Day 17: My Family

This is a loaded topic for me. Not because I'm estranged from my family of origin, or because I never started my own family (although that stings at times). It's that since my father died, I feel orphaned somehow. I miss the family we used to be as much as I miss my Dad. I grieve for that family, as I grieve for my Dad. Sometimes more so. I really had no idea how much I counted on the support of my parents, as a unit. Emotionally, sometimes financially, and always just to be there for me, to catch me when I fell. And they aren't now. It's not the way it was for so, so many years, and it won't ever be again. And I'm still struggling to adjust to that.

Mom is still living, and I'm so thankful for that. But she hasn't been the same since Dad died, and has since been diagnosed with dementia. I still love our long talks on the phone, but when I think back to conversations we had five or ten years ago I'm startled at how much she's changed. We still laugh, and there are times that I get a glimmer of how it used to feel--really connected and communicating. But it's changed, is changing too fast. I wasn't ready, am not ready, will never be ready!

And this mid-life rite of passage, losing my parents, has made me feel utterly mortal and vulnerable. I wonder about my old age, which seems like it could be sooner than I think. What will I do? Who will be there for me? Who will love me? It just takes my breath away sometimes, how fast the years go by now, and how unprepared I feel.

When I was young, I imagined that by fifty I'd be an elegant, silvery-haired woman who spent her days not idle, but certainly leisurely. Involved in meaningful, fulfilling, civic-minded pursuits as well as enjoying the companionship of a husband of many years and a wealth of family and friends. Instead, I'm who I've always been--restless, uncertain, confused, yearning for more, and not possibly grown up enough to be nearly fifty. I don't have much gray hair yet. I'm still caught up in the rat race, trying to find time for friends and hobbies. And I never married, never had my own family. I thought the one I had would be there forever.

I have to remember that really, it still is! It's just changed, as everything does. It was changing all along, I just didn't notice. I still have my Mom, even though our relationship is very different and I have more responsibility than I ever wanted there. And I'm so grateful for my sister, who is right there with me. I am so glad we're a team! And the uncles and aunts and cousins that love and support us. It's hard, and sometimes I just want things to be the way they used to be. But it's time to grow up, and an opportunity to be deliberate in the larger "family" I create going forward.