Christina ~ May 11

 

My son often says that I don’t understand what it means to be part of a family, that I’m a loner. And he’s right: I am a loner, a loner by choice, by a conscious decision made back in my 20s to go off on my own, to not set up housekeeping with a partner, not to risk a life that I saw and still see as one of unhappiness. I was never alone when I was a child, the second eldest of (what would be by the time I was 12), six children, surrounded by screaming babies, by my angry mother and my violent step-father, and then when I left home at 16, living and working for a family that fought each other on the weekends while I sat in the maid’s room off the kitchen, so happy to be away from my own family, so happy not to be part of their family. Then a year in the dorms in Berkeley where I shared a tiny room with a roommate, miserable and trapped, then another year working as a live-in babysitter for a different, happier family up in the Berkeley Hills, but hectic and noisy, for they had four little girls under the age of ten. Finally, at age 19, I started living in apartments on my own, first in Berkeley, later on East 11^th Street in New York City. And then there were the decades living with roommates in large Upper West Side apartments, roommates who were my friends, who I enjoyed sitting around the kitchen table with, laughing and talking. But still, I wanted my own space, I wanted peace, I wanted privacy. The roommate period was followed by the 18 years I was the mother of a little boy, pretty much as a single mother (there was a father, but he didn’t stay around long), a little boy who became a teenager, and who left home to go to college and never really came back. And finally, these last 20 years I’ve lived alone, in my own apartment in New York City or in my own house in Woodstock, or now, in my own place in Northampton. So, I say to my son, yes, you’re right, I am a loner, but you’re wrong about one thing, I do know something about being part of a family, about living with people, maybe more than you do, living as you do with your wife and little boy in a big house on 35 acres in a hill town of Pioneer Valley. I do know about families and I admire people who can live happily in them. But it’s not for me.