Does Life Give or Take?

Life changes its rhythm as we age. In youth, it feels like everything is about gaining — energy, possibilities, people. Later, it can feel like life is taking things away: parents, certainty, physical ease, the illusion that time is endless. But sometimes what feels like loss is actually life clearing space. Making room. Slowing the pace so I can finally hear myself think.

I'm at the age where life begins taking things away instead of giving them or earning them. Instead I now have some aches and pains as I renovate the house, slower days and just my sister and aunt for family. Yet has life really taken anything, or is it just changing things so that I can slow down and enjoy the hard work I've put into my life?

A retirement that I thought would never happen has been a gift that I didn't see. I am more than comfortable and luckily I had that before my mom passed leaving my sister and I what was left of her estate. That is a breath of fresh air. We are able to afford to do things we weren't able to do while working. Trips that would take quite some time and the ability to come and go as we please, we can now think about and not just as dreams.

My father passed away five years ago, and while I do miss him (although that gets less each day) I do not mourn him. That sounds disgusting and coldhearted, but when you live how we lived, it is not a bad thing to admit, it is honest. My mother passed away this year, leaving my sister and I with a house that feels sad but is learning to live again as we make paint and repair. It is learning to breathe and so am I.

I was luckier than most. I have travelled extensively putting a foot on every continent of the world except Antarctica and south America. My sister and I plan to travel Canada extensively and perhaps travel to Scotland, Ireland, and the Scandinavian countries. I have worked with people I will never forget unless dementia claims me. Each of them have come into my life and taut me something, now if I can only remember those lessons, or perhaps they have all led to this moment in my life when I can lean back and think and reminisce.

Looking back, my life wasn’t bad, but it was shaped by a father who controlled the emotional weather of our home. His moods dictated my sense of safety. His anger dictated my silence. His need to feel important dictated the size I was allowed to be. Me, my mother, and my sister learned to shrink ourselves to survive. That isn’t weakness. It is adaptation and survival. That’s what you do when people around us cannot regulate themselves.

People who comment on YouTube stories or stories on Facebook, (where I hang out, they're probably others), ask how can you not tell when someone is a narcissist? That they would leave. As if they are omnipotent in their foresight. Why don't people leave? That's easy, because I grew up with it from the day I was born. And Mom, innocent of the world, fresh off the farm in Lacombe, had no idea. We lived with it. We accepted it because we didn't know any different. We weren't stupid and we certainly didn't have the tools people now a days have to see what we now see. Besides at that time in the late 1960's to the 1980's you put up, shut up, and live up or down as the case may be. Woman's lib was just starting in those days and it had a long way to go.

We lived with father's mood swings that could be happy at the beginning of a sentence and shouting red faced angry by the end of it. We walked on eggshells always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even now, five years after his death, my sister and I are discovering just how small the three of us, my mom, sister and myself, made ourselves in order to avoid the temper flares.

Mom became adept at manipulating dad by speaking to him before they went to sleep but even that backfired when she said no one night and he moved to the second bedroom. She never forgave him for that.

Mom did what she could with the tools she had. She was young, unprepared, and carrying the weight of a sick newborn in a time when medical bills could break a person. She stayed because she didn’t believe she could survive alone. That wasn’t a judgment — it was a confession of her own fear. One time, not long ago, I asked her why she didn't leave him before my sister was born. She could have put me up for adoption and I wouldn't have known the difference. It was a cruel thing to ask, but I wanted to know what we had done that was so bad we had to live with someone like him. She said because she couldn't have made it by herself with me. I was sick and had life saving operation when I was a day old. At a time when no health care existed this was a serious issue. A thousand dollar bill is nothing to scoff at. But it seemed that with dad staying he made us feel we owed him more than our love and our future. She asked me why I asked, and I told her then she wouldn't have had to live the way she did for our sake, she could have found someone that would have been more considerate and less temper mental. My dad loved her, but it came with a price tag.

We haven't mourned my mother, or my father. After so many years of hiding how we feel so that my father could feel important we have shut down to the point that we are so stoic you would think we were stone. We should feel guilty we haven't mourned but I personally don't. As a matter of fact we barely speak about dad anymore. It's as if once we realized what he did we don't have to deal with it anymore. We need to recognize what happened to us and use it to learn and grow. It's not forgetting it's letting go. My sister was closer with my mom than I, being in the hospital for a month after birth has probably made me more hard than I should be. That and the fact I was teased for having eczema during elementary school. So I learned to not be open, and I became even smaller. But it is also what made me strong enough to withstand fifty-eight years of waiting and tip toeing. That too sounds awful, and will probably wring the ears of those who read this. But it is my life and I am the one who has to survive it and bear the consequences in the next phase or after that.

