Really Not OK

The magick comes when you least expect it

I grew up in a rental house on a busy street that my parents eventually bought, aided by a kind landlord that let them apply almost 30 years of rent paid to the purchase of the house. It felt safe and secure and even if it was quirky with all the repairs my father had done himself over the years, it felt PERMANENT.

My parents, unhappy for years, eventually split and my father moved out, but my mother kept that house with a tenacity and fervor that made me wonder if I would settle similarly into the house I now own, digging my heels in until I grew rigid and bitter as she did, all alone.

But even as my mother donned her misery like an ever stiffening cloak, that house was still a comfort to me. I could go there and remember the Christmas tree in the dining room whose ornaments have slowly migrated to my tree over the years, long gone but in my mind still standing with its flashing lights if I looked hard enough. I could sit at the kitchen table where we were all required to check in at 6 PM every day for dinner no matter what because if my mother was going to put in the effort of cooking, you were gonna eat. I could still see inside the closet my father had built against one wall in my tiny bedroom where there was a bit of leftover wallpaper covered in jungle animals that was the backdrop for my teen years.

Now, things were different than when I lived there, certainly. Somehow the place shrunk to be impossibly small, far too small to have ever housed the four of us and all the unhappiness that we each wore under our armor of normalcy. My mother had little tolerance for complaining so if you felt the need to venture into the common areas of the house you didn’t do so until you were ok. Everyone was expected to always be ok.

You could cry in your room behind CLOSED doors if you needed to do that sort of thing. Before my parents’ divorce was final, my dad had moved into my old bedroom, so the shrine to the youngest child had been taken down. However, the room was really still mine and even 30 years later I was not done cleaning the last of my things out of the closet. As far as the rest of the house, my mom always had a great love of redecorating and she painted and changed the wallpaper every 3 years or so because that was what was “done” to keep your house fresh.

However, the house did take on a heavy energy that made it seem dark even when the sun pushed in and hit the white carpet that my mother had always wanted and installed after, as she phrased it “you kids aren’t always dragging in dirt anymore”.

For years I thought the sour mood there was just her, never finding happiness, and it made me think of a childhood spent quietly walking on eggshells so as not to upset mom because she liked order and if she didn’t get it she was prone to yelling at us until order was restored because, as my dad would say, “You know how stubborn your mother is”.

In the end, though, it wasn’t her presence that made the house feel so oppressive. The feeling lingered there when she went to assisted living and even after she entered hospice. It clung to the corners and hung in the air making me occasionally gasp in for a good deep breath to try to loosen the clenched feeling in my chest whenever I was there.

But even before that - though I missed the house when I wasn’t there, somehow when I was there, the memories kept fading and becoming more pale than when I was back at my own home trying to find a spot for whatever she had recently insisted I take with me.

And so, after she passed away, when it came time to sell the place, and it was cleared out of everything that had been there and filled with rental furniture from a staging company, I was confident that I had already carried away any good memories with me a carload at a time. It seemed as though I felt fine getting ready to sell it and as my brother and I did yardwork and cleaned gutters we joked around about how she could make us resent her from beyond the grave.

When the house went on the market it sold the first day. We wondered briefly if we had priced it too low, but it went to a developer and we both agreed we didn’t want the time or expense of rehabbing it. We felt like we were well rid of it. We closed on the house two weeks later and suddenly the place I had first experienced the world from, the place that held more pain than joy, but more safety than either of those things was about to be gone.

I vacillated from feeling nothing to feeling everything almost nonstop and my mind was caught in another place and time as I stalked around my own house trying to get some work done. I thought to myself that perhaps I should go there one last time to say goodbye.

And so I found myself two days before it was no longer “my house”, standing in the silent, empty rooms. I walked around, looking at the yard where the swing set had been and the breezeway where we had summer parties. I walked around the basement and my brother’s room, the living room and even the bathrooms, the house seemingly stretching and becoming a bit bigger again now that there was nothing in it.

Finally, though, I found myself in my mom’s bedroom. I felt like I had something to say, but as always with my mom, my words of complaint dried up and I felt that familiar responsibility to be ok settle in around my shoulders. It was sweltering upstairs and I felt sweat on my back. The only thing that came to mind to say was

“OK, mom, you can go now. You did what you came here to do and you don’t have to fight so hard anymore.”

The sentiment sounded hollow and dumb, standing in the hot room by myself. It felt incomplete, so I pulled out a book of blessings by an Irish poet named John O’Donohue that I had brought with me. I had found a passage that was entitled “On the Death of a Beloved” and I thought, well, I can at least read that.

My mother thought funerals were morbid and we had promised not to have one, so I never had any kind of formal goodbye and this seemed like as good a time as any. Then, if by accident or perhaps a magickal push from my guides, I opened the book to the wrong page and started reading a blessing called For Someone Who Did You Wrong. Mostly it’s about expressing that you were hurt and letting go of that hurt. At the end, though, the author reminded me that there are gifts to be had, even in pain.

The blessing ends like this:

Now a new kindness

Seems to have entered time

And I see how that hurt

Has schooled my heart

In a compassion I would have

Otherwise never learned.

Somehow now

I have begun to glimpse

The unexpected fruit

Your dark gift has planted

And I thank you

For your unknown work.

And then I went ahead and cried, and not even in my own bedroom, because I wasn’t really OK.