56. Ordinary time.
On solstice and estrangement.
Solstice is here, and something is ending.
Starting in the small light of the shortest day of the year, and arriving here at this longest, brightest day, this year has been a long season of celebrations and remembrances, some more fraught than others: my father’s birthday and Father’s Day, my mother’s birthday and Mother’s Day, the death days of my friends Matt and Glo, my husband’s 50th birthday, my son’s high school graduation.
I made chicken and waffles for graduation, like Glo did for her son, and a big strawberry cake, and I wore her red slip under a thrifted pink and red floral print linen dress, a confection. I didn’t realize until right before the party that it was also her birthday, the fifth one since she died. Of course it is, I thought. Happy birthday, baby.
I’ll never forget how, on her 50th birthday, in another life, she tubed solo down the French Broad River for hours, from Bent Creek all the way to Craven Street, and then we all met up at El Parieso for margaritas and after we sang happy birthday and she blew out the candles, she straddled the cake, sunburnt, and lowered herself down over it, sitting on the cake ever so gingerly, just a kiss, she said.
The high points of this season were gorgeous, blessedly so, and I savored them; the lows were bittersweet, but I managed to savor them too. But one snuck by me, unnoticed until now: the fifth anniversary of some day in April (not sure which day) that I decided to cease and desist all communication with my parents, my siblings, and all their kith and kin.
Terrifying, unthinkable then, that I would do what I’ve now done: that I would simply stop. Stop arguing, stop trying to prove myself, stop accepting breadcrumbs, stop pleading, stop exposing myself and my family to a constant barrage of annihilating contempt and disdain. That I would pick up and move across the country, that I would miss all their milestones and bar them from all of mine.
I didn’t just lose them when I left them, I lost everyone and everything connected them: summer camp friends, nieces, nephews, neighbors, the land, the roads, the trees, the creek out back, my grandparents’ farm, legacy, lineage. So many babies out with that blackened bathwater.
Estrangement happens slowly at first, then all at once, and there were so many years leading up to this point, a million trampled opportunities for repair, a million unheeded bids for connection.
Now, five years of living into that decision—which, not at all coincidentally, immediately preceded and facilitated the beginning of my recovery from alcohol use—the primary emotion I feel when thinking about my estrangement from my family of origin is not grief but relief, and gratitude for the self that did not drown, but saved myself.
What choice do I now have but to walk on? What else can I do but lie in this bed that I had to make? What else but to try to do right by the self of me who had to choose authenticity over connection, after a lifetime of doing the opposite? I never should have had to choose, and it was never a choice so much as a last resort, a last grasp for agency in a situation in which I was utterly powerless.
I’ve noticed now, over these five years, that shame takes up much less space in my psyche, and acceptance is beginning to take the center. There’s a grief in that too, letting go of so much of the bright rage that has propelled me through these times.
But it’s true, much of the nervous charge surrounding my parents, my siblings, dissipates now when I think about them. I am now able to remember that, though they are not people who are safe for me to be around, they are still complex and whole human people, and, while remaining fully oriented to the harms that I experienced, I feel less invested in a victim/villain binary. Sometimes, I’m even able to see how their bullying and gaslighting—the culture of narcissism and authoritarianism in which I was raised—is itself a form of adaptation to trauma.
But I could not have gotten to this place without getting away.
My experience bears out that visceral quote by therapist and somatics teacher Prentis Hemphill that boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.
Five years on, from this safe-enough distance, I can simultaneously love and care for myself, parsing out what belongs to me and what doesn’t, discern my needs, heal and grow; while also accessing my love and my empathy for my family, loving them best by refusing to let them harm themselves by harming me.
Not that any of this is easy. Or clean, or tidy, or pleasing in any way. I should never have had to go through any of this, and it was never my responsibility to fix it, baby child that I was.
I grieve, I rage, I’m disorganized in my thinking, chaotic in my feelings. I pull people towards me, then reject them; I vacillate between burning everything down and frantically trying to pick up the pieces; I superimpose wild and grandiose stories onto others and then feel supremely disappointed when they don’t live up to my expectations.
I mull, I wallow, I ruminate. I convince myself that if I don’t win at healing from estrangement, if I don’t absolutely crush it, stick the landing and come out smelling like a rose, I will literally die like my sister did, I will lose my son like she did. But even in this, in this chaos and darkness, I am learning to accept myself. And that acceptance of myself, however absurd I may seem even to myself, is growing in the center of me; even in this, in this chaos and darkness, the shame is moving to the periphery.
