Family can be a wonderful thing, but every family comes with its baggage. My family (on my father's side at least) has a dark secret history because of the neurological glitches it is trying to hide in the closet. I believe that my great-grandfather on my father's side, the one with the chicken whose picture you will find below, had Tourettes, rage, OCD, and perhaps also bipolar disorder. I believe this though not a word was ever spoken about him by anyone who knew him. In fact, this picture only came to light because my uncle found a negative in a box and wondered what was on it.
Tourettes has been an important thing in my own life because my father has it and my son inherited it, along with the other disorders named above. My grandmother never seemed to like my dad and this attitude was shared by others in the family, who treated him sometimes with contempt, and I think it is because of the anger my grandmother felt towards her father, who was supposed to have been a terrible person, a violent monster. My father sometimes behaved like a violent monster before he was diagnosed and medicated a few years ago, but I have always known that underneath it all he is a kind person. The same with my son, though we identified his problems and medicated them very early on--largely because of my father. I felt very angry at my own father for a long time, and that is why I think my grandmother felt that way about her own father, so strongly that she changed her name totally--from Velma Trostinetsky to Jenny Gross-- and never spoke of her original name or family again.
I wrote a small poem about this, "My Secret Line."
Here it is:
My Secret Line
Somewhere in Minsk or Moskva,
a frozen forest east of Kiev, my father's
people shed unwanted history and sailed away.
Whether fleeing Cossacks, as they claimed,
or seeking refuge from their own,
they found new names, spawned branches
of invented kin, a dynasty of paper
for the avid heir. This way
they flummoxed dim Americans,
managing to flee inherited misfortune--
gaunt stranger on an empty road.
Old rules do not apply in dreams or exile.
2 comments:
My favorite posts are the when where you talk about your family. You know so much about them that I am impressed, envious even; I know little My mother's family made up stories, so who knows what is true. And my father, as a male, didn't carry the family stories that his sisters seemed to guard.
It helps that my great uncle on my mother's side was famous. That means there are books written about that family, books that I have read and wondered about. But as for my dad's family, having lived with my dad much of my life, it was plain that these problems did not come out of the air. They were inherited. And although no one spoke of them, they were there all the same.
When my son was born, it was clear that all the running away in the world was not going to get me away from these problems. I had to engage them, learn about them, recognize them in myself and the people I love.
I now know more about Tourette Syndrome and associated disorders than most doctors, and have been told that many times by doctors as well.
I had to learn it to explain things to myself and to help my son.
So I'm glad you like it. It's important, and I have written about it before.
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