FOR MY FAMILY, MY DOOR IS OPENED, BUT NO ONE IS KNOCKING.

art by Caragh Geiser

            I’ve never been one to hold a grudge, hold anyone accountable for their actions or allow any lack of judgment to hinder any future relationships, especially with my family, at least not for any actual length of time.   Depending on what they did or said, it usually took no more than a few hours or days until I was over it. Family, though strangely, I’ve never had a loving one, has always meant something to me. Perhaps it was the many sentimental T.V. shows I watched, the family movies I saw, or the Norman Rockwell illustrations popping up everywhere representing what a family is supposed to be like that might have created these false illusions in me.

There is also the possibility of my desire to belong, understand, and forgive. As a foster child, I learned early on what rejection was; though I didn’t fully understand it completely, I nonetheless felt it. By age 5, I had started to withdraw, observe, and keep quiet. It was not necessarily out of choice but rather out of circumstances; I was slow, dimwitted, or, as my grandmother would say, “retarded.”    So, of course, I would pick up the most straightforward representation of what a family was supposed to be, meant to be, and what I desired it to be, and that is what stuck with me throughout my entire life, regardless of the family I actually had. 

Words or a means to express myself didn’t come to me until many years later, but by that time, I was so far behind that my father gave up on seeing any potential in me, and I gave up on caring, connecting, or communicating. I was simply just a passenger in the back seat along for the ride with no real direction, say or worry, just going where the wind blows, where the road travels, and where faith took me.     Just like the 5-year-old child I once was, sitting in the back of a station wagon while a social worker drove me from house to house until I came to the one that would finally have me.

For my entire life, I had always been that 5-year-old along for the ride, watching the street lines zipping by on highways, byways, and winding roads leading to my next home. I suppose I grew up being taught that nothing lasts forever, but because of my strong desire to belong to a family, I refused to believe that, despite my family constantly reminding me. 

Understanding more than I should about abandonment, rejection, and failure, I made a promise to myself to always keep my doors open to my family, despite their flaws, critical judgment, and cruelty. It is because I was not a fast learner of life, such as my siblings were, that I can leave my door open.   Call it naivety mixed in with all those sentimental visions of Norman Rockwell’s depiction of a family that keep me the way I am. Regardless, they are my family, and I love them, but it’s been many years since I last saw them. Still, my door is always opened to them, at least until I no longer can remember, and we become nothing more than strangers with fading, distorted memories of a time long ago, back when we were family.