*This is a fragment I started In 2005, which – oh, maybe I’ll build on, one day? Who knows. Thanks for being here, and reading!
In my late teens and twenties, I believed in reincarnation. This worried a bit me in that I was not a Buddhist or from India (or at least I thought that was the religion and country that had the whole reincarnation thing going on) and I couldn’t imagine myself wholly embracing an idea I wasn’t part of in a cultural way, as my mom did with her Irish and German Catholicism. I don’t know what I read, can’t remember, but I know there was a book or two that turned me onto the concept of reincarnation, and I know now that part of this interest (hell, most of it) was a deep desire for a ‘do over’. This was primarily because my Catholic mother was, how shall I say it, not rational about me and I was not happy being her daughter. In truth, I was not happy being me, period, and never had been so yes, let me have another life, please, please, please.
While I cannot identify the moment or series of hours or days during which I initially became aware I was not happy in my own self, in my own skin, I do know that I initially thought about killing myself when I was fourteen, during my first year in high school. I was president of my class and we were a volatile, divided group. It was nineteen seventy-three and my older sister, my mom’s favorite, was also a freshman, but in college. This loss, of her company (so mature, so well-behaved, so quiet) was a huge one for my mom. I was what she was left (stuck) with, despite having two other children at home, and that was not good.
Additionally, my sister’s education, at Rhode Island School of Design, caused a good deal of stress in my parents’ marriage. My mother was determined she would get the best education that money could buy, and my dad went along with it (he had bought a house without telling my mom, several years earlier, so he ‘owed’ her) but it was hitting him like a ton of bricks as her four years there, with no scholarship or financial aid, cost them their entire life savings up to that point. Although my mom adored my dad, who owned one of the two small, independent pharmacies in town, when there were issues between them, when she was angry with my dad, or disappointed, it was toward me those feelings were expressed.
My mom’s other children, others still at home, those who were not me, were well-behaved (better behaved than me), quiet types (quieter than me) but the loss of her favorite, at the tender age of seventeen (a year early!), to a schmancy art college in a big city, was devastating. Plus, my sister was dating a person of whom, however well-connected and educated (he was at Yale when my sister was at RISD, his father was a surgeon), she did not approve. He was dark. He was hairy. He was male. He was dating my spoiled blond princess of a sister and while I couldn’t and can’t stand the guy personally, the truth is I doubt any man would’ve been good enough in my mother’s eyes for her perfect daughter; yet, yet, that it was this guy, with his unruly hair, barrel chest, and arrogant manner that never aimed to please, merely added insult to injury. It was as if her blond goddess of a daughter was being defiled, drawn into the underworld by the lord of the dead, when in fact the guy was merely half-French, half-Egyptian, and as a consequence hairy as fuck, as well as being smart as fuck and insecure to a degree I can only characterize as off-the-charts, which led to his appearance of arrogance. But! At least he was Catholic, my mom knew that, but he claimed he was an atheist, that all of their future children would be raised atheist, which – you have to laugh – did not happen.
In fact, his children were all raised in the Catholic Church, and one of them, their eldest, is – on all issues – to the right of the Pope on all issues. Conservative as fuuuuuuuuck. Any sex that isn’t procreative is the work of the devil type horseshit, y’know? Fun guy, if you like the type (I do not).