The stuff of families

My husband’s brother dropped in this morning, too early for my liking.  I find myself trying to work off my resentment as I offer him a cup of tea.  

My husband has gone for a shower while I make small talk.  My brother in law sits at the table.  his boots scuff at the floor.

My husband supports my wish to write uninterrupted in the morning.  He cannot help that his brother arrives early before he, my husband, has even had a chance to dress.  

My brother in law knows the drill.  He knows that after I have said my hellos and poured him a cup of black and sugar free tea, I will leave the kitchen and escape to my writing room. 

He knows this and seems sanguine about it but I am troubled by what seems to me like rudeness. 

You do not leave guests unattended.  

My husband will join his brother in a few minutes and then I can close the door on them both and get into my own world, but for a moment I am riddled with the guilt that comes of not being hospitable.

 

How would it be today had my husband’s brother not suffered trauma at birth all those years ago?  Had he not been starved of oxygen as he first entered the world?  Had he not been born with a mild form of cerebral palsy?

My husband’s brother grew up the oldest of six children but the responsibilities of first born fell to my husband who came next.  These responsibilities continue to this day.  

My brother in law passes all his correspondence onto my husband who sifts through, sorts out and fills out forms as necessary, ever since their parents died nearly twenty years ago.

My husband and I laughed when a bowel cancer test kit arrived earlier week, redirected to my husband by his brother.

 

‘I can fill out the forms,’ my husband told his brother on the phone, ‘but I can’t take the test for you.’

‘You’ll have to tell me what to do then,’ my brother in law said, and my husband groaned at the thought.

This is the stuff of families.  The stuff we do without question even as we might sometimes resent it.

Guilt like a dead fish

My mother takes Nulax for her bowels. She keeps the Nulax on top of her fridge. A rectangular lump of compacted dried fruit that tastes like jam but is barely chewable.

‘I cannot think you need to take it,’ my mother says to me.
‘You are young. Your bowels are good. But mine, mine are stuck.’

Years later a kinesiologist looks into my eyes. His bright light beams and blinds me. ‘You have an excellent immune system,’ he says, ‘ but your bowels are sluggish.’

My mother again, I think. She always manages to get in somehow, inside my system. She slows me down.

How can I purge myself of this woman of the slow bowels and the turgid constitution?

There was a time when I was about fourteen when I decided to join the ranks of all those women who sat around at morning tea and talked about what went into their bodies and what they might do about getting it out.

My grandmother died of cancer, not of the bowel, as you might imagine, but of the stomach. Something got inside her, too, something she could never be rid of.

All the Nulax in the world could not relieve her of her guilt.

Guilt sat in her gut like a dead fish. It stank out her insides and eventually ate away at them until she died.

At seven I was formally introduced to the concept of guilt when I made my first Holy Communion.

And then when I was fourteen I, too, decided I needed to do something with it.

Each day I chewed a wad from the Nulax pack. The fig seeds stuck between my teeth. The apricot pith coated my tongue.

I chewed to moisten, but to swallow the stuff was like swallowing a cow.

I could not get rid of my guilt.