I have been chewing on this for a couple of weeks. I am not even sure I want to write it now- I don’t know how coherent it’s going to be, but I have to get out out.
A couple of weeks ago, I got a text from my biological father. We are estranged, to put it nicely and to make a long story short. As such, I bear a surname name to which I have no connection. I don’t know them; I could, and have, in fact, passed family members on the street and not known who they were. So when I read that he was coming into the area to see his biological father -who has a terminal diagnosis and was given six months to live- I said I would meet him. I saw it as an opportunity to meet some of my bloodline, to discover a part of me I have never known.
There is a part of me that wishes I could write about that account here, but that’s not exactly what happened. While I did not meet my biological grandfather, I did get to meet family members from another part of my bloodline. In that sense, I did get what I went to get. I got to ask some questions my inner child wanted answered, and I got to start naming the branches of some parts of my family tree. In another sense, I got well more than I thought I would. Some people talked to me like nothing -no time had passed- which pissed me the fuxk off.
To think that greater than 30 years of not knowing me, speaking to me, acknowledging my existence could be overlooked now that a name could be put to a face incited a fire in me that still hasn’t been extinguished. To be asked about the wellbeing of people who were little more than names to me because of assumed proximity was almost more than I could take. To find out that a part of me I had idealized -because my imagination had filled in the blanks- could not live up to the fantasy was a mighty blow. In response, I did what people who know me well would imagine I would do.
I spoke my truth.
What I learned on that trip is how much I have grown from the person I used to be. Rather than setting an intention to tear people down with my words, I spoke in my authenticity. I won’t say my words were flowery, because that would be a damn lie. Instead, I learned that I had room to ask questions, to request context, to be empathetic. I also learned that I could tell hard truths from a place of love. I learned that I cannot and will not sustain relationships that are not built on a foundation of honesty, understanding that honesty also requires acknowledging that my understanding of what that is may not quite match up to what other people can give me. They might not have it available because they weren’t willing to do the work that sustaining it required. They weren’t able to acknowledge or sit in the discomfort that facing truth- mine, theirs, and Truth with a capital T requires. To me, honesty requires admitting, owning, and redressing fault. An attempted redress is empty without a willingness to name or concede fault, even if it is just a willingness to hear and honor another person’s perspective.
Hearing stories about women I will never meet made me mourn the stories I will never hear from their mouths about the decisions they made, though hearing them from their sons’ perspectives made me wonder if I would have ever been able to request the telling. Knowing that some of the qualities I see in myself that my family tried to teach out of me out of fear of how the world would see them are as inherent as the sun in the sky gave me confirmation that nothing, no seed that has been sown in me is by accident. To know that God spared me a double dose of family members who made a conscious or unconscious choice to suppress their feelings rather than feel them or sort them out made me grateful for His grace. I don’t know how I feel about generational curses- I prefer the term generational trauma- and while I know I have been doing the work to get to the root of mine, I was grateful to know it came from both sides of my family tree. I was also grateful to be in a personal space where I could choose compassion over rage, where I could meet people where they are in this moment rather than seeking retribution of past wrongs.
When I search myself, I know I don’t want this story to end here, even though I could easily find them more wrong than right. I told a friend today that -though I am not an orphan- I’d previously felt like a big piece of me was missing, because I couldn’t trace my family much farther back than the family I’d had the chance to meet. I have the chance to create a family tree, and -though I know that won’t tell me who I am, it will let me know the stock I come from.
Who I am is a matter of my own choosing- the choices I make, including the ways I show up for myself and others. I can and do rest securely in that fact now that I know that was never outside of me.
I'm just telling you how I see it 