Back To...

We have at least nine separate bus stops at our corner. And today is the first day of school, so they’re all out there in droves. The kids are in their hip new school clothes (soon to be replaced with the regular dirty t-shirt and sweatpants), clean backpacks filled with fresh, empty notebooks and sharp pencils (soon to be replaced with candy wrappers and molding lunch box food). The parents are clutching cups of coffee (secretly wishing they had added a ‘bump’ this morning) and wrestling with dogs on leashes, wondering how their kid can possibly already be in (___) grade and trying not to think about that new gray hair they noticed in the mirror this morning.

This is the first “first day” in 16 years that I am not making back to school breakfast. I’m not taking a first day picture. I didn’t make something fun for kids to eat after school and I don’t have a special dinner planned. In fact, we badly need groceries and to be honest, I’m simply trying to find the will to get dressed. No, all my kids and bonus kids are off, elsewhere, having their ‘other lives’...

Early this morning, I woke to my usual daily rage about the yipping dog down the block. And as I lay there mentally preparing for the conversation I will eventually have with the owner of said dog, here came the busses. As I listened, the same old feelings of anticipation/excitement/fear/nostalgia came flooding in. I remember so vividly standing at the bus stop with the small humans I created, wondering aloud with them about what they’d do that day or listing the friends they already knew in their class to help relieve first day jitters. Later, the humans got larger and were not necessarily created by me and sometimes we were dropping off in a car rather than waiting for the bus. But the conversations were always the same. And because, through their life circumstance, my kids attended a few different schools, I always tried to keep some tradition alive. But here I was this morning, just listening to the busses and wondering how all the kids are doing and also wondering if it was too soon to send another good luck message (the answer is yes, it was too soon).

I guess I could have driven out to Stillwater and forced my son to endure a picture he doesn’t want me to take. But to what end? It seems like this year, I just need to face it. The jig is up, Gina. And there isn’t a photo or back to school cake that’s gonna change it. Life moves on. Oh sure, I was included on a text message “first day photo” from my husband’s ex-wife of Raena off to 7th grade (should I be exceedingly delighted over this since ex-wife has perfected pretending that I do not exist in the world?). But even that felt like further evidence of my failure to accept the truth.

Ok, let’s stop for a sec. I know how this sounds. I’m THAT woman. That middle aged woman who doesn’t have anything else in her life but being a mom. But here’s the thing. I DO have other things in my life. My life is so full, I am constantly cleaning up the mess when it overflows. It’s just that...I really love being a mom. Maybe I’ll do something yet in my life that’s more important. But, I don’t actually think I will. I created these cool people who are pretty fucking amazing and I don’t regret one single moment I spent attending to their every need and driving them to music lessons and reading endless books with them and volunteering in their classes while my own career was literally expiring and probably overparenting to the nth degree. And this life transition of kids growing up and moving on. Well, it’s hard. And for that I’m not going to apologize. In fact, I’m going to avoid work just a little longer and go into the basement and dig through the photographs and cry as much as I feel like. 

I went on social media this morning to share the first day fun with my various contacts (masochistic fool that I am). In addition to the smiling faces and cute, nostalgic comments, I suspect there are others out there feeling melancholy. Not the “I’m so sad summer is over” of kids going back to school (who will be back soon enough to drive you crazy), but the melancholy of life. Life changing. Life moving. Life is good...great, even. But man, life is hard sometimes.

Peace, friends, as you swim in the sea of change...

(and to my kids: I’ve got a great dinner planned for the next time we are all together!)

Living the Questions

And then one day, there I am on an airplane, traveling hundreds of miles per hour toward my past... As we take off over St. Paul, I can just about spot my house, a tiny dot near the new light rail and on a block filled with beautiful trees and plenty of eclectic people. I look down and think about my life in that tiny little dot on the face of the earth. And then I wonder if it is perfect or disastrous that while my relationship with my family of origin is a complete conundrum of huge fuckedupness, I am heading back to rediscover a family member who was left behind.

