(The photo above is the cat being very angry that I was leaving AGAIN since I’ve been gone so very much due to my husband having had the whole Lump In His Leg Adventure of 2023. We spent hours and days and weeks in Portland and my memories of those streets will always hold those tones. Sad and scared. And thus the cat is also if not sad, then perhaps she is scared she will not have her favorite perches to nap on.)
This is an experiment.
This post, and the few following it are going to serve as a companion journal for travel back to my homelands, Georgia, where I have not set foot for at least 15 years. I’m terrified, to be honest, to be back there. See memory-ghosts everywhere. Nightmares, but also a few wonderful dreams from the past. Do you do that? I do that with places I’ve lived a long time, this sort of layering of memories one on top of the other, so that entering back into that space is instant time-travel and in the present all at the same time. It’s probably a kind of disassociation? Because the time spent there was traumatic at times. Or maybe it's my own personal version of an ADHD brain, or a brain that is primed for memory issues, like my mother’s mind was.
She had Alzheimer’s and it was terrible. All of it. I know a lot of writers who have somehow found the grace and affection and love to walk through that horrific process with their loved ones, but I hated most every bit of it. So did she, to be fair. And she hated being reliant on me, again, as she’d had to be after my father died, suddenly and sharply in front of both of us (heart attacks are real dicks) and she was mostly lost in a sea of grief.
This desert town of dry mourning and estranged family relations went on for 10 or so years. Then, I left town, for reasons. These reasons included not wanting to live with the ghost-memories, the fear of my family and this very clear sense that something in how we all got raised and brought up was not ok. I’m hedging I realize, but I’m still in the beginning stages of this experiment.
My mother drove with me across the country to Seattle, because she loved me but really couldn’t express that she loved me, and so driving across the nation in a very awkward mother daughter road trip was kind of her way? Alone and a thousand miles away, I thrived, got married and everything was fine, moved to Texas with my lovely kids, and lovely family, and exciting and adventurous friends, and job that had to do with giving and connecting and the social justice volunteering and the joys of improvisation, and the awaking of sexual exploration and writing, a kind of magic of its own.
Until my mother became ill.
Alzheimer’s is an ugly disease, robbing the bearer of their dignity. It’s ugly for the family as well. She and I had been at arms length over the past 10 years, and I didn’t handle her return gracefully.
I was unmoored. Resistant. Afraid of her and of the memories of my father’s death, our strained mother daughter relationship, come home to roost. As she became more and more ill, I was doing more and more theater, more and more activism specifically around sexuality, sex instead of death perhaps. I was totally over my head.
My very independent mother had been moved back to Austin, Texas from Athens, Georgia and was being placed into a nursing home due to Alzheimer’s disease. She’d been deteriorating for years and no longer could drive, cook or no be safe on her own. She was angry and overwhelming. I was angry and overwhelmed.
My mother was in the worst stage, waking up in a fog, agitated and violent at times, extremely afraid. And because of her confusion, and me being the only caretaker, she was blaming me for all of it, all while I tried to manage a job, young children, marriage, my life.
I’m experimenting because I feel as if, I know really, I have not been as honest nor as bare as I could have been in my writing and while you might say, “But I thought this Substack was about meetings, gatherings, the workplace, and power!” The thing I’m really writing about is the understanding that the workplace and power involve people who have personal histories and bring those personal histories TO those meetings and gatherings. I cannot and frankly do not want to separate these parts of my mind. I do not want to write surface level articles about fundraising. I want to write dense deep articles about money and power and culture and why on earth we even need fundraising to begin with. As but one example.
Work and power and how we gather in our careers are inextricably connected to family and the first groups we grew up inside. Who I am right now, and the work journeys I’ve been on, are completely related to my childhood and my family and in a sense, that’s why it’s important that I’m going to back to Georgia. And thus it’s terrifying. And thus, I’m trying to report live from the field. The field of fear.
Fear of what? Fear of feeling. Fear of speaking the truth about how things were back then and how they built me into who I am now, and how that’s informed all the things that make up my life and how I work within it. AND that leads into how all of us (all of us having things that built us) work together in our little careers and families and how we experience and manage power.
If you enjoy any of this mayhem I’m attempting to write, please subscribe and please share? Or leave a comment about how you manage your own stuff about your family systems, power, and/or work? I’d really relish hearing from you.
I’ll hedge less, next time, promise.