All of my years have been formative: Mississippi

 I'm strolling my way through Ann Patchett's latest "These Precious Days", pausing at this or that immutable truth, or inviting idea, or gazing fondly at some of our shared landscapes.  The Deep South is one of those landscapes, and while I spent three of my four high school years there, and then eight of my post-middle age, that storied and story-telling culture is firmly but ineffably implanted in the middle of my bones.  It does that, the Gothic South: it sneaks in there, implants itself, and never leaves, like one's elderly maiden aunt.

Patchett's husband Karl VanDevender was born and raised in Meridian, Mississippi, and I can vaguely remember spending endless and lazy, indulgent summer days at the local country club swimming pool with either him or maybe it was his brother.  He could execute complicated dives, I recall, and he was of course Netherlander blond, getting blonder, increasingly tinted with chlorine green over the summer months, like me.  We were never part of the same crowd, but the name was odd enough in that part of the country that it, and its bearers, stick in my memory.  

Just seeing Patchett write a scene set in Meridian jerks me back to an adolescence fraught, as are everybody's, with drama and longing and rage and appalling risk-taking.  I imagined myself a rebel in the land of The Rebel: it was, and continues to be upside down, inside out, and horribly lonely.  For a world of Rebels, there was remarkably little room for a singular rebel, and I was barely tolerated, but always the subject of fascination -- maybe like an albino rhino in a zoo.  I am sure I scared the living daylights out of the gentler Rebels, while I intrigued the more socially and intellectually curious of them.  The nigger-knocking, red-neck underclass just watched me from a distance; they left me alone (except for one brief interlude where I dated one of their second-tier leaders, probably just to get my father's attention -- as I am wont to say, I think I'm still grounded for it).  

Where do you put the relief?

 It seems that my long-estranged daughter has been diagnosed with cancer; I can tell because -- although one of them alluded to it in a recent Facebook post (he never has been able to keep his mouth completely shut, that one) -- neither of her brothers who still communicate with me will answer my queries for clarification.

I say to them that I need to know these things, whatever the daughter's feelings about it.  After three days, I'm no longer sure I do.  If I am to respect her demands for complete disconnection, then, whether I need it or not, I'm not going to get it.  If I found out any details, what would/could I do about it?  

Certainly she would find no comfort in a visit, or even a phone call/email/text from me.  It would be painful for me in any case because of overt rejection and God knows what kind of a scene.  (All my kids are drama-queens; I can't imagine where they get it.)  (A) 

   (B), though I am a very competent healer, I know she would reject all of my efforts in that direction.  (I do know that healing operates from any distance, with or without the consent of the wounded, but there is a particular etiquette to it that I am honor-bound to obey: I.e., stay out of other people's heads and hearts unless invited in.)  

    Further (C), it's not kind of me to observe the implicit requirement of putting third parties -- the brothers -- in the middle of a transaction; no matter how they got there, either by way of their sister or the "helpfulness" of the brothers themselves, it's just not psychologically healthy to be, or to use, go-betweens.  It might relieve some pressure on the primary and tertiary, but it's cowardly and exploitative, and I can't justify participating in it myself.

I have only recently become detached enough not to moo at the thought of this truncation.  There is yet another brother (how COULD I have consented to so many children?) who long ago divested himself of connection with me, and even to a certain extent from his siblings.  (Though the rejection of me was not quite so pure that he would not take free room and board for an Atlanta layover on his way home from St. Barts, or relatively free use of my family's vacation house in Martha's Vineyard.  Mustn't be snarky, but there it is.)  I accept and even hardly recall that son's rejection; it might be personal, it might not be, but it's fruitless to beat that particular dead horse.  I'm in the process of putting the estrangement by my daughter pretty much in the same tidy storage box, resting on the very bottom of the garage shelving.  Almost got it shoved in, when this possible life-threatening diagnosis came up, and now that the damned box has been reopened, I find myself picking through the foxed and tear-stained contents all over again.

Then there's the relief.  I'm beginning to think I never should have had children in the first place; I wasn't very good at it (just ask them), though I did what the essential contract with their father laid out:  I was, in turn, the brood mare, then the wet-nurse, then the governess, all the while imperfectly maintaining the house and household while he went on the road.  With his (reluctant) help, I got them all through school and bachelor's degrees; none of them has been arrested (well, detained anyway), none does harmful drugs, all support themselves, for the most part all have what they want from life.  I don't take much credit, but I don't deserve much blame for their failures either.  Besides, passing the age of thirty means one has to take responsibility for the state one is in; parents are irrelevant unless they actively enable one's infantilism.  God knows I haven't done that.

So there is within me a flicker of relief; this is the good part of estrangement: I don't have to fret and pace in sleepless worry.  I don't have to monitor symptoms, wading through insurance papers; I don't have to comfort, spoon-feed and change diapers on the invalid.  There's that.  What a relief!  I can live my own life.