What a long, strange trip it was, this summer. I can’t believe I let myself stop writing, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. Well, I guess there is always a choice to be made, and the choice I made was to not write. You see, I had to clarify that as I’m trying to really be accountable for my actions, maybe for the first time ever. I had no connection at the house, as it had been cancelled long before by my uncle, the executor of my mother’s ‘estate’ – a word that seems so conflated considering how she lived her life – so my time online was limited to when I could get to the Starbucks up the road, a place the kids learned to love because of its big free cups of water filled with ice. There they had way too many sausage and egg sandwiches while I downed coffees, answered urgent emails and tried to regain some semblance of normalcy after being in the vortex of my mother’s still messy house. Instead of writing, I chose to sleep, to recover from it all, to try to be rested for myself and for them, so that I would be at my relative best.

The last time I wrote, it seems, I had finally had enough. I didn’t know the way up, or the way through, or the way out, but I knew that I’d had enough of everything. I didn’t want to feel any worse, or even the same, and I knew that something had to give and of course, that something was me.

Even as I write this, sitting at the kitchen table, I can’t seem to leave all the old crutches behind. I am eating what had turned out to be a bottomless bowl of my favorite cereal, a sugary treat that I bought ‘for the kids’ for the weekend. It’s the worst thing to eat before bed, a sugar-heavy simple carb with dairy, but oh how I’ve made it a habit. That fullness, that calming, reassuring fullness that makes it easier to fall asleep, it too is a crutch. But for now I will not feel guilty, as I’ve given up literally everything else and for now, I’m ok with it. I know that not long from now I will back and wonder why I did that to myself. By soon, I don’t mean the 20 minutes after you’ve eaten a Ben and Jerry’s and wonder what the hell you were thinking. I mean soon, soon along this path I’m taking, leading me closer to my self. Soon, when I finally realise, not in my head but in body and by my actions, that the way forward is through health and – god forbid I admit it – exercise. Soon, when I can fully accept and integrate the fear that has forever been holding me back from what truly want, from truly, and simply, becoming.

This summer I went home to California. I seems strange to say that, but good. It feels good to call California home. Never in a million years would I have thought that it ever would be so and yet, here we are. I have struggled for so many years to feel at home, anywhere, probably because I just kept moving. First, when I left home, it was to college, just to get out of there. Two weeks later, I quit that and moved to St. Louis with a few friends who were working in TV there and not going to school. Then it was Chicago, for art school, then LA, to be closer to my family who had moved to the region, the exurbs if you will. There I found it too fake, too hot, and too spacy, so I went east again to New York, and then DC, which was a bit of a fluke but turned out to be a place I felt quite at home in. Then I met Cyrille and we decided to go to London next. Then to France – first the northern most part of the South in the Rhone valley and now in Champagne, the best place to be, if you ask me. It has a quiet, simple sort of luxury. Life moves slowly, and predictably to the rhythms of the growing season, the cuvées, and the releases of the wines. It is full of tiny villages, like ours, packed with producers of all sizes, big and small, there is a solidarity and respect among all of them, an égalité and fraternité. All that and we are less than an hour away from Paris on the fast train.

None of this mattered this summer as I went home with the three kids to which will forever be known as Grandma’s house, a little, what I like to call ‘cottage’ in an old working class development just a mile from the mighty Pacific in the not-quite northern-most part of California. It’s safe from the wildfires, too humid, and it’s nestled between the glorious coastline and the old growth Redwoods. It’s a funny little sour green house with a white picket fence around a garden that my sister laid out with my mother’s plants, and put in with the help of a neighbour, a lovely man named Gene, whose story I listened to on the front porch while he dug and planted the beds. The house was built in 1950, the date and names of the first owners is finger-written in the cement on the little front porch step we discovered that first summer of 2021 when we cleared its overgrown white-flowered plants growing from under its porch. We had arrived to help her through a surgery that was then postponed and so we spent a month clearing and cleaning and decorating. I stayed a week longer than planned to be there for her first round of chemo, to help her, to not abandon her, so that she felt safe and cared for, surrounded with love and by her things neatly presented, finally. She had been left  in that house by my brother with not even a closet rod to hang her clothes on. She had been making do for so long that she didn’t even mind it anymore. She’d put a bookshelf in her room with the shelves left un-posed at the bottom of it, which left a gaping space so that she could rest the hangers at the top and let her clothes fill in below. 