I forgot to go outside for days and when I go, the lilies are outrageous. Men bathe in the Rittenhouse fountain like birds or John the Baptist, women paint flowers on easels, African delivery workers lounge coolly on their mopeds, smoking, conversing in French. A boy squats on the roof of a dump truck, a forest grows on top of a train trestle. Mimosa trees and maypops bloom, the signature of their medicine (heart gladdening, hypnotic) transmitted in every gregarious stamen and pistil—even in their names: albizia julibrissin, passiflora incarnata; a woman in flip flops and a chocolate brown tube top blows kisses down the sidewalk.
I’m still fasting on Thursdays for Gaza, six months now, nine months into the genocide. It’s clarifying, to attune my attention in this way, every day later than the last, until now, when the sun will begin its retreat and the light will wane again. On fast days I stay out until sundown, taking pictures of promiscuous hollyhocks and salacious yucca flowers, against a backdrop of broken tile and brown cinderblock.
Everything looks so different to me now.
Like how playing music super loud in public is not actually a nuisance, it’s a gift. That woman is sharing the gift of the gospel of her friend Jesus with you when she sings at the top of her lungs on the trolly on Sunday. That man is sharing the precious life of his phone battery to play smooth jazz on the subway for all to relax and enjoy. That car slow rolling and subwoofing is bringing the party to everybody on your block, you’re welcome.
Like how the supermarket is actually a simulacrum of a real marketplace in a village somewhere, in every village everywhere, with stalls and vendors, but unreal. A Disney-fied air conditioned video game of a marketplace where all the money goes up and out instead of amongst and between, where cameras and robots scan every glossy aisle. I’ll never again not see it that way.
Ordinary time: the saints’ days have passed, the dishes washed and dried and put away. We are yet one year older, just like the earth.
Solstice is here, the light at its glory and zenith, the dark encroaching soon, and bless it. Life continues to insist upon life, to fruit from the very death that wrought the most unbearable grief, light from dark, dark from light, whether or not we go outside, whether or not we notice it, whether or not we fast and we weep and we pray, whether or not we feast on pineapples and cherries and berries and Korean melons and key lime pies, whether or not we remember to go to the swimming pool or the river or the ocean or baptize ourselves in the fountain and start our life all the way over again. So we might as well notice it, we might as well weep; we might as well feast and swim and start anew.
Home.
I’m finding myself feeling positively fecund with ideas these days, pleasantly pollinated by conversations with people and plants, challenged and enriched and enlivened and enbrightened by new and old friendships and networks and books and intellectual/emotional/spiritual connections of all sorts. So thank you, friends, for these rich conversations, and these recommendations:
This For the Wild podcast episode with
blew my little mind this week, as it synthesizes many themes and ideas that have sometimes been disparate in my mind and reminds me, as usual, that everything, everything, is inextricably intertwined. Key takeaways include:rot is the womb of life
you have to learn how to feed the self to others
I’m part of a greater mind that’s thinking me
Jesus as the mythological break with the lineage of vegetal/fermentation gods, and the parable of the mustard seed as anti-imperialist eco-radicalism at a time of great, extractive (Roman) colonization (so much more to say and think about this!)
I’ve cued up her audiobook The Flowering Wand, which has been on my list since it came out a couple of years ago. I’ll keep you posted.
I also loved this Meshell Ndegeocello Tiny Desk Concert full of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin wisdom, both of whose work is finding new resonance and relevance in this revelatory times, both of whose work was so prescient and is taking on new life and new roots long beyond their deaths. Life’s insistence on life, light from dark and dark from light.
I’m taking a break next week, and I’ll be back in July.
Blessed solstice,
xoxoxo!
Jodi
Home + The World is an occasional newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake.
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⚔️❤️ Jodi
I was taken with the story of divorce from one’s family. It’s beautifully written with deep love for oneself and everyone including those we need to leave behind. The deep work we need to do to love ourselves is so hard, so needed and so meaningful. The writer captures both of the themes and then blossoms to capture moment by moment beauty in life. She tosses out culture taught judgement and sees others living their everyday days with beauty, compassion and curiosity! Thanks for writing and sharing and educating us!
Another one Jodi...where your vulnerability and bravery gives me goosebumps. Reading how far you've come since cutting communication with your family for the betterment of you in inspiring. You are a great partner, mama, and friend. Thank you once again for your words.