The Family That Rants Together...

When I was a teenager, my dad and I spent a lot of time talking.  Just sitting and talking.  Now, you have to know something about my family, and about my father in particular.  There was never an occasion on which he (any of us, really) wouldn’t hop up on a soapbox and start ranting.  We did not make small talk in my home.  Not really.  Everything was worth a speech.  Looking back, it was like living with Rick Mercer.  Sit down to dinner, and the next thing you know, the salt and pepper and HP sauce were being used to illustrate how we needed to work together as a family to achieve our goals.  Sound odd?  Well, it wasn’t to me, because that’s what I was raised on. On any given evening, the salt could be my dad, and my mom could be the pepper.  My brother might have been the HP, and I could have been the tub of margarine.  It’s hard to remember that far back, but you get what I mean.  We were all condiments in the Game of Life.  Daddy would push the salt halfway down the dinner table and say something to the effect that it was no good for him to be way ahead of Momma (the salt shaker that was lagging behind) or for my brother to be way at the other end of the table.  If we wanted to succeed as a family, all of us needed to cross the finish line (whatever that might be) together.  Ta-da!

Imagine:  that was dinnertime conversation in my house growing up.  Nothing was ever trivial.  Everything needed to be analyzed and discussed and justified.  It was slightly mystifying when I was little, but as I got older, I began to enjoy all of it.  Talking was fun at my house.  Some of my absolute favourite memories are just the four of us, sitting in the kitchen, just talking.  For HOURS.  Laughing and talking.  I have to say that one of the most painful things when my dad died was realizing that we would never be able to do that again.  That was the only club I ever wanted to belong to, and without wanting it to be, the whole thing got cancelled on me.  Which sucked, to say the least. 

However, to return to my point (see what I mean?  Always ranting!):  my dad and I spent a lot of time talking.  During the course of these talks, a lot of old (sometimes made-up) sayings would get used.   One I remember in particular was “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.”  Which brings me to the moment I decided to go back to Jamaica.  I have to say that if I hadn’t been at the end of my rope, hanging on to a fraying knot, I would never have landed there.  I was going back to see a man I had met a year previously, when a group of friends and I had stopped in Montego Bay for a day trip during a Caribbean cruise.  Which sounds awfully glamorous, but was more a testament to my friends’ determination to celebrate our 40^th birthday in style than anything else.  More on “Mr. Wrong” later.

After struggling for years with an unhappy, unsupportive, unfulfilling marriage, I was pretty much convinced that no matter how much I overlooked and endured my current situation, the truth of the matter was that it was affecting my kids more and more as they got older and more aware of the atmosphere in our home.   I was terrified I was messing them up permanently, letting them think that the bitterness and sarcasm that passed for conversation between their dad and I was what a marriage should be.  In short, I was miserable, and I was looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, hoping it wasn’t an oncoming train. 

When I got off the plane at Wyman Sangster International, I saw two men looking at me:  one was smiling and one was not.  As it turns out, the one that was smiling at me just happened to be the cousin of the one I had come to see.  He was extremely handsome, extremely friendly and extremely…short.  Five foot four, to be exact, but who’s counting?  Certainly not five foot eleven old ME.  *sigh*  That was another of my dad’s sayings (or was it my mom’s?):  Man plans, God laughs. 

Next time:  Off to Greenwood we go!!