The infamous closet rod, a symbol of so much in the sad story of how my brother left her to flounder in that house. It was even mentioned in the lawsuit against him – she was left there surrounded by unpacked boxes and vermin in an unfinished house, abandoned by contractors and her very son, unable to unpack without his help, without even a closet rod to hang her clothes on. He took here money, borrowed what he needed, paid it back just once to earn her trust, and then just never did again. She paid for every last bit of it, trusting him to do good by her, unable or afraid to stand up to him, a tall, angry, intoxicated 6 foot 4 beast of a long before estranged child of hers. She paid for everything and he abused her faith in him, kept her name off the title so that when it all came down to it, she had, yet again, no power, no protection. While she continued her treatments for not one, but two cancers, he proceeded to try to sell it and make her a renter in her own home while he up and moved his family to Ohio, away from all the carnage he left in his wake after 10 years of life there.

He hated her so much for not being the mother that he needed growing up. His unchecked ego made it all about her, which I know it was at some point, but that point had long passed. He had long been responsible for destroying everything in his wake, for years and years. Years of burning bridges and fucking over everyone that he encountered. Years of not doing the right or even decent thing to others, deciding that somehow it didn’t matter or he didn’t care. He had once been a sweet, soft, caring boy and and even young man. He had been hurt by others, besides his own family, and had never quite recovered. He’d experienced the incredible, terrible loss of his best friend, who had been following his car on his motorcycle when he lost control and crashed and died instantly. Who knows the details of how this felt to him, for he never learned to share anything, as no one ever taught him how, except perhaps this friend that died. With his loss, I think my brother lost his innocence forever. 

Instead of hurting, he chose to toughen up, as he had seen everyone around him do, to toughen up and not care about the repercussions of his actions. He’d learned that certain, terrible type of masculinity where the bigger and scarier you are, the less you care, the more you can win. He took from everyone a lied about it, too. He took from our father, preyed on his kindness, knowing that our mother would never agree, got money from him to buy his first house, a house which he just completely walked away from. He abandoned it and its payments and it was in turn repossessed. He laughed about it when he told the story of how it had been raided by  the DEA just weeks after he’d left it. He’d escaped arrest and prosecution because of his good timing. Years before he told me this while our father lay dying in his final days or day, even. I was aghast, appalled, not even by the act itself but for his lack of repentance. I told him I hoped he realised how lucky he was, and that he’d learned from it. Apparently, he didn’t. Apparently this all just reinforced his grand ego, a sign that he was untouchable, that he could get away with just about anything he wanted to, and so he continued as such. This is why, I now remember, when he called me to tell me that he was married and asked me for a mere $1000 as a gift, I said no. Even though I sat on a small inheritance that I had to fight my mother for in her lawyer’s office after my father’s untimely death left them still married, and her still his sole heir. No way, no how, sorry, but no. Do something for yourself, for once. Learn your lesson, for once. As our father lay dying, each time I called from the hospital during that last eight weeks, he seemed to not really care, to not really realise. He finally came just two days before, when it was finally ‘time’. He came, he smoked, he swore, and he drank and drank, bringing a bottle of Jack Daniels to the side of my father’s bed in the ICU. Uncaring, unawares, and dealing with the situation the best he knew how, that I now know. I do have compassion for him now, from this point. I know he didn’t mean to, he was just doing his best at the time. 

My mother’s house was left just to my sister and me, a feat she managed to stay alive for, beating the deadline for me to sign off on the lawsuit for the house – as it had been me who was finally able to pull together all of the financial evidence against my brother. She made the deadline by just a few days as it would only finalise if she were still alive. Sadly, I realise now, it was the last day that she was awake. She was deeply driven to do so, to leave us a home, so that no man could ever take that away from us, as had been her experience, I imagine more than just this one time.