Thirty-nine years ago...

I have no memory of what I was told in preparation. And really, I don’t have much of a memory of the actual event. It’s more of a feeling...

I’m in the backseat of our car and looking out at the building where my brother is going to live. I know that his mom lives there and he has to go back to live with her. I feel very, very bad and sad. 

Did I hug him goodbye? I don’t know. Did I cry? I don’t remember. What I do know is a narrative that has been given to me over the years by my parents. It’s a combination of facts or myths or a likely mash up of both about mental health issues, drug addiction, guilt, the injustice of the court system, social workers, birth parent rights, and more. It’s a complicated yarn that ends in “we’ll just have our own baby.” But I don’t know how any of that was possibly reconciled in my six-year-old brain. I was told that I got very sad. I refused to go to birthday parties. I wasn’t my “Gina Sunshine happy girl” self. 

Ya think?

What I often wonder now is who thought that after three years of being brother and sister, it was ok for two little kids to NEVER see each other again? Somehow, through the narrative I was given, I just sort of accepted it. But where were the adults? Where?? My husband says things were different then. I know on one level that he’s right. We had to just sort of accept things in the 70s that the children of today would be protected from by their helicopter parents. We weren’t always given an explanation, or maybe we didn’t even ask for one as we just went off to slide down the brown California hills on pieces of cardboard or to sneak into the abandoned yard with all the frogs in the pool, where we weren’t supposed to play.

But the truth is, after the hippie tales about the six foot tall marijuana plants in the backyard and “don’t eat the green brownies, Gina” trail away, I need to find a way back to that six year old self and mourn the loss of my brother. It wasn’t ok, what happened. Or at least it was pretty, damn devastating.

Because, I truly lost a brother. And it was worse than death, because he was still out there, somewhere. How was he doing? It was all the mystery. Did he remember me? I would never know. Did he have a good life? Nobody seemed to know, but the people who ran into him on the street and reported back to us were pretty confident that he didn’t.

Over the years, Joey became a phantom. He was the tiny, adorable, blond and curly-haired ghost brother who lived in my dreams, day and night. Maybe things would have been different if we had stayed in California. Maybe I would have bumped into him sometime or wondered about him and looked him up in a phone book. 

But, as was the theme of my childhood, the geographic cure led us elsewhere. And once my sister was born, with all her medical problems and life and death scenarios, Joey became even more of a phantom, because I guess who could continue to talk about the past when the present & future was so fucking in your face and immediate and filled with emergencies?

Nineteen years ago...

After my first child was born, I became sentimental. Having a baby daughter was so amazing and I was full of romantic thoughts of all things “family”. I began to think more and more about Joey. By now, he had taken on a mythical place in my life. He was part of a story that I regularly told and my good friends to this day remember me talking about him from the day they met me. It went like this:

“After I was born, my parents decided to be socially responsible and take in foster children who needed homes, rather than have more kids of their own. A girl lived with us briefly, and then Joey came to live with us. His mom was a drug addict and at 18 months he was malnourished and wearing 3-6 month clothing. He lived with us for 3 years and when my parents decided they wanted to adopt him, his mom decided she wanted him back. They went to court and she won. So then my parents said, screw social responsibility, we are going to have our own baby. And finally my sister was born when I was 8. And I was right next to the doctor at 2am when she came out, born at home in our living room.”

Of course, the story is much, much more complicated than this, and I continue to learn new facets of it. But it became encapsulated into family narrative so strong that I lost any sense of my own self within it. Even today, it’s hard for me to reflect on the experiences just for myself, separate from the feelings and experiences and hopes and dreams of my parents.

