Carrie Link

A PICTURE'S WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS - AND A THOUSAND WOUNDS

I've blathered on and on before how I'm part of a huge family, tiny immediate family, but big ol' extended family. My mom had six brothers and one sister, and that is important to the story. My mom was BETWEEN the six boys, right in the very middle, and let's just say, she has "issues around that."

Yesterday I got to have lunch with a cousin of mine, one of the "older boys'" daughters. She lives out here in Central Oregon, and we got to dine while looking at rim rock and miles and miles of beautiful God's country. The food was excellent, but the conversation was even better.

Throughout the conversation I kept thinking to myself, "So! THIS is who I'm like!" I love all my cousins, they are amazing, but I'm not like them. My astrologer said I often feel displaced in time, and that is so true. Clarissa Pinkola Estes talks about the misplaced zygote (I don't remember her exact term, so don't quote me on that one), but basically she talks about those of us that grow up feeling, "How in the hell did I end up in this family, who ARE these people, and where are MINE?" Turns out I am in the right family tree, just not on the right branch. That's OK, I can scoot.

So my cousin, Mary, and I were talking about our lives, our childhood, our parents as siblings, our upbringing, theirs, etc., and I told her the story of how my mom had had our portrait taken, just her, my brother and me, right after the divorce, as a symbol of our new "family." Almost immediately she remarried, and one of the first things her new husband did was take that very portrait and have my brother and me PAINTED OUT. He literally chopped us out of the picture, then what parts still touched my mom, he painted over them. Then he framed the picture and put it on his desk. For years that picture sat there. I clearly remember saying to my mom at 14, "I'm no psychiatrist, but isn't that a bad sign?"

She didn't seem to think so, evidently.

The fact that he was a diagnosed, but unmedicated manic-depressive, (that's what it was called in 1977) chain-smoking whack job didn't seem to concern her, either.

Both of Mary's parents are dead, and we talked about how we feel close to our deceased parents, and with the years since their deaths, the peace and change of perspective that has come.

"I am becoming less compassionate towards my mom, instead of more so. I'm doing something wrong here," I confessed. "And frankly? I don't see this story turning around in this lifetime."

Mary didn't either.

And so I scoot, and prune, move and adjust, shift and realign with the tree of life, my family.