"Goodnight, Aunt Nora,"

Memoir Series

she said to me as she hugged me before going upstairs to our landfriend/family’s (there is no single word that can capture the richness of this relationship) apartment. She said it quietly like she was trying it on for size. It was the first time Patty, Paul’s significant other, had attached the honorific to my name since we’d met this summer.

“Did you just call me ‘Aunt Nora’?” I asked.

“I did, yes,” she replied.

“That’s so special,” I said (or something like that. I can’t remember exactly what I said due to the rush of emotions I was experiencing).

Theresa, Paul, and Patty, just returning from a cold wintry walk, had stopped in for a visit on their way upstairs. Paul and Patty had arrived from Minnesota a few hours earlier. It was Thanksgiving Eve, and the building was filling up with love.

When we first moved in here twenty-one years ago, Theresa and Vasken decided that Paul, then aged seven, and Helena, then aged nine, should call us “Aunt” and “Uncle”. I let them know that it was not necessary and that they could just call us by our first names. I am not one to support hierarchical constructs, but Theresa insisted that we be “Aunt” and “Uncle”. It just did not register with me back then that this choice was coming from the love of being with family as opposed to making sure the younger beings respect their elders.

For over two decades, we’ve been their honorary aunt and uncle, and it was not until Patty called me “Aunt Nora” of her own choice that I let myself fully receive the specialness in getting to be someone’s aunt and in turn, the specialness in having an aunt. The fact that I hadn’t fully received this from Helena and Paul before has nothing to do with them and everything to do with me and my family dynamics.

Although I have aunts (or had, two of them are dead, and the third I am not in touch with) and spent some significant time with them when I was young, I never felt the kind of closeness with them that I do with my chosen niece and nephew, Helena and Paul.

My family on my mother’s side did not display a lot of warmth. They could muster up the energy to physically show up, have fun with one another, and participate in family gatherings, but there was a lack of empathy and compassion, the damage done by my alcoholic grandfather, Harry, and all of the other dysfunction, death, and abuse rippling into present-day realities.

I never felt really safe or loved or accepted in their presence. There was always a harshness and a meanness to their jokes and perspectives, and the alcohol often flowed.

On my dad’s side, I have (had, she died this summer) one aunt. As I reach back into the archives of my memories I can feel her warmth when I was young. Their home was lively and fun. However, after my parents divorced, we saw less of them, and as I grew, the differences in our value systems became more obvious. Being called an “idiot” by her for being vegetarian is just one example of the chasm there. That side of my family was equally as critical and judgmental as my mother’s.

“Aunt” to me has largely been a performative experience as so much in my family has been, the characters there, masking a version of reality that did not exist.

Jon and I had a lovely Thanksgiving alone this year, just he and I, vegan turkey with ALL of the sides and pie, so much pie while our landfriend/family were all at their matriarch’s home, with their many biological aunts and uncles. The extended family who occupy the third-floor apartment had their extended family over, so the building was once again filled with love.

Meanwhile, my mother sits in a memory care facility just a few hours away from me, her Alzheimer’s advancing, and my father, who lives less than an hour away, well, I have no idea what he’s up to. After multiple attempts to connect with him and repeated ghostings and cancellations by him, I have let it go for now. I won’t be ponying up to the trough of rejection again with him any time soon. as Jon said, “Even if you did spend time with him he’d just be mean to you.”

I have to battle every day not to embody the meanness myself. It’s in my blood, and it’s in my bones, and I do not always win this battle.

When the guilt wants to swallow me, the guilt that this is what remains of my relationships with them, I remind myself again and again that they did this and not me. They left. They abandoned. They rejected. They abused. I stayed and fought and tried and tried and tried some more with them both until finally all I could do was leave. As I have said, fight is my go-to and flight is my last resort. And even after leaving, I returned for more only to find myself here, in the same situation I found myself in with them twenty years ago, estranged.

Two months ago, I was just about ready to speak to my mother by phone. Right then, an email from one of the people she chose to be her power of attorney contained the information that my mother did not want them sharing any information about her, including her financials or estate, with anyone, including my sister and me.

Estranged

She keeps doing it, pushing us away, her only children, and replacing us with others who have enabled her abuses. They listened to the words and wishes of a woman who lost her mind long ago and now is losing her memory of it all, leaving my sister and me to bear the burden of our story as she turns into a five-year-old.

I have not been sleeping well for the past couple of weeks. Initially, I assumed it was the election result but now I think it may be my mother, waking me up in the middle of the night as she roams the astral plane, her anxiety, even in that space, seeping through the porous membranes of my energetic form, triggering my own.

She came to me a few months ago, while I was in the in-between sleeping and waking state, we call it lucid. She let me know she was checking out what it might feel like to leave. She was more lucid there than she is here. The fact that she came to me for help with this exemplifies the deepest dysfunction between us, she burdened me with her care as soon as I entered this world. Our roles have been long reversed.

A mother with a long-dead mother turning her child into her mother.

It’s so boring and cliche.

During a visit to my Chicago apartment while I was in college she stayed out one of the two nights she was there until four in the morning. I’d been working at the restaurant and got off around 10:00 pm. I started worrying around midnight and by two in the morning, I kept trying to tell myself she was fine, my anxiety denying me sleep. She rolled in at 4:00, still drunk and laughing that she’d met a chef and he took her and her friend out on his boat. She could not understand my upset.

The Thanksgiving before then I’d gone to visit her in St. Louis. My uncle was in town as well and we all went out. I watched them get completely sauced as I stopped at one drink. I had to drive us all home in my uncle’s pickup truck on streets and highways that were not familiar in a vehicle that was not my own as they cackled and slurred. The two of them enabling each other’s alcoholism. My Uncle Mike is now dead, he left this earth not long after my mother’s diagnosis.

When she was finally free to choose where she wanted to live, she did not return to Chicago and her children and our lives, she returned instead to Cleveland.

“I’m here to look after Mike,” she said when I questioned her on her choice.

I see the lie in it now. She returned to be with the sibling she could get drunk with.

Is it any wonder I have shrugged off the title of “aunt” for so long?

“Patty just called me ‘Aunt Nora’ as she hugged me goodbye,” I said to Jon after they left the other night. “I finally get it,” I said a bit tearfully with the love and warmth of it.

A lost piece of me healed and integrated.

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