So there I was with my newborn baby and I wanted to look up Joey. My mom suggested I contact his grandmother, with whom she still was in contact via Christmas cards and who was supposedly a good person who had always tried to help my parents. I wrote a letter to her in search of contact info for Joey (that was when people wrote letters...on paper). My goal was just to tell him that I thought of him often and wanted him to know that...and that I had always thought of him as my brother. I really didn’t have any grand plans of a wonderful reunion, nor did I even know if he'd care enough to want to be in contact. What I received in return was a letter from his older sister Karen, who stated that she and their mother thought it was a very bad idea for me to contact him because “he wasn’t doing well at all and hearing from me might upset him or make it worse”. I backed off, but not before I got right up on my high horse in judgement. Who did this Karen think she was telling ME if he needed to hear from me?? (I now know she was totally and completely right). Karen, who had the advantage of leaving the dysfunction and going to live on the east coast with wealthy relatives and now had a great life (I had no idea if this was actually true, but this was the info I had been told). And his MOM!! What did she even care? Oh boy, I was really fired up. I was his sister!!! He was my brother!! But what could I do? Joey continued to elude me. This phantom boy who followed me down the streets of Woodacre. The curly haired kid who tumbled off the bunk beds when we were playing and scared me half to death. My little brother.

Three months ago...

It’s weird how one moment in time changes everything. One little decision that seemed so big but took seconds to execute. And sometimes the odd chain of events that leads up to it doesn’t really make that much sense, but makes all the sense in the world.

One cold Sunday a couple of months ago, Gerd and I were catching up on work at the dining room table before heading off to see Hannah’s violin concert. I absentmindedly floated over to Facebook, where my good friend had posted a picture of her with her birth mom. Their story is a very happy one, that begins with an unwed mom giving a baby up for adoption, the birth mom finding the baby 40 years later and continues with a relationship between the birth mom, her extended family, my friend and the adoptive family that raised her. It’s basically an amazing and touching and wonderful story...

So that day, while I stared at the picture of Renae and her birth mom on the computer screen, my thoughts led to family and eventually to Joey. I began to wax poetic to Gerd and he asked, “Have you ever tried finding him on Facebook?”. Well duh, of course I had looked him up on Facebook, but now that I thought about it, it had been a while since I had tried. Over the years, I had searched his name on those people finder type sites and occasionally would come up with a phone number, but I never had the guts to try calling. In the time since I had tried to contact him so many years earlier, I had plenty of examples of not-so-great endings to family reconnections that ended in lies, accusations, stealing and dysfunctional relationships. And let’s face it, I didn’t need any more of those. So, I always tucked my phantom brother back into my heart, locked in the space where he had remained since I was six.

But today, well, it’s pretty easy to find someone who isn’t trying to hide. And so when I randomly punched in Joseph Hoberg, up popped four choices, one of them a face that looked like it might be...could be..... I considered that his face might look familiar just because I just wanted it to be true, but the dude did live in California and had a picture of some redwoods on his profile, so... maybe... 

I told Gerd I was going to message him. He said, no 48-hour rule? (the 48-hour rule is a thing my therapist instituted with me, because believe it or not I have, at times, gotten myself into trouble with running my mouth/emails a bit too quickly. Mostly, I follow the rule, but you know how that can go...). And I didn’t think I needed 48 hours this time, because I was just putting a toe in the water with a Facebook message that I was certain would land in his “other” folder and disappear forever, leaving me wondering for another 40 years. I said something like “Hello, this might seem odd, but I once had a brother named Joey Hoberg and I’m wondering if you could be him?”

Then, an unfortunate thing happened and Gerd left to run errands. When left alone, I have, at times, been known to obsess over things a wee bit. And so I immediately began to scour whatever was public on Joseph Hoberg’s Facebook page and after seeing the names of some of his friends I determined that it WAS in fact him and I immediately clicked on “add friend” without even thinking and the 48 hour rule must have gone and run errands with Gerd. 

