I LOVE family reunions! I envy people who get to live just down the street or across town from their extended family members. Tim grew up with both sets of grandparents living nearby and involved in his life, and it was a real blessing for them. But, my family has this habit of living scattered across the country, if not the globe, so we don't get to see each other as often as we would like.
However, in mid-March, my entire family--parents and brother from Oregon, sister from Arizona, and grandmother from Kentucky--converged on our house. It was the first time that all of them except for my grandma had visited us here, so we had fun showing off our new house and hometown and home state. Some of the local attractions that I had been looking forward to sharing with my family were, unfortunately, closed for the winter, and the trees didn't start blooming until the day after most people left, but they did manage to hit the most spring-like week of weather that we've had so far this year. We actually ate several meals outside, it was so warm. We visited a state park, toured the university where Tim teaches, ate good food (featuring lots of MEEEEEEEEEAT!, in honor of my brother), and generally hung out. Of course Esther got to be a star, which was quite to her taste.
My parents and brother were only able to stay for a few days, since they were sandwiching the trip in between my dad's return from his annual volunteer trip to Thailand and the date he had to return to work, as well as between my brother's last final exam and his need to start job-hunting for the upcoming spring and summer. But my sister and grandma were both able to stay for a week.
I wasn't quite sure what it was going to be like having my sister here for a week. Due to her developmental disabilities, she requires more energy than your average adult house guest. And frankly, it's been a long time since I've lived with her, so I wasn't sure how the experience might be the same or different from what I remember of spending summers at home when I was in college.
As it happened, being at home with both Esther and Melodie was a lot like having
two three-year-olds in the family...except that one of them, when she jumped up and down with excitement, shook the whole house! Esther has much better fine and gross motor coordination, while Melodie has the edge in life experience, but other than that they're a lot alike. In fact, Esther has reminded me almost eerily of Melodie in the past...like the phase when she took to addressing me as "Hon" (something Melodie has done for years), or started responding "Huh?" to comments that I knew she had heard perfectly well (another irritating habit of Melodie's--if you're not wise to her, you can end up repeating almost everything you say). Esther and Melodie are also very similar in their approach to other people (they love them!) and to food (any kind, any time!). When Esther first became part of our family I would occasionally refer to her as "Melodie" by mistake, and when I had the two of them together for a week I switched their names so often that it was embarrassing. (And catching--Melodie at one point protested, "I'm not Melodie, I'm Esther!") In the car on the way home from picking Melodie up at the airport, Melodie and Esther entertained each other for a long time exchanging epithets, with many giggles at their own and each other's cleverness.
Melodie seemed to favor "bozo," "you silly goose" and "you little goofball," although my favorite of hers was "you little gumball." Esther got quite creative, addressing Melodie as "you big, heavy ghost," "you big Aunt Blankie" and "you gecko tunnel," among others. Tim said he thinks it is the first time he has heard anyone out-do Melodie in an exchange! (However, Melodie is still the champion as far as I'm concerned. My all-time favorites of hers--all intended as insults--are "you beckoning calf," "you wretched pea-vine," and "you excellent teacher"! I guess another thing Esther and Melodie have in common is a love of vocabulary!) Now that she has been introduced to the fun of name-calling, Esther seems to have no intention of calling it quits just because Aunt Melodie isn't around to play the game with her. I am getting rather tired of being addressed as "you nut" (borrowed from Melodie), although I don't mind quite as much being "you Nutcracker on ice" or "you polka-dot." This evening we had our pastor and his wife over for dinner, and Esther kept addressing the pastor as "you crazy nut!" Ack!!
Esther was really excited initially to have Aunt Melodie visiting, and was surprisingly tolerant of Melodie frequently swooping in to kiss her or pat her head, but by the end of the visit she had gotten tired of having her space invaded and was starting to whine and pull away when Melodie got too close. I think she also found it strange and intriguing that I would tell Melodie, an adult, what to do or not to do, and sometimes spoke to her in the same tone of voice that I use with Esther. Despite some minor discord, I think they both enjoyed being together.
