When I was a child looking
at my parents’ lives, you know
what I thought?
I thought
heartbreaking.
Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.
*from Meadowlands, 1996, by Louise Gluck. I have posted this here before but I love it so much that every single time I come across it (it’s saved on my computer – ‘What’s this again? Oh.’) I fall in love with it all over again. My parents had many flaws, and my mother was in many, many ways a horror show; she disliked me from the moment I was surgically removed from her abdomen (actually, before that), but gosh they loved one another, and gosh my dad was funny. They were funny together, when I wasn’t put, shoved reluctantly, in the middle, the problem, the other woman. Heartbreaking. Insane. And very, very funny because heartbreakingly insane. Funny because love and madness and family are a mystical, magical brew, if you get out alive.
A psychic in San Francisco once told me that I would not have survived had it not been for my sense of humor. Y’think?
I know. Amor fati.