Later, I asked Joe if he got my friend request or my private message first and he didn’t recall (poor guy never had a chance with my trigger finger, huh?). But, after we determined that we were, indeed, the long lost brother and sister that we actually are, it was wild what happened. A rapid fire communication ensued and we tried to share memories as best we could from our years together. But mostly, there I was again, with more of a feeling than a memory. And it was a feeling beyond what I was expecting, if I was even expecting anything specifically. It was like everything in my life from that time on started to look different. And the estrangement that is occurring currently with me and my parents was actually a blessing in this case. Because instead of getting a narrative inserted into my memory, I was able to just “BE”. To simply be there, with my brother, remembering or trying to remember a moment in time. I didn’t have to share it with anyone. It was just for me. For me and Joe. My brother.

In talking with Joe over the weeks that followed, he mentioned that the time with me represented something innocent for him. Before things went to shit (which they really, really did for him). And that’s exactly it. Even though our lives took a very different path, we both have our shit. And the time with him? Well, I was a KID. I had a brother and he followed me around. It was before. Before laying in bed for hours worrying that my sister and my parents would die. It was before my dad’s alcoholism blossomed. It was before my sister spent weeks and weeks in the hospital, nearly dying and thankfully always living. It was before I felt like a misfit and structured my entire existence for so many years around trying to fit in. Psychology tells us that what we learn to TRUST is so important when we are kids. And what I could TRUST was that my little brother would follow me around. Sounds simple, huh? But I don’t know... I think there hasn’t been a lot else I could trust in my life. Not really, truly trust. I wept and wept those first days of talking with Joe. He said he cried, too. Because I never forgot him. 

----

So there I was, zooming through the sky in an airplane. Clouds and mountains and grass beneath me. Loving family and estranged family behind me. I had thought almost every day for the previous month about hugging my brother. My grown up brother. He is not a phantom.  

I have always been frustrated about my lack of memories. I want to conjure memories that just won’t come. My childhood friends reminisce about our escapades and I have nothing to contribute. It’s like I’m hearing someone else’s story. I heard an article recently on the radio about memory and specifically childhood memory. They talked about how the significant and frightening experiences tend to stick more in our memory as a self-protective instinct, going way back to early man kind. For example, if a child burns their hand in a fire, remembering that moment keeps them safe because they learn not to touch fire again. I couldn’t figure how my memory of laying awake in bed at age 10, worrying my family was going to die, was doing anything to protect me. Or how foggy memories of my dad, high on California weed and embarrassing me in front of my friends, was doing anything to improve the quality of my life. Maybe I got the weird backlash of evolution gone awry. But reconnecting with Joe gets me thinking about memory in a whole different way. It’s like knowing he also has fuzzy memories yet feels that I’m his sister makes it ok for MY memories to be fuzzy. They are fuzzy for us both. I recently came across Rilke, writing: “...be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue... and the point is, to live everything. LIVE the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along someday into the answer.”

I got off the plane. I hugged Joe. My brother. And 39 years later, we are living the questions. Together.

Attending a Funeral with Angie

Everyone should attend a funeral with Angie.  For that matter, everyone should attend a funeral for a friend of Angie, with Angie.  

