionally resorted to sleeping in cars while in art school. We lived in a Levitt house bought at a foreclosure sale. In a word: we were lower working class.
My resentments were mostly inherited envy and shame. My grandmother had put her siblings and their progeny on a pedestal. My parents were ashamed they lacked higher education and financial success. My father—who rarely drank—needed a couple of strong ones to make it through a family wedding where I wore an inappropriate, clingy floor-length gown cut down to there, and trailed a green feathered boa on the floor behind me. For an afternoon wedding. We each had our armor.
I don’t know why my father resented his extended family, or even if he actually did. We’d never discussed it. I can only guess and that would be a tome on the cruelty of his father, humiliation, envy and scapegoating1.
Like generational trauma, I’d inherited generational grudges, envy, judgements and resentments.
I was nervous about meeting with Stan, to have a our first actual conversation. Now an old man with a walker, he’s still sharp. I got a big smile, an exuberant Hello! then, “You know I have a problem with your father.”
My father’s been dead since 2000, twenty-five years next month.
Stan told me “the birthday party story.” The whole family was there to celebrate Stan’s birthday—and then my father pantsed him—pulled Stanley’s pants down in front of everyone, and laughed at him. Stan was 7 years old, my father would’ve been around nine.
Stanley, a well-to-do, well-respected, prominent and retired medical specialist with four children and a ridiculous number of grandchildren was upset about something that had happened 88 years ago. At the actions of a 9-year-old boy. Angry at the man that boy became, a man who’d been dead for twenty-five years.
Later, alone with Stan’s wife, she said, “Yeah, he can’t let go of that incident.” Later still, his son agreed, “Oh yeah, that birthday party thing.” Not only had he been holding a grudge, it’d become family legend. Part of him was stuck there, standing in his underpants at his 7th birthday party.
And then, the anger I’ve been holding on to for fifty-five years bubbled up in my brain. I’ve written about it. My hurt and humiliation was part of my story, my legend. I’d let pubescent pain keep me from making close friends, or from having more than one friend at a time. I said it was why trusting was hard. I’d let it take some of the blame for the drugs, drinking and promiscuity.
I was still stuck in 13.
Childhood hurts burrow down deep, covering themselves with years of living and memories until we forget the why behind the angry. Forget why we are the way we are.
When you think of a pearl, you’re not thinking of the irritant at its core, the pain necessary to spark a mollusk’s natural defense, the process of secreting and layering nacre month after month. That’s how pearls are made. It starts with an irritant. With dirt. And pain.
We’re not so different. Layer after layer covering the pains and fears we hide until all the world sees is our shiny outsides.
Anger, resentment, humiliation— the dirt and debris—they’re hard to let go of, you’d have to smash through the layers built over them. Anger is like fuel. It can motivate and move me, or be the incendiary device that’ll have me standing in the flames, burn me to the ground.
Holding on to anger and resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
Because caregiving can be just as isolating as anger, because I’m still working my way through the layers of generational resentments and secrets, because the world is in flames with one country after another playing Simon Says Take A Giant Step to the Right, because the current administration wants us confused, angry, unfocused, unsure who the enemy is, because my brain hurts from all of it—I’ve been actively seeking my village, my playgroup, my people.
Expulsion
When an animal is hurt—by a thorn or a shard of glass, for example—its immune system recognizes the threat, creates inflammation and an abscess around it until the thorn is gradually pushed to the surface and expelled.
Encapsulation
But, oysters and humans are designed differently. We wall off the offending irritant with scar tissue and rationalization and keep moving on. We become pearls.
Just as Stan is still carrying the pain of his seven-year-old birthday party, part of me is stuck in the hallway of my junior high school, alone.
Originally trepidatious, I left what’d turned into a delightful visit with no more information about the missing cousin or the unknown parentage. Instead, I’d learned more about the family I still have. And about myself. I left knowing I don’t want to be a 95-year-old angry pearl, and that means expelling rather than encapsulating my pain. If not the physical note I received at age 13, at the very least, I’m asking to let go of the hurt and anger I used to build a wall to keep you at what feels like a safe distance—
but distance is no longer safe.
The world is on fire. The solution is connection not isolation. “When people are more socially connected, they have increased survival rates.” That’s not me talking, that’s doctor of neuroscience, Julianne Holt-Lunstad. I’m not now, nor have I ever really been the Lone Ranger. I have my drunkies and junkies, my potters, my fighters, my writers and my family and we have each other.
We are the village.
Sí se puede.
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Example: Imagine you want a parent’s love, but get treated poorly, while all the love and praise goes to another sibling. It’s safer to hate and reject the well-loved sibling than the withholding parent. In my home the role of the well-loved sibling was played by my mother. In my father’s home, it was anyone who wasn’t him.
I love this entry. I knew you were my longlost sister/cousin. Change a few details and it's the same family and the same dress to the afternoon wedding, except mine was purple with glitter. At an upper east synagogue with a 3 piece chamber group when the bride walked down the aisle. My father swept floors in burlesque houses to put himself through law school, although his career was derailed by McCarthyism and depression. Enough about me. It's a wonderful piece.
I feel like we are witnessing the path of your healing in real time. Glad you realize you are a pearl. Diamonds only become diamonds after being crushed with extreme pressure and heat. You're a diamond too.