The Irreconcilable Difference

I am wearing my Leo socks today in honor of the fact that, while I am sometimes vain and self-focused, I am also deeply, incredibly loving and generous, and often open to the Spirit. My Leo socks will hold my feet dear as I seek ways to hold myself dear and allow my friends to hold me dear on this day when I feel like a layer of my heart has become powder and is blowing away.

Yesterday I was disinherited. This was as inevitable as brush fires in California. Still, I was not prepared for the severing of ties with my parents, abrupt and final as it was after a short foray into truth telling. Both my mother and my father have spoken, and so I, along with my sister, am orphaned. Thank God for my sister.

Here's the thing I will always remember: I told my father that if this was the last time we would ever speak I needed him to know I love him. I told him the truth of my forgiveness and for just a few seconds I saw deep in his eyes the longing to believe and accept it. My poor dad.

He will deny that, of course. He will say I am completely crazy, delusional, brainwashed by "the feminists". I imagine he believes he has to say these things; I know in my heart he knows otherwise.

I let go of my mom years ago. I was washing clothes one day and I imagined her standing at her washing machine and yearning for me as I was standing at mine and yearning for her. Despite everything, we were mother and daughter, loving one another deeply, and yet between us lay a truly irreconcilable difference.

The same difference reared its head yesterday. It is not going to go away. If my parents eventually try to bridge the chasm they just created, I hope I remember that truth telling doesn't just happen one time. It is ongoing, relentless -- devastating.

I am stripping the bed in the guest room, washing the sheets and the towels. The windows are open to dissipate my mother's strong perfume. The soft, rain-laced air is soothing on my swollen eyes.