Writing my own stories

My brother and I grew up with one foot out the door. It's not surprising, with our home life being what it was, that we were more than happy to play sports (all that practice time!) and get after-school jobs as soon as we could drive; in high school we took summer school classes and got summer jobs as soon as we were old enough. My brother took to the golf course. I let my bicycle take me miles from home. Home was where we did homework up in our rooms, ate dinner, and slept. We didn't have Family Game Night or bed-time routines or mother-daughter time. We weren't that kind of family. We were a family my default, we were a family because my parents got married- and believe me, the whys behind that are legion - and had children. I think they had children because that was what one did when one got married. I don't think they gave it a lot of thought; I don't think they even considered the possiblility of child-free living, though at the risk of writing myself - and thus Small Boy - out of existence it would have been the obvious choice for them. For my mother, certainly.

They belonged to a generation of hands-off and passive parenting, but they raised it to an art form. Why, exactly, would you have children only to proceed to have absolutely no interest in them or what they did or who they were and how they dreamed? One of my most vivid memories of my mother involves her telling me - me, the girl who started to write stories and poems the minute she could hold a pencil - that she didn't "give a shit" about writing. She couldn't seem to see us - my brother and me - as actual people with personalities. (Or perhaps she saw us all too clearly - she did have a nack for saying exactly the most hurtful thing. See above, writing, "don't give a shit.") She certainly didn't try to have a relationship with us. And so we grew up with one foot out the door and nobody should have been surprised that when the other foot was old enough to follow, follow it did. We did not, in the years before her death, have a relationship with her that surpassed obligation. When she died it had been six weeks since she and I had spoken and as last words go they leave a great deal to be desired.

My father, to his credit, did try, to the extent he was able, to forge something resembling a relationship with his children. Sports provided the bridge for him. He coached many of my brother's hockey teams and when I ran track in high school he came to every home meet. When I started cycling, we would watch TV coverage of the Tour de France (what little of it there was back then) and I would explain to him about team-work and drafting and strategy and why Greg LeMond wasn't going to waste his energy trying to win every day. I don't think he understood me, not really. But he could understand the cycling. He could learn the lingo. He could, approaching sixty and dying of cancer, become a fan of this strange new sport because his daughter was. I'm sure he found me a baffling girl and he must have watched in growing confusion as I grew into a baffling young woman. But he tried, in his clumsy born of a different generation ex-Marine quiet man way, to find at least one thing, a tenuous link between us.

Maybe that's one of the reasons I continue to believe in the transformative power of sports. It is surely one of the reasons I continue to hold a deep affection for the increasingly tarnished sport of professional cycling. As I went from a child to a young woman, something my father could only have watched with a growing sense of unease as the distance between us grew, there was always a new bike helmet to buy, a training session to hear about during the weekly call home from college, a race to look forward to. After he died, I met people at his memorial service - members of his AA group, people I had never met and would never see again - who knew all about me and my cycling and who to a person repeated how proud my father had been of me in the last race of mine he'd seen. He had, it seems, bragged about me. We might not have understood eachother across the distance of gender and years and personality, but he boasted. I was his daughter. I rode bikes. I was good. My father grasped at the one thing about me he could hope to understand - athletic endeavour - and he used it to cultivate something between us. He was quiet and clumsy in his love, as I think a lot of men of his generation can be, but he tried. Our relationship was limited and never touched on matters of the heart, I don't think he could have told his friends about the life I wanted for myself or the future I imagined for myself, but he could buy me a slice of pie and we'd be able to have a conversation while we ate.

I know my father loved me, and I'm pretty sure he liked me as well. I am far from certain I can say the same thing about my mother. And, in fairness, that was a two-way street. I didn't like her. I didn't want to spend time with her as a child, and I didn't care to spend time with her as an adult. It's not a pleasant truth, but there it is. But I have friends who like their parents, who in their thirties make time to go visit them on long weekends, who go out to dinner and Broadway shows with them. These friends of mine are like Martians to me, but they are also guide-posts along the way. They show me that there is another way, that I don't have to recreate the family I was so eager to get away from. When I'm able to step away from myself and look at the way R and I are living our lives with Small Boy I'm able to have a certain degree of confidence that we'll continue to have a good relationship with him as he grows, when he becomes an adult. But it's hard to step outside of your own narrative, and there are many days when I'm pierced by the thought that when he's grown he won't want to be our friend, that he won't want anything to do with us, that he'll always have one foot out the door. It's hard to step away from a narrative like that, so posts like this, that remind me of all the things that are possible with my children, are like little blessings.

Because it may be hard to step away from a narrative, but it is just a narrative. I can write it however I want. It's what I learned to hold the pencil for.