A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And-Five

I have been having a lot of unpleasant dreams of late.  Many of them revolve around feelings I have in relationship to some of the issues in my family, and feelings I have about home and loss.  As I have mentioned, my house where I live is under renovation right now, and, while Melissa and I are here, it feels a bit partial right now.  As well, I am still feeling quite uncomfortable with the reality that my brother is moving a few doors down, especially since my expressing my feelings about the issue resulted in my brother choosing to back a car into me.  So, I am feeling a bit out of sorts here, right now, and the issue was compounded by the sense that I was not welcomed in the home where my mother lives here in Florida, a house that I visited many times in childhood when seeing my paternal Grandparents,  who bought the house in the nineties.  It always felt like a home to me, but my experiences in the past few months have whittled away at that feeling.  I have spent a great deal of time cooking for my family at the house, because Melissa and I do not have tile in our kitchen, and each time I do, my mother is clear that I shouldn't touch anything myself, even looking for spices on her spice racks.  All this has been hard for me.  My mother's actions suggest she sees me as an intruder in her home who she grudgingly tolerates, and I am kind of stuck dealing with both her and my brother right now.  I love them, and believe they love me,, but that does not change that they have been acting in very hurtful ways.

So, as I have said, these issues were already resonating with me in terms of my feelings about having a home, but that has been magnified a great many times, now.  You see, I grew up in an apartment in New York, in a building that my family owned and managed, and where my Mother had lived since childhood, as had her father.  It is a complicated matter, of course, and I am not unaware of the complications and inequities of the rental real estate market, but it was still my home, and the home of my ancestors, dating back three generations.  It was my neighborhood, and I have a great many people that I have known since childhood from the building, as well as those older residents I was close with who have passed away.   My family chose to sell, for a lot of reasons, and, while I was not part of that decision, I understand it.  But, it does not change that I feel bereft and cut off from an aspect of my familial identity, that I feel the deep loss of my familial home.  And it had to come at a time when I was already having issues around this theme...

I hoe writing this helps to clear my mind before I get to sleep tonight, but, in truth, I do not feel anything has been exorcised.

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