wednesday, july 14
about secrets i had a conversation yesterday about secrets, and i was a bit shocked to realize just how many things can be buried in people for long periods of time. i know that many of those things seem to be things we "don't need to know", or things there never seemed a good time to bring up, but still. do i have any major secrets? i can't think of any, so i guess not. i mean, i have secrets, but nothing i believe would stun anybody terribly if they found out. perhaps it's because i'm still young... i don't know. a secret (i think i may have told this a long time ago, but will do it again) one evening when i was sixteen i walked into our kitchen and found my mother and older brother talking casually about an 'annelie'. i assumed they were talking about my cousin by the same name, and simply continued to put together a bowl of cereal with milk. and then i heard the word "half-sister." i got curious and asked who they were talking about. i got the reply "oh, you know, your half-sister, annelie." i don't think i could have looked more surprised if ronald mcdonald had just slapped me with a fish. it seems for sixteen years they had omitted to tell me that i had a half-sister that lived in a city closeby. she was fathered by my dad about a year before my mom and him met, and is therefore in her thirties now. my dad was supposed to marry the girl he'd gotten pregnant but didn't because he was a newly come immigrant from yugoslavia who barely knew the language and she was the daughter of a rather wealthy man who figured my dad was a gold digger. a few weeks after that i got a phonecall from annelie. we spoke on the phone for about an hour, but because i was scared (of what, i don't know) i made some excuse up when she asked if i wanted to visit that day, and that was that. i haven't had any contact with her since. i know that she's around 33 years old. i know that she has two kids - a 5-6 year old girl named hanna and a younger son (i'm an aunt!). people have told her that she looks a lot like me, only blonde. to this day, i still don't know the correct answer to the question "do you have any siblings?"; it feels odd to say "i have an older brother, and a half-sister, but i've never met her." ah well.
about stories i sometimes listen to people tell about their family stories and find myself jealous. it's not that we don't have stories - i'm sure we do. it's just that we never tell them to each other. part of it probably stems from the fact that i've only known one grandparent in my life, my grandmother vera, and that all relatives on my father's side are strangers to me because they're spread out in bosnia, germany and who knows wherelse... anywhere but here. my grandmother has told me memories from her childhood sometimes, as have my mother, but it's often only by request from me to "tell me something." my father never spontaneously tells me anything, and because of his broken swedish, it's hard for me to completely understand what he does tell me. so i decided i'd ask mom yesterday. i asked her about anything she could remember (they have been divorced for over 16+ years nod), and she tried to answer me. mostly i just wanted things i'd never gotten a straight answer to before. it was odd to learn that my dad actually has about 10 half-siblings. 10 uncles and aunts i've never met? how many cousins does that mean i have? the mind boggles. i sometimes suffer from feeling disconnected. i guess i'll have to stop that now and just sit and think about myself being connected to a whole spiderweb of relatives walking around on this earth whose names i don't even know. oh ghod. i feel like somebody who just heard about the six degree theory. i'm such a nerd. |
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