Lost in time and space

Family meant everything to me when I was growing up. My world was in a constant state of flux. We moved. People came and went. Schools changed, but my family was always there. 

I felt safe when I was with them. There was something solid and coherent in being together in the family car, or on vacation in Minnesota on the lake. Our homes, schools, and friends changed, but our routines were the same. The first twelve years of my life were spent as one fourth of a group called the kids. We bathed together, played together, rode bikes, and sat together at meals or watching television. There was such security in that little group.

My mother was the god-like creature who held us all together. Her strength, love, and fury defined our lives in no uncertain terms. I may have been afraid of her some times, but I always felt safe from everything else in the world when she was near by.

My father WAS god. He knew everything. The state superintendent of public instruction once described my dad as the most intelligent man he had ever met. I believed that. If he said something, I was willing to die before letting anyone else tell me it was wrong.

Moving to my mother's small home town when I was a senior in high school changed the dynamics. Not right away, but in the long run. There is a snobbery in small towns, a kind of backwards clannishness that separated our family. My younger siblings spent more time there than I did and the rift between us has never completely closed. We are no long one thing made up of four parts. We were them, and me, and each thing I did away from them - going to college, moving away, having an extended family of the heart, redefined who we were.

When my mother died we all drifted farther apart. Now my father and one of my brothers have passed on, my sister has migrated into a lifestyle I do not understand and my youngest brother is someone I talk to on the phone a few times a year. It is hard to imagine we were once one tight knit little solar system orbiting around the love and light of two people whose differences made them fit together like custom puzzle pieces.