The Thaw

It is a little like flipping TV channels to determine my mood most days. I'm not very happy most days but I am also functional and able to fake happy a lot. I'm grateful for the ability to do this. I look forward to the day when I can turn the channel to "Happy Days" and really be there.

I look forward to the day when my sister can do that as well.

I go in and out - a little like my moods - in deciding if my sister will make it through this. SOme days I feel so hopeful and patient. Some days I feel aggravated and evil. I don't manage my anger around her very well - despite the fact that it is not all related to her. But she is a very convinient vessel to drop my anger on. I want to blame her for my current state of unhappiness but mostly in speaking with other people who have had other traumas and who seem to feel the same way I do - I realize she is not to blame for what ultimately undoes me.

I want things back the way they were. When my parents were both a little crazy and my brother was eccentric and my sister was wild but they were all in my life. There was always this HOPE that things would just come around back then. Before my Dad died, I believed we wouldbe re-united at some point. I believed that inherantly he loved me even if he didn't like me that much (I wa a teenager after all). When he didn't write me in his suicide note, it was the first time I realized I could not talk my way out of something. I could not change or un-do what I always felt was mutable. It was the first time hope was ripped out of my fingers and I have longed and ached for it ever since. 

They say that the worst thing you can do to another person is take away their hope. And though I stand here a mortally wounded victim of this, I have also slung the arrows that have killed hope dead, on the spot. What a terrible circumstance of the human condition that we need to destroy other people's hopes in order to find our own? It's not just me, it's whole communities and cities and countries - wrestling hope from one to give it to themselves. It is literally on the news every day. And who is the most affected by this constant exchange of hope for sale or rent? The vulnerable, the expendable. My sister.

By proxy - I am also slated to be the victim of this tragic exchange. I take it from her and someone else takes it from me and so on and so on.

 I met a little boy yesterday who was 12 with no parents who contacted him or had even seen him for 7 years. And you know what he wanted the most? He wanted to meet his little brother who had been born some time after him. He wanted a connection. ANY connection. It is his hope. Hope that he still has a family somewhere, even if he has to cultivate it in a little boy who doesn't even know he exists yet. 

No matter what, I see my sister still reaches for hope. It is small. It is sometimes not recognizable as hope but it is there. After all this play business, she figured it out. SHe moved towards problem solving it on her own. I want to shout to the roof tops. I wrote her to tell her I am proud of her - she will hate it and probably delete it because she is still bitter she had to do it herself. It will probably make her even angrier at me. But I don't even care if it makes her see that she can do things without those of us around her considered "able". Like that little boy who found hope in something that may not even happen - I saw it today too. A spark. I'll take it.