Party Like It's 1999

I had a weekend that could only be properly captured on film if Samuel Beckett wrote the screenplay and Steven Spielberg directed.

It was that absurd.

On Sunday, my brother Tyler came down from Vermont with his fiancee to attend a wedding shower in their honor, attended by church members who would not be at the April wedding but wanted to celebrate. It was held at my grandma's house, and she and I were the hostesses. And my mother came, with my youngest brother, Spencer.

In case it's hard to spot, "my mother came" is the punchline here. But I should start with context: not from the beginning, which would take too long, but from the beginning of this particular absurdity.

The last year my family was all in one piece -- and this is a loose designation -- was 1999.

My mother kicked me out of the house after my first year in college, over chores. It was even stupider than it sounds and was, as most things are, secretly about something else. On the day I left, she followed me around the house asking why I was "rejecting the family" and "putting [her] through hell," and saying various insulting things about my character. (But this was nothing new.) The weekend following, she put all my things on the back porch and arranged to be gone when I picked them up. She hung up on me when I tried to call the boys, sent back letters I mailed, stood in the doorway laughing at me (literally, laughing) when I went to ask for my birth certificate. I was reduced to tears in front of the police officer that eventually showed up; I was reduced to tears by many, many things, but they were mostly tears of relief at being out. I lived with my grandparents, her foster parents, through vacations and summers until I left for China.

She kicked my brother, Tyler, out of the house after his second year in college, for equally ridiculous reasons. (She said he had put his name on her AAA membership.) He moved in with Grandma and Grandpa, too. My expulsion from the family had lasted some six months and been broken when I finally replied in anger to a series of hateful emails she had been sending me, but Tyler's lasted much longer. Most of us who knew Mom began to suspect that she would never speak to him again. By the wedding shower on Sunday, it was going on three years.

But something must have changed. I have no idea what it was. I had had several hours-long conversations with her since moving back here, about how she should reconsider her complete rejection of Ty, but she couldn't see that she might be wrong, might be interpreting events rather than relating "the real facts." She couldn't see that three years of estrangement was too vicious a punishment for any offense, let alone something as small as Tyler's. (Also nothing new: Once, Tyler was punished with two years of no television for not doing chores.) She wouldn't, or couldn't, budge.

Until she did, last week, as though a switch had been flipped, or everything that happened in the past three years had been erased. I've seen her do this before, on a smaller scale: When we were young, when she got upset, her face contorted with rage, and if I asked why she was angry, her face would change completely, become placid and calm, and she would say "I'm not angry." It was frightening.

It was a strain on her, being at my grandparents'. She had cut them off completely, too, first for housing us after we were excommunicated, and then last summer for letting Spencer, my youngest brother, see Tyler; I didn't expect them to ever have contact with her again. But she treated them the way she would treat anyone at the party.

I tend to believe this means she's angrier at everyone else than she admits, too.

We sat, the four of us family, me, my mom and two brothers, and talked and told stories about when we kids were little, and laughed. We took an "updated family photo." But the strain wore on her until she suddenly demanded to be taken home -- not fifteen minutes from now, after I cleaned up, but NOW. I drove her and Spencer home to their apartment, and continued down the street to mine.

I had a headache. I still have a headache.

This happens to me: that when I get what I want, I am overwhelmed by the conflict between the joy at getting it -- finally, finally -- and the sorrow of the memory of years without, years of missing. Every moment we sat laughing brought to mind weeks and months when we didn't. I can only embrace both at once; I cannot divorce the two. My mother cannot marry them.

And that is why apprehension blots out joy and sorrow. She has not changed, not fundamentally, and it's likely only a matter of time before this -- estrangement, rejection -- happens again.

At least now we can tell ourselves the bad times are likely to end eventually, too.

I can live with that.