Digging around the family tree

Feels like a mighty long time since I last wrote anything.  But two days is not long.

Again, I feel my interest in blogging wane. This means I am doing fine mental health-wise.

My body, on the other hand, not so great.  I am sick sick sick.  Well, actually I am not that sick.  But I am not a good patient.  I get cranky, self-pitying and gluttonous.

For the last seven years or so, my friend W and I have had a standing date on Sundays.  We take walks, we sit in the park, we eat dinner, we do whatever.  But we always see each other on Sunday. There was a period of two years where we met at five in the afternoon and ate at the same restaurant and each ordered the same dish. We joke that we are two old women trapped in our youngish bodies.

Yesterday we went to a crappy Chinese restaurant in the Upper West Side and laughed so hard I felt like my eyes were going to fall out of my head. If I were to retell what made us both lose it, it wouldn't be funny so I won't even try. I just wanted to say that I laughed so hard that it felt like my eyeballs were going to fall out.

My big week:  my funny friend Larry and his friend, the guy Larry described as the one with a radioactive pellet up his ass (prostate cancer). Another A man, only this one is young and gay who sometimes surprises me with his mature insight and then flattens me with his youthful arrogance. I think that's all that's happening.

A link about abortion: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/11/23/091123taco_talk_toobin

There is a lot of talk about abortion lately.  I sometimes want to join in, just among my acquaintances. But I stop myself. I steer the conversations toward other things. Not that my view has changed on the matter but now I understand the ramifications.  I see it as something more than a political issue and lately I have become a firm believer that emotions should be left out of these debates. Tears somehow lighten the gravity of a situation.  Is that the wrong thing to say?

Turn on Oprah, Barbara Walters (is she even on the air anymore?), watch chicks cry. No one takes that seriously.  I don't take it all that seriously because it seems exploitive and calculated. Even though when I'm doing the crying, I take myself pretty fucking seriously.

A and I paid for my abortion. I don't know why I felt the need to say that. But we did.  We split it down the middle. Maybe the one time in our relationship we went dutch.

Ironic, no?

I believe that is the right way to use the word.  But if anyone is reading this and recognizes that I made an error, speak up and correct me.

My sister and I talked over the weekend.  She told me more family stories, some new and some just confirmed:

• our mother's father is the husband of Aunt Lydia (this means granny had an affair with her son-in-law)
• the big old house my mother grew up in was lost to a gambling debt -- an uncle used the house as collateral
• someone molested my mom, that is why she seems to think it's okay when it happens to anyone else
• Aunt Lydia's companion Ellie told my sister that their relationship was platonic -- this makes me doubt everything Ellie has said, but maybe she doesn't want anyone to think Lydia was a lesbo
• gay people should have spousal rights everywhere -- poor Ellie deserves some acknowledgement as a widow
• Granny arranged the marriage between son-in-law and Aunt Lydia while already having an affair with him (my mother had already been born)
• there is one living relative named Milagros who knows most of these stories and I will never meet her

I used to think my family was so dysfunctional that those of us of child-bearing age should all be sterilized. But who am I to judge?  Seriously though, what is wrong with us? Was my grandmother evil? How did she meet the Muslim (my father's father, who she eventually "married")? 

How can so much fucked up-ness exist in one family, generation after generation?  I still want to have a baby someday. Someday. But I don't want to do it alone, I don't want to do it with someone who doesn't really want to be there.

This family history is one of the reasons I couldn't have the baby with A -- he didn't want it. The way I saw it, my forcing a baby on him would increase the chances that we would be raising a child in strife, be it emotional or financial.  A's reluctance to be a father also increased the chances that our relationship would not last when the baby arrived. And while there are no guarantees in life, I want/wanted to bring a life into the world with as much in the right place as possible, where everything is not so fraught with compromise and angst.

Well, that's all I have energy for now. 

I will say, even though my love life is not exactly filled with promise of romance at the moment, I am pretty certain that if I were to have a child, I would be a good mother.