We are realizing that emotional numbness doesn't go away in a few days or years. It is a scar that will always be there, but it is also healing and grows smaller as time moves on and we talk about how we feel about our parents.

My father was not a bad man, he provided for us, clothes, food, a place to live. But in the important stuff, emotions and self esteem he was condescending, berating and unforgiving, even cruel at times. the person who said "sticks and stones may break my bones but name will never hurt me" should be shot. Because names do hurt, and the emotional pain carries on, just like the x-rays show past bone damage. There was a time when I was twelve that it looked like my parents would separate and my dad asked both my sister and I who we would live with. Without equivocation we said mother, because then we wouldn't have to live with him. Even then we must have seen something. Without doubt he would have been a dead beat dad, using his money to hold us hostage and keep that control.

I remember dad telling us about his life as he grew up in Lethbridge with his two younger brothers. The other five were girls older. My Aunt Shirley, the sister dad loved the most, would tell him how good it was to live at home when Grandpa was alive. Dad only remembered sitting in the middle o the street starving while Grandma tried to feed three growing boys on twenty-five dollars a month and a family, living on a farm in Saskatchewan, punished her for marrying the farm hand and never sent for help. I remember at Grandma's funeral how an older brother told us that he was sorry she was gone and how he loved her, and I countered that if he really loved her he would have sent food to feed my father and two uncles. He would not have sent two snooty aunts to visit my Grandmother while they were dressed to the nines and Grandma was in an old dress covered by an apron, baking the best bread in the world. Nor would he have "treated" her to a trip to Hawaii and made her pay when she couldn't afford it.

These are all reasons for why dad was the way he was, but not excuses. By the time these stories occurred Grandpa had left Grandma and was living with another family. Still, he had no foresight like we do now and he did the best he could, because that is what Grandpa taught him, while he compared dad's family to another family Grandpa liked more. Not sure if they were his children, who knows. And it's not like Grandma was innocent, she liked to stir the pot with the best witches out there.

The phrase, “Double, double toil and trouble, Fire burn and cauldron bubble" comes to mind with how she pitted one family member against the other. She did her best to include my sister an i in her machinations, thank god mom was there and didn't let us get involved. Still it made me mad when she congratulated a distant cousin of mine, while my dad's money also helped her buy groceries or we took her to appointments when we learned how to drive. So under those conditions dad's control issues were natural and instinctive. I just wish he had understood that how he treated us was the same way Grandpa treated him.

As it was, when we grew older there was no thought of dating, and his jealousy was something we dealt with too. There were a lots of things he didn't know about us, that we never told him. Mother kept those secrets and I don't feel bad that he didn't. The fact that he read my diary and then yelled at me for my feelings tells me he would have held those secrets over me for whatever payment he deemed fit and ultimately never reaching the payment goal ever.

He was a man who set the bar and then changed it whenever he wished. It was like putting a carrot in front of a horse and making him walk for miles without letting them have it. And I just kept reaching for it. All the while feeling like an idiot for falling for it time and again. Now I don't have to.

What our life did mean, at least to him, was that as long as my sister and I lived in Calgary we didn't need or want a husband, we had him. For fourteen years I lived and worked in Rochester, Minnesota. I got married and then left my husband shortly after when I realized he was just as absent as my father but in a different way. When I got married my sister asked him what would happen if she got married and she told me "Why do you need a husband you have me?" What our life did mean, at least to him, was that as long as my sister and I lived in Calgary we didn't need or want a husband, we had him. He was serious about that.

A cousin of mine once said that she wished she lived in our house and I said you have no idea what you are asking. I told her the way her mother treated her is the exact same way my father treats us, why do you think they both get along so well. She has never asked again. And I have since found out my aunt used to beat her oldest son.

The funny thing about life is the fact that it seems like it is taking things away from me but in one way it has given me an insight I didn't have before. I can see what my father did to us and I don't have to make myself small anymore, and my sister and I are both learning that. I can actually say one thing I have never admitted to myself since I turned thirty in the Republic of Yemen, I am beginning to like myself, faults and all. Life is also giving me something I never had before: perspective, autonomy, and the ability to like myself without apology. I'm not becoming hard. I'm becoming whole.

Perhaps through all of this we've gotten used to life taking things away, because we never expected it to give us anything. At the age of sixty-four, I am adulting. It is scary, exciting, daunting and thrilling, all at the same time. And perhaps that is the best and greatest thing life and age can give you.

I am on a path of discovery that I haven't been on before and looking forward to it.