And What is a Family?

The calm after the storm is more difficult than the storm itself.

When I’m running around trying to help a family in a terrible situation, I don’t have time to think about how terrible it is. After it’s over– when I’ve failed to rescue anyone, but I’ve done everything I can, and life goes on– that’s when I start to feel it fully.

I am much healthier than I used to be. I’ve grown up a lot from when my codependent dance with the Lost Girl’s family nearly killed me. I’m almost strong enough to handle a nightmare situation like the one with the family I’ve called the Artful Dodgers and not be destroyed by it. I know I did everything I could. I know I couldn’t save them, but maybe I made things better, and now my role in their lives is over. They’re in another slum house, in another part of LaBelle, and they are no longer my business. On an intellectual level, I accept that, but my nervous system doesn’t.  I keep waking up shaking, with my heart pounding in my ears and all my muscles aching.

The other neighbors are being so kind. The mother and grandmother of the Baker Street Irregulars brought me barbecued ribs and macaroni and cheese and broccoli, all on the same flowered plate, a sticky tower of dinner big enough for six people. The Man Called Dad did the barbecuing, and he’s an excellent barbecue cook. The mother and grandmother baked that macaroni and cheese to perfection, with a creamy sauce the color of buttercups. I can’t eat barbecue sauce or pasta because of the gluten sensitivity and PCOS, but Adrienne and Michael had a feast.

I told the Baker Street Irregulars to watch the weather for a dry day, so I could take them to the lake beach. Their little disabled girl likes to play in the sand more than anything. She would go to the beach every day if she could.

“We love you like family,” said the Baker Street Irregulars.

What does that mean?

What is a family?

Michael had work all day, so I went to Sunday Mass by myself. The Baker Street Irregulars keep inviting me to come with them to their Protestant church down the block, and I can’t think how to explain why Catholics are so persnickety about which church you attend.

I like the parish I’ve found. It isn’t the strict traditionalist one with the Tridentine Mass, and it isn’t the silly one with the sentimental music and the babbling Charismatics. It’s the parish that comes the closest to plain old vanilla Catholicism that a Catholic church in Steubenville could possibly come. I don’t dare try to join any groups or come to the social activities. I can’t get up the courage to even sign papers officially joining the parish. I don’t think I could possibly ever do that in a Catholic parish again.

But I like to sit in the back and watch the families.

There are so many pleasant-looking families at that church. There are young couples: first-time mothers with their round pregnant bellies, their husbands hovering over them like museum curators fussing over a piece of art. There are dutiful mothers walking their noisy babies back to the cry room, and dutiful fathers walking toddlers outside for a talking-to when they misbehave. There are parents with great big gaggles of children, five and six and seven children, all dressed up in Sunday clothes, taking up a whole pew. There are grandparents that show up with their children and grandchildren.

Sometimes, when the children are taken to walk around in the back, they press their faces to the stained glass window to see the world in a strange light. I like to look through the window with them.

I like it best when the children are being impossible, and instead of getting exasperated, their mother smiles. I would like a mother to smile at me, and I would like to be a smiling mother.

I tried so hard to make my own mother love me, but she couldn’t. I did everything I could to make up for being such a burden to her, but all she would say was “it was the least you could do” and “you’re just faking to get food” and “of all the children I ever had, Mary, you hurt me the most.” I tried to think of the Virgin Mary my mother, but my experiences at Franciscan University ruined that relationship forever. Oftentimes, I can’t sleep unless I turn her icon to face the wall. I tried so hard to BE a mother, but I was only ever able to have one baby. I wanted the Church to be a mother and a family to me, but she’s not. My relationship with the Church is something different. I don’t have a family.

My mother used to tell me that the secular world was doing everything it could to “attack the family,” and only the Church stood in its way.

What is a family?

Is a family just the jumble of people you happen to find yourself mixed up in, through genetics?

Is a family something that’s under attack? Is a family something you can only find in a Catholic Church? Why, then, have a good half of the worst families I’ve ever met been here in the Catholic Church, and the other half Protestant like my neighbors? And why are the very strongest and most loving families also evenly divided between those groups?

Sometimes, when I receive Holy Communion, I pray for God to please be a family to me. Sometimes, I am too afraid to receive Holy Communion, because of that old superstition that if you are sinful, the Host will poison you and make you waste away.  On this Sunday, I went to receive Holly Communion, and asked Him to poison me and get it over with, because I couldn’t take this anymore. But He didn’t.

When I got home from Mass, there was only one cat having dinner on the porch. Charlie, the feisty cat the Artful Dodgers starved and bred for kittens last year, was enjoying a can of fish. Sparkles, whom I re-named Buster, the affectionate cat the Artful Dodgers abandoned to starve a week ago, was missing.

Jimmy’s boy came over to inspect the garden and get some zucchini for his mother. I was glad for the company. I showed him around and let him pick squash and bush beans himself. I reminded him that I’m going to take him on a field trip to the Carnegie museum to see the dinosaur skeletons, just as soon as I have enough money to renew my membership. And as he was leaving, I mentioned that the Buster hadn’t come to dinner yet.

“Oh,” said Jimmy’s boy. “The Dodgers took him back. They came to get the rest of their stuff from the old house and they took him back.”

I felt my mind disappear into the upper atmosphere, just as it did when the cat caught the pigeon.

I wasn’t even sure that Jimmy’s boy was telling the truth. He likes to make up tales. After another neighbor went away to hospice care, he would tell me lurid stories about the way she’d actually been murdered and her ghost that haunted his basement.  But Buster was gone. She wasn’t in the neighbors’ garages. She wasn’t in my house. And I haven’t seen her since.

What is a family?

Is it the people who keep you for a pet because they think you’re sweet, and then leave you with nothing when they’re having a hard time– and then come to drag you back when you find a safe place, because they’re bored, and they’d like to have you for a pet again?

What is a family, and why do they hurt so much? What is a family, and what are we supposed to do about them? Can we make them cease to exist, so that nobody will ever feel this suffering anymore? Or is the arrangement I’m thinking of not a family at all?

I stayed outside late, sitting on the porch watching the light fade.

The remaining cat bolted back and forth across the grass, chasing fireflies.

I am not all right now, but I’ll be all right soon.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.