happening around here

full circle

This photo won't look anything special to you. It could be any family, sitting down to any meal, any where. You've got photos like this. That's Greer eye-balling the camera, eating a sausage. Abigail's in the high chair, and the other two kids are the birthday boys. Paddy is sitting next to my dad, then there's my step-mum, with my brother-in-law next to her. Sounds pretty ordinary, yes. Then there are the people just outside the frame. My sister and my mum are in the kitchen, and there are more kids in the lounge behind me as I stand taking the photo.

I guess that kind of makes me right in the middle. Which is exactly how I've grown up feeling. I'm the only child of my parents, who split before I was two. My dad re-married soon after, and I have two half-sisters on his side. My mum had my sister when I was three (I've already told you a bit of this days of our lives saga here) and we grew up together, so although she was technically my half-sister, our half-ness was never really an issue.

How that played out for me, though, was that I lived my life in two worlds. One world, the safe, ordered, controlled and loving world of home with Mum, and the other the completely different but exciting, fun, and slightly wild world of my dad's place.

When I was sixteen I went on a school trip to a french film. It was "Romauld et Juliet," a modern revision of Romeo and Juliet. In the movie a high-powered executive falls in love with his office cleaner, and is so smitten that he leaves his wife for her. By the end the wife has found herself a new man, and the final scene is of a picnic in a rambling garden, where the entire family re-unites, along with the new partners on either side. It's a loving, warm and very happy scene. The executive is blissfully happy with his new love, his ex is happy with hers also, and their children play and laugh and eat happily between them. I'm not going to edit out all those "happy's"... because happy was exactly the word for it, and the thing I remember vividly, twenty years later. I knew right then that that was my dream of dreams. I dreamt that one day all the parts of my crazy family would come together, happily. I kept it to myself, but I never forgot.

Fast forward twenty years to this weekend, and that scene at the top of this post. We were at my sisters' house, celebrating the birthdays of her sons, with my mum, plenty of friends, as well as one of my half-sisters, my Dad and step-mum. At one point I was sitting at the table with Mum on one side, and Dad on the other. And we were all happy.

Could I, at sixteen, ever have imagined that scene exactly? No, I couldn't have imagined it at all. It was a wild dream, the stuff of movies and happy endings. But it happened. I got my happy ending.

I wasn't the most important person in that room, not by a long shot. I sat in the background for much of it, enjoying the good company. But it was a special day for me. I've spent most of my life living in two parts. One side the part of me that fits with my mother, and the other side the part of me that fits with my father. I haven't always seen it quite like this, but it's taken me a long time to figure myself out, and this is partly why. It's also the back story to that chaos I told you about when I last wrote. This chaos I've had to come to terms with has partly come from living as if I've still got two worlds inside of me.

A couple of days after I wrote that post I went to spiritual direction. Wouldn't you know it, but we got talking about my crazy life, housework, and chaos. We also got talking about what my parents' respective houses were like. To say they were different is an understatement. I realised then that I have never fully acknowledged that my values and opinions about life and keeping house come from two completely different sources. If I've ever felt confused and slightly split-personality about these things it's understandable. And the fact is, I'm not a chip off either block. I'm my own random version, as we all are in some way. But I really am my own version. And during spiritual direction I realised that I need to start living like it. I need to integrate my two inner-worlds into a new one, uniquely mine, and get on with my life.

Funnily enough, within two days of that realisation, that chaos I wrote about was all but gone. The vacuum cleaner got put away after three weeks of waiting. I found the camera charger! The corners of chaos in the study and master bedroom are dealt to. The house is mostly tidy, and mostly clean, which is pretty much how I like it. I know Mum will always see something that needs doing, and that Dad may sometimes turn up and find it too tidy for his liking, but I'm ok with that. It's my house.

And as far as special family gatherings go, I'm thinking I'll be getting plenty more of them. It might even get so that they don't feel so special any more. For our girls those gatherings are already normal. They think nothing of having three sets of grandparents, they don't think it's strange that I have a step-mother, or sisters that are not sisters to each other. They love and feel at home in every part of our extended family. In fact, they are richer for it. And so am I.