Welcome to mindfuck

So, just recently, I wrote a post about my heritage; how little I know about it, and how unconnected I am. I had started thinking more about it recently because of a conversation with my roommate. He is all about the genealogy thing, and I am not so much, not the least of which because I have no way to be into genealogy. I’ve got no leads.

He talked a little bit about how important he feels like the genetic piece is to a person’s history, how it really does include a lot about them. I never really connected with this, but I understand how it’s that way for others; I work in the adoption field, and you can’t help but feel (and see) that “click” when some bio family members meet for the first time. It’s just never “clicked” with me.

Even reconnecting with my mom after so many years, when she’d been so absent; I felt that emotional importance of having a mother in my life, but I never really got that “click” that made me feel like she was my mother, instead of a mother who happens to be mothering me. It’s hard to explain, maybe. She feels like the mother to the person I am now — she is mother to a 25 year old Harriet — but the mother that exists for other people, the mother across time, the mother from their childhoods, the chance for that is gone. That’s a hole that won’t ever get filled. I used to be bitter about that, but I’m not anymore. I’m okay with how I turned out, I’m happy I have a mother for a 25 year old me, and from what I’ve seen about how people with more “normal” family set-ups work, I don’t know if I could have the very good relationship I have with my mother now if she’d been my mother throughout my whole life. In that alternate world, I imagine a lot unsaid, a lot that would’ve been held onto, but in this alternate world, it all had to come out, it all got let go of.

I’ve felt like my family history is just an additional hole that won’t get filled. But I’m okay with that; I like feeling like the Harriet that I am is due to my hard work, my choices, my personality, and not some ubiquitous genetic thing, some string that ties me to people who are complete and utter strangers to me. When I talked to my roommate about this, I said that I felt like, to me, right now, at this point in my life, that was a fine place to be. Not really caring about my heritage. Maybe someday I would, but not today. When I said that, I wondered if there ever would really come a time and place where I did care about my heritage. In some ways, I think I have always just assumed there won’t be, because there isn’t any heritage to care about. And since I’ve made my peace with that, I’ve never worried about it.

Tonight my mother called me to tell me her dad is alive, and she just got off the phone with him.

Mindfuck like whoa.

So, he was supposed to be dead. I never met him, unless you count when I was in utero and my mother got to see him once. He fucked off out of his kids’ lives pretty early on, and all I knew was his name, that he used to be a race car driver, and he was from Spain. Also, that he was dead. I didn’t ask how. The details were always vague, and since I never really cared about my family history, I didn’t feel like pressing the issue was worth anything to me. Turns out, he was supposed to be dead because 25 years ago he fucked off away from his new wife and their kid and went off with some chick he’d just met into the desert, with a bag full of drugs and the stated intent to take them till he died. When he didn’t come back, well, everybody just figured.

Which brings me to the more important bit of information; my grandpa is alive, and he has been sober and working the program for the last 15 years. I was happy for my mom, if a little worried — she’s the one who grew up without a dad, so this was HUGE news for her — but I wasn’t making that genetic connection. All I thought was, “My mom has a dad! That’s awesome for her!” I did not think, “I have a grandpa.” Then my mom told me he was sober, which suddenly opened up the possibility that I could maybe, someday, have a grandpa.

This is SUCH a MASSIVE mindfuck. I still can’t get my head around this genetic/heritage stuff everybody feels. Because, really, holy shit, what kind of genetic thread could connect me with a man who goes off into the desert to die Leaving Las Vegas/Fear and Loathing style? Is that really in me? I can’t tell if my answer is I don’t know, I don’t think so, or I don’t want to know. I feel so little connecting me with my family of origin, often I’ve felt like a fly that spontaneously generated.

It would be nice to think of this as an opportunity to open up that part of me that’s been closed. But I’m extremely wary, and feel a lot of resistance towards thinking “my grandpa” instead of “my mom’s dad, who we all thought was dead.” Maybe I’ll find out that wariness, chronic mistrust, and an alien feeling of spontaneous generation is what runs in my family.