Lately, I tend to wake up sometime between 3 and 5 a.m. and lie there for some time, my mind wandering until I am brought back to reality - that I am lying in bed awake - by the feelings of fetal dancing. The other day I woke up from a dream in which I attended my dad's wedding, instead of going to Alaska. This is the first dream in which my dad’s wife appeared – probably because last weekend I saw photos of the wedding and, so, saw Mary for the first time. Now that I have a face to attach to her person, I imagine I will see her from time to time in dreams.
We were at the wedding reception and I still had not even exchanged so much as a word with Mary. Finally, she was making the rounds and she approached my table (I was sitting there with my partner and several siblings). She looked at me and I smiled at her, eager to finally meet her. Then she said, with a puzzled expression, “I’m sorry, I have no idea who you are.”
That was it for me, I stood up and stormed away. Then I woke up.
My brothers tell me how nice she is. I keep telling them that I don’t doubt for a second that she is nice. My sister tells me that she thinks Mary should have taken a little time to reach out to us. I keep telling her that it is not Mary’s job to keep us in the loop and make sure that we get to know one another, that’s dad’s job. Even in the dream, and when I woke up, I knew that I wasn’t upset with Mary. I am upset with my dad.
It’s difficult to take on the role of family matriarch when your mother dies: to spend the first several days of your winter break cleaning your father’s house (which hasn’t been cleaned since the last time you did it) and decorating for the holidays so that when everyone else gets there you can celebrate Christmas; to be the person that your dad calls whenever he needs anything, wants to talk about how lonely he is, or is wondering why he hasn’t heard from one of your siblings in a week or 2; to be the person responsible for updating the extended family about what everyone is doing and organizing the immediate family when necessary. I know that I didn’t have to do all of those things, but people expected them of me, I would have felt like I was shirking my duty if I didn’t do them, and lastly, I feel like it would have been disrespectful to my mother’s memory not to maintain some semblance of family life and order in the family home. I had this dream once in which I walked into my dad’s kitchen and my mother was there cleaning. Sometimes when I dream about my mum, her presence isn’t problematic but sometimes in the dream I am aware that she shouldn’t be there because she is dead. This dream is one of the latter. When I saw my mother cleaning the kitchen, I asked, “Mum, what are you doing here?” She looked at me with a mournful expression, “They kicked me out of heaven to come down here and clean this house.”
So, the point is, for the last 6 years, since my mother was ill and asked me to put on the family Christmas in her stead, I have felt a tremendous amount of responsibility to keep my family together. I always hoped that dad would remarry and I am glad he has found someone, but I feel like my family, instead of growing larger as a result of this marriage, which is how I have always felt with sibling marriages, is dwindling. I don’t know if I just need to recast my relationship with my dad and siblings and recognize that, although the form of the family will change, we will still care about one another and keep in touch and all that. I don’t know if I just need to let dad settle into his new marriage and eventually he’ll have some emotional energy left for the rest of us. I don’t know if I should say something about how upset I am to feel so irrelevant - that I worked too hard to be cast aside without a thought. I don’t know if I should just assume that dad and his wife have her family complete with grandkids, so dad’s children and his biological grandchildren, when they finally arrive, will never be too important, and move on.
This whole thing really get to me – puts me in an every other day funk that can only be remedied (and only in the short term) by a trip to the gym.
