Alone

My grandmother fell yesterday and broke her hip. She had surgery to repair it. As far as I know, she'll be fine.

She was doing exercises. For the record, my grandmother is 101. I hope this will be the end of her living alone. Maybe this will be the moment she realizes it's okay if she lives with some sort of assistance. It's hard to acquiesce when you've lived by yourself for so long.

I'm nearly 41 and my grandmother has been retired as long as I can remember. But, she's always been busy. She volunteers a lot. She was a founding member of a church that's not even a quarter of a mile from where I live now. She won't be there this Sunday, though.

It seems like most people have a sweet little thing of a grandmother. My grandmother is a tough little shit. I don't think I've seen her be soft too many times. She had a favorite among us brothers, and it wasn't me.

I can remember her picking me up from school one day when I was in the second or third grade. She berated me for not having any homework. Homework was what I had when I fell behind. Why was she mad at me? I can still remember feeling so small in her little red Toyota as she went to get a few groceries at Piggly Wiggly. It felt okay to be alone at that moment.

It's hard to admit that your relatives never cared for you. I can see the same thing in my aunt's eyes. And I've always known that my parents didn't plan me. Even if they never said so, I knew it was so. You don't treat people you value like they treated me. And my brothers, well, they may as well be dead to me. 

I always wanted to see what was inside stuff.

I chose to be alone a lot as a child. I had interests that were different from what everyone else was doing. I had a terrarium, aquarium, and lots of science experiments going on all the time. I found an antlion under the eaves one day and brought it inside in a jar and fed it critters. I routinely found fossils and took things apart to see how they were made. I enjoyed a communion with nature, which was almost like talking to the Creator.

The reason I chose to be alone so much was that I endured regular beatings and teasings from my brothers. I steered clear of them as much as possible, often disappearing. No one seemed to care that I was never around. I was driven away from my family by my family, rejected at an early age.

I don't know what to tell people who have had a good family life or upbringing. I don't know how to tell them how it affects you even so many years later when that's not the case. It becomes part of the fabric of who you are.

One of the things you realize as you get older, though, is that you owe these people absolutely nothing. They've shown themselves to be enemies to your soul time and time again, so why would you do anything for them? They can sit with you in a room and expect a rapport when none has ever existed. It's asinine. You can't tear something down with your hands every day and expect it to be there years later. What did you do to make it happen? Nothing. You were an enemy to the process. There is no friendship; there is no love.

The sad fact is I see how this ties into how my life turned out. It was better to be alone than to be hurt when I was a little boy. At this moment in my existence, I feel the same rule applies. When I met with that beautiful woman a summer ago, I told her my heart felt like a crime scene. It wasn't her fault. It was a process God was putting me through to heal up as many wounds as possible before it became too late. The first part of that process was the uncovering of wounds. That's where I was that day when I told her my heart was like a crime scene.

If I can give myself credit for anything, it's the fact that I've come a long way from where I was. I'm completely willing to embrace the truth. I've done some incredibly hard things over the last few years. I don't want anyone to pat me on the back; it's just helpful to acknowledge how far I've come. I sit here a different human being than I was a year or two ago, and certainly different from how I was four or five years ago.

Sometimes the toughest thing you can do is admit your weakness. It's with much hope that I look toward the future and see all this struggle having a purpose. There's that quote that people like to bandy about; it says, "God never gives us more than what He knows we can handle," something like that. It sounds great. It's utter crap. God gives us things He knows we CAN'T handle all the time. He wants us to rely on Him, and that's the only way to break our belief that we can do it all. That's where faith begins.

Whatever the next step of my life entails, I won't go there without God. I've spent enough of my life alone.