In the last week we were there this summer, as I lay on the foldout couch in the back room between two kids, I said to myself, deeply in my soul, I never have to leave from here. This is home. 

Now I know why I have not written until now. It is so hard, so painful, so emotionally revealing to write, as I cannot avoid the words that come. They arrive without my permission, they bring up the images and tales that are hidden in the parts of me that I do not want to see, nor feel. 

Only now I have begun to have the tools and the abilities to feel the feelings that arise and then let them go. This is what I did on my summer vacation – I learned to let go. I have never before known this, and even now it is not my brain or my heart that knows how to let go, but it is my body that has begun to learn how. My soul can exist in a place with these feelings, in the in between time, the elegant word for which escapes me, but it is in there somewhere, through the fog of my mind, like on the moors of so many sad and sorrowful, frightening tales. This unknown I am now familiar with, the hounds in the distance are no longer just symbols of fear but of an animalistic part of me that I am learning to accept. These feelings, at once emotional and physical, are no longer forming the foundation of my daily experience. They arise, I pay attention, and then let them be, aside, within, or outside of me.

You see, I knew that I had to go home this summer, to be in the place that it all went down, to finish what I started when I went there for the first time. In the late summer of 2021, I went back to the US for the first time since fleeing everything in 2010 to start my next life with Cyrille in London, to be married, to be finally free of my family of origin and all of its sadness and failure, and to be free from my own failures and shortcomings, sins and sadness. How foolish I was to think that all of that wouldn’t follow me, how naïve, how deeply hopeful I was that I could actually start over. But here I am now, for the first time willing to look at it all as just ‘me’ and my life, to accept and love the darkest parts of me. This is what will let me be finally free of it all, to accept it, and to love my self, truly, as I love my own children even when they make their biggest mistakes. They know not what they do, they are forever forgiven and loved, so why not me too? I know now that it is ok, it will be ok, it will be good and great and dark and sad and lovely and terrible, forever and always, and it will be ok. 

I learned this this summer, in my mother’s house, by the sea, on the roads, in the forests, and on the tables of a great body-work healer and intuit who saw me, in the present form, with the physical reality all of these experience as they had been stored in my body, for years and years. In his treatment room, four times a week, I would arrive with the intention of healing, and it worked. That space was transformative, that space allowed me to exist in my body in the present, to feel exactly where I was, each time, and through his gentle adjustments I was able to feel pain and let it go. To feel everything in my body as it came, and it did come. These sessions offered me a place, a deeply important and necessary place for my self to be present, with no demands from others, human or otherwise. It seemed that every other moment I had was spent either caring for my three young children; clearing, cleaning and decorating my mother’s house; sleeping or just trying to generally recover from the vortex of the entire experience. These sessions allowed me to feel better, to realise and then literally tell my self this:

I don’t have to feel bad. I can find joy in this even though it’s hard, it hurts. I can be ok with my mother being gone, she is free now and I can be, too. There is no point to suffering. I can be sad and miss her and still experience joy with my children, still love them as I want to love them, as they deserve. I can forgive myself and love my self, too. I can love those around me without fear of more pain. I can exist in a complex world with love and loss and the entire array of human experience. 

This healing work is by no means finished. I am really just at the beginning of this next trajet of my journey. Moving forward, I am not only filled with hope but also with a deeply grounded knowing, a belief in possibility. My sadness, which manifested itself as an ever-present anxiety for years and years prior to this experience, a sort of waiting for the next terrible thing to happen, is gone. For a little while I wasn’t even sure what this difference was that I felt and then I realised, it’s gone. Even now when I think of it, I let out a deep breath that resonates throughout my body in gentle waves as if checking and yes, it is gone. It might come back, but now I know that I don’t have to keep it, to store it, it is not necessary, nor helpful, nor good.

Until the next time I write, I will continue to say to myself, Let it go, little child, you can be free again.