The hardest part of the visit for me was that Melodie does not entertain herself. (I remember that as a child she didn't learn to play independently until she was about seven. I was in charge of watching her on Sunday afternoons while my parents napped, and those afternoons of having to constantly interact with her got so long! That experience was what initially decided me (at the tender age of 13 or so) that I didn't want to adopt a child unless I was married to a husband who could help care for them!) Melodie did eventually learn to play independently, but now she seems to have passed the age of being interested in "playing" or coloring or things that she can do on her own. So if there was no structured activity going on, she would follow me around, offer to help me with my current task, no matter how unsuitable (e.g. chopping vegetables with a sharp knife or putting Esther to bed), and talking. Mind you, conversation with Melodie is not like conversation with most other people. She has never quite mastered the art of narrating an event in such a way that her listener can picture what happened. It's not that she tells things inaccurately, but she doesn't have a sense for what details are necessary to include in order for her story to make sense. So asking her about her life gets bits and snatches of information, but it's kind of like looking at a mosaic with only half the pieces in place. I can only talk about the routines of my life for so long without boring even myself, and there's no use discussing thoughts and ideas because she's not an abstract thinker. So mostly, especially when I was trying to concentrate on something I was doing (like cooking dinner!) our conversations revolved around her favorite obsessions: the weather ("Is it snowing outside, hon?"--asked several times a day, despite the warm and sunshiny weather; "Does it flood a lot around here?") and her health ("Did I twist my ankle?"--said while walking normally; "Do I need a new prescription for my face?"; "I think the doctor [our father] is going to have to write me a prescription for that!") Melodie wanted in the worst way to help me cook, and I felt kind of bad that there weren't many things I felt safe letting her do. We did make cookies together one day, something we had often doen together when we were younger. Even then, though, one recipe came out so sticky and the other so crumbly that there ended up being fewer parts that she could do than I had envisioned.
Some of my mental snapshots of the week include: Melodie praising my cooking to the skies at every meal (including the one where I served hot-dogs), and putting away as much food as a teenager; Melodie constantly coming up behind me and putting her arm around my neck, or stroking my hair; Singing a few words to a song from a movie that we had loved as kids and that Esther now enjoys, and having Melodie join in, even though she hasn't seen that movie in years; Looking over at Melodie at the beginning of one meal to discover that she had filled her dinner-sized plate with potato chips and was placidly munching her way through them; Melodie responding to about every third comment of mine, no matter how mundane, with an enthusiastic "Good one!"; Melodie expressing her angst over having to wait longer than expected before boarding her plane by muttering, "Come on, people! This isn't a barn!"
Despite minor frustrations, it was good to be together for a week. I realized that some of the unsettledness that I've been feeling in my relationship with Melodie is because I haven't gotten the chance to learn how to relate to her as an adult. With my brother, we had one kind of relationship when we were kids, went through a period of flux when he was in high school and early college, and then built a different way of relating to each other as adults. I have been loving the relationship we have now--not only do I enjoy my brother, but I respect him as well, which is not something that would have occurred to me when we were kids :-) (I'm seven years older, so always had a superiority complex). But I haven't had the chance to make that same transition with Melodie She is no longer the small child that I felt much the same way about as I do now about Esther, but nor is she someone that I can talk about thoughts and ideas with. She still needs directing and instructing, and yet it feels wrong to treat her as a little girl. She is so proud of being an adult now, and the skills she has now are ones that she has worked hard to achieve and has reason to be proud of, and it feels like there should be some difference in our relationship to honor the ways in which she has grown.
Getting to know my sister all over again as an adult is going to be different than it was with my brother, but I feel like we made some progress during the week she was here. Maybe my favorite time of all was the hour and a half we spent at the airport together before she returned home to the sheltered community where she is now thriving. We didn't do anything fancy. We looked at a list of airport restaurants together and decided where she might like to eat dinner. We walked up and down the terminal and discussed what kinds of food our new son might have eaten and might like. It wasn't a particularly deep topic, but it was interesting to both of us, and each conversational turn held genuine sharing of information and ideas. Then we shared Chinese food, which Melodie enjoyed more thoroughly than most of us average adults bother to enjoy anything, and then we went to her gate.
I don't know when it will work out for her to come visit again, but I hope it will sometime...maybe when it's snowing!
