COMING TOGETHER--67

This afternoon Mom was telling me about her father. He was a banker in rural Missouri during the depression and later. He worked all day at the bank, then came home to take care of his invalid mother, my grandmother. He would do everything for her, after a full day at the bank. He had no life of his own. My mother grew up with that as the example for her.

I have wondered about the effect of that on her and in our family.

It does make me resent her. I wonder if she is using me to do what her father was willing to do. I have no desire to be that kind of man for her, as her father was.

I am realizing what a nothing life I have had. I never had a career, never had a family or a real wife--although I was married for 4 years--never had a household of children.

If I take after my grandfather, I have had no family to give me any kind of satisfaction in exchange for the labor, the social slavery he went through. I hope to God I have not passed that along to my daughters.

My life is fragile in the sense that it depends so much on my mother being alive, living as well as she does. I often think about what it would be like if my mother were not alive or not living on her own with me. I don't have a good enough job to live by myself, unless she dies and I have my inheritance. I am trapped by her, by the life she has with me, by these family patterns. It feels like a curse has been sent down from my

grandfather through my mother to me.

I'd like to get out of it but I have no life to go to then. It's like having a bad relationship is the only thing better than having none at all. So I stay in this prison I'm in because I would have no life outside of it.