It is difficult to describe the feeling of sitting next to Angie, in her giant, puffy red coat… her gait, volume and comment unpredictable at every moment, and all I could feel was just so tremendously, completely, overwhelmed with gratitude that she is in my life.  I expected to feel sad.  I expected to feel awkward and uncomfortable in the Catholic service (par for the course…).  I did not expect Angie to be my guide and my strength through the entire thing.  Angie pulls Catholic verse, prayers and songs out of where??  She claims it is years of attending family weddings and funerals and that she somehow absorbed the information.  I was at these funerals and weddings.  I did not absorb this.  Angie is overwhelmed with a need to share in communion with these Catholics we do not know.  I am concerned about being “turned away” at the altar for not being Catholic (a story I heard from someone recently).  I gently try to suggest to Angie that I’m not sure we are allowed.  She looks at me like I’m crazy and her look says she is going up there and doesn’t give a flying fuck who says she can or can’t.  So my mind wanders to the potential argument/incident I may get in at Erica’s funeral.  I try to mediate my sudden lioness-level protective feelings with not wanting to upset Erica’s family.  Wild fantasies start to fly through my head.  But then I look at Angie, with wet eyes, just needing to “be” in this service and community, and comforted so much by something that is so off-putting to me.   Regroup, Gina.  My mind wanders again.  I remember little girl Angie, with her beautiful, thick brown hair and her adorable smile.  Angie, too often struck blind by a seizure, paralyzed, predicted to possibly die or have irreversible brain damage.  Angie, who ALWAYS made it back.  I am, again, so incredibly thankful as she sings out, loud and proud, in her not-heading-to-Broadway-anytime-soon singing voice.  Yes, I think to the man trying to look back without us knowing he is looking back at who is making that sound – yes, that is MY SISTER.  How sad for you that you don’t know her!  And why is she alive and continuing to remind me about everything good in life, and her friend is dead in a box at the front of this sterile church?  All I could think was to thank God, Buddha, an old Indian woman or whatever the hell is propelling this whole bizarre system along.  Thanks for my alive sister!  I did not expect this.

Oh there were moments I could have predicted…  

The *community* communion cup comes out and my chest tightens (where are the individually sterilized cups??).  I quietly shame myself for thinking more about the fact that it is cold and flu season, and less about the fact that we are supposed to be there “in communion” to celebrate Erica’s life.  

As we walk to the front, I am relieved in a way I can hardly describe, as I see people skipping the community communion cup (I am clearly not the only one who realizes this is a public health hazard).  Then, as I wait for Angie (so she doesn’t get lost walking back to the pew), I turn to see her taking the longest, deepest pull off that communion cup and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand afterward.  I didn’t check to see if they had to refill the cup after Angie, but I’m pretty sure they did.

After the service, we find Erica’s mom Linda, and Angie immediately informs her that “This is just as hard for me as it is for you, Linda.”  Linda graciously smiles and hugs Angie.  Can a person not be transformed by moments like these?

Erica’s siblings read letters they wrote.  I saw inside their eyes and hearts and souls.  They knew this might happen.  They hoped this would never happen.  They are forever transformed by Erica’s place in their life.

The priest spoke.  I am cynical.  I expect empty words from someone trying to comfort a family in mourning.  But, He KNOWS Erica.  He loved Erica.  He is talking about appreciating the wonderful things that made her tick.  He is telling us that she was willing to ask him hard questions.  I know what he really means to say, I can read between these lines.  Erica lacked the filter that makes us all bumble through this world, feeling inferior, trying to dress right and say the right thing, struggling with what to write on a greeting card and trying to be politically correct, all the while gulping our anti-anxiety meds and chewing our fingernails.  Oh sure, she wanted a necklace to cover up her heart-surgery scar for Angie’s wedding, but she didn’t mind telling it like it is.  And Angie told me on the way to the funeral that Erica was always “her rock”.  When times were tough, Erica was there.

We leave.  Angie doesn’t need to have cake, thank you.  We’ll go home and have leftovers.  We walk into the freezing night and Angie thanks me.  With a big sigh, she says she really needed that and I am a great sister for being there for her.  As we drive home, I babble to Angie about why I was worried about communion and marvel at her knowledge of Catholic liturgy.  She calmly says she knew from talking with Erica that her church was a special place to be and that we could feel comfortable and welcome there.  Thanks, Angie.  I guess I should have let you start guiding me a long time ago.

Angie spends the night.  She knows she wants to be around people, but doesn’t need to talk. So, she reads in the living room and then heads to bed.

In the morning, Gerd makes her breakfast and she enjoys laughing at his silly jokes (he really has her number).  I need to get on with my day, yet I feel a sudden anxiety at taking her home.  But, Angie has her shit together.  She mourned, she lost exactly ONE night of sleep, she cried and she attended her friend’s funeral.  Now, she is ready to keep moving forward.  The person with the lowest IQ in my family has, hands down, the best mental health of us all.  

