Family Roles

I'll just say it loud and clear: my mom is dead. She died from stage four pancreatic cancer back in the fall of 2016. It sucks but it's also just a fact of my life.

Everyone says you don't really know what you miss until it's gone and boy is that true. I was only fifteen when my mom died so she wasn't there like any mom would loved to have been when I got my license, or when I went on my first date, or when I won this super cool art award. Well, that's not entirely true. I got to tell my mom about it in the hospital. 

I'm not trying to brag, believe me, but this award was actually a pretty big deal. Winners were invited to receive their award with celebrity speakers in Carnegie Hall in New York City, no less! I played it cool saying that a ton of kids win and that it didn't take me very long. But I was excited to tell Mom not only because it was the first major award I'd ever gotten, but because it was art. We weren't particularly close but art was something that she and I alone shared a distinct interest (and not to mention talent) in. But a couple weeks later she passed away and all of a sudden I unconsciously hated that award. I say unconsciously because I only recently realized the reason behind why I was so upset about attending this ceremony. I mean, I was in NYC for the first time! It should have been exciting! Yet, all I could think about was how much I did not want to attend this thing. It wasn't just because I was a hormonal teenager or because I thought my piece didn't deserve all that extravagance (honestly, I still don't think so). It was because my mom wasn't there to share what would have been an amazing, once in a lifetime experience. She didn't get to be proud of her daughter who inherited an important part of herself.

She didn't get to do a lot of things moms are expected to get to do, like hear about college life and boys, or get calls about that one apple pie recipe she has, or meet her first granddaughter (who is adorable, by the way). So when we talk about family roles, I can't help thinking about how much my mom is missing. 

I also think about how our roles in my family were forced to shift dramatically. A lot of my mom's role in our family was placed on our oldest sibling, my sister, who was unfairly allotted an adult rather than a grieving child like the three of us siblings. She had to hold herself together for us and probably even my dad, while she was preparing Thanksgiving dinner basically by herself, two weeks after. And just as my mom would have to make it feel as normal as possible for us, which meant sparing no effort or side dish. Then troubled when our dad started dating again relatively soon after, she whipped out her marriage and family bachelor's degree and as far as I know, pretty much told him off, which probably would have represented how the other siblings felt too, had we shared how we really felt about it. Plus, simultaneously dealing with but mostly worrying about me, who was frighteningly irritable and really quite rude (you'd better be safe and not get on my bad side), while my other siblings were away.

I don't know how she did it. She still does it even now that she has her own baby. Now, as an adult myself, I can only imagine emotional burden after emotional burden. 

I don't really know what my role as the youngest child was and I don't really know what it's supposed to be. The spoiled one (check)? The crybaby (check)? Now that I've grown up a little, and I'm reflecting on all that has happened, rather than ignoring it like I used to, I feel that it's my responsibility to get my family to face our fear: communicating and expressing our feelings. I hate seeing relationships dwindle and no one doing anything about it. I hate that 90% of the time, I don't know how any one of us is really feeling. So to heck with "I hate confrontation"! My family is gonna talk about our feelings, darn it!