leiru13

I just made dinner for my foster mom and brother and real father. It was a marginal dinner but a good time, and we were all a little tipsy. My dad played some jazz while we sat and listened. Aaron and I did the dishes together and talked about old times when we used to live together and wander the streets of this podunk town in the middle of the night. I told him that I used to wish my father was married to his mother instead of the womain he is married to, how we would be siblings and everyone would live dysfunctionally ever after. I lived with his mother and him the summer after my freshman year, while I was on chemo, because his mother had put her foot down as far as my living with my real family was concerned, for my well being. I learned to call her "Mom" and she looked after me as a mother would. Aaron's older sister was gone that summer; she was my best friend throughout high school, even though we were worlds apart. We graduated ninth and tenth in class...she was captain of the soccer team while I ran the literary magazine... I cooked dinner in the tiny kitchen of their apartment for them, in exchange for a room and a family that resembled something I could love. In that summer, I undid so much damage of the years before, instilling in myself a new faith in people, and in family. They didn't drink, they kept no alcohol in the house. Aaron and I sat in his room and looked out on the city and smoked a joint together some evenings before I took off on my evening social calls.
When I am here I go to the apartment which has such a familar smell and feel to it, and many nights I have curled up with my head in my foster mom's lap to cry about some familial crisis or some boy or the fear I have of not being able to make it on my own. My pretend mother always understands. My pretend mother explains to me that I will have a difficult time when I decide to adopt because of my life expectancy; she is the only person who is really frank with me in these matters. She knows that one day I'll want children, and my secret hurt that I can't have children of my own flesh and blood, since I have gone through all the effort to repair my soul that I might raise them without the poison that runs in my own family. She knows every last one of my fears, in the most honest way that only a mother who is not my mother can know. Aaron, I love like a brother, while at the same time wishing I could find a man like him, with his ease and sense of self and his understanding of where he wants to go and who he wants to be.

I am sleepy, the slight buzz is wearing off and I need to work in the morning. Someone out in Portland, please send me pictures of the cherry trees in bloom, and maybe some token lilacs.

love
laurie