As I drove away from Angie’s apartment building after dropping her off, I remembered what my mom always says about Angie having a guardian angel.  God, I hope she’s right.

Pretty Much The Rock Stars Of Winter

It’s -7 degrees tonight (add the wind and it feels like -25). And it’s the end of February. We’ve literally been doing this for months. And would we like to tell you about it? You betcha we would! 

Sure, if you bump into us while you’re here on that unfortunately timed business trip your company insisted you must attend, we WILL complain about the weather. But, deep down… we love this shit.

You see, we’ve been tolerating your ridicule for years. I mean, Fargo was a pretty good movie, we’ll give you that. Although we did feel the accents were, well, a little overdone. We don’t really sound like that (we do). But truly, we’ve been the butt of that joke for a long time. And do you have any idea how exhausting it is to explain to you, every single time we travel anywhere south of Kansas City or go anywhere at all on a plane, that no, it is not actually below freezing and covered in snow here all year round. Yuck, yuck, we chuckle along with you only because we are on vacation, and those of us who are codependent enough to have a need to justify living in this climate may even spend inexplicably long periods of time trying to explain to you how hot it actually is here in the summer and how you should really come visit during a gorgeous, crisp autumn. Yes, I’ve always wanted to, you say, eyes glazing over as you return to Bejeweled Blitz, leaving us frustrated and misunderstood.

Perhaps it’s a bit of an inferiority complex. You’re always bragging about your sunny beaches, your varying elevations, your citrus fruit. We have the Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Area, but even trying to explain the beauty of that tends to end in a story involving mosquito bites and mud.

So here we are, with weeks upon weeks of below zero temperatures and incessant snow adding up to what is very likely going to be the coldest, most brutal winter on record.

But you know what?

We got this.

Because when the 11” snow fall comes, getting ourselves to work isn’t an impossibility. It’s a challenge. You can see the puffed up chests around the water cooler as we tell the stories of our adventures just getting out of our driveway, and don’t even get us started on the three separate vehicles we stopped to push out of a snowbank along University Avenue. 

And when there are blizzard conditions... our airport? That’s right, it doesn’t even shut down.

And when the temp drops to -20, we start considering that school might be called off. And sometimes it isn’t.

Oh, you think you’ve had a tough winter, too? Well, we saw that video of the silly couple in Portland, all “This is actually the perfect snow conditions for a run”. And you know what? We knew she was going to fall, because we saw the patch of ice as she headed toward it. Duh.  

And Atlanta, well, you really made us laugh this winter... sleeping in your cars on the freeway? Amateurs.

Look, when we get absolutely, relentlessly battered with winter, suddenly, the coldest and darkest of midwestern hearts begin to thaw. We realize, hey! I’m pushing a snowblower! I can clear my neighbor’s sidewalk and never even have to speak to them. If that doesn’t scream warm and loving neighbor, we don’t know what does.

Drive through any first ring suburb filled with mid-century homes inhabited by aging men and you will see the very definition of “clean winter driveway”. These guys spend entire weekends with all varieties of snow removal equipment, until bare pavement proves their superiority to every other human in a seven block area, if not the entire city. The other day, I was struggling along a city street in my too-tiny-for-a-midwest-winter car, when the smooth, white concrete of an completely clear driveway caught my eye. And there, beaming with pride, was the man responsible for that driveway. Was that a tear in his eye, as he nodded in my direction?

We’ll chuckle along cooperatively as you tease us for electing a "former professional wrestler" governor. And we will flood your economy with our vacation dollars when we can’t stand another minute. But until then, we'll go outside in mind-numbing coldness and toss water in the air, just to see what happens.

So, can we all just agree on this one thing?

When it comes to winter, we’ve got it going on.

You betcha.

Runners in Portland 

Traffic Report "Frozen" Parody