What do you do when you look at your life and realize you wouldn't choose it? When you realize you are a knot in the tapestry your parents and theirs before them wove. My parents dangled on the edge of middle class with overdrawn bank accounts, credit card debts, and dead-end jobs, surviving by family that would bail them out before they let them fail — a family that shared the precarious and slippery ledge sometimes called the poverty line.
When my father was a homeless teen, my mother’s parents took him in. They knitted him into the fabric of their lives.
Later, after my parents married, they moved to Oregon and left behind their dying hometown for the opportunities of the Pacific Northwest. In a few years my mother's parents moved to Oregon, and it was now my parents turn to knit them into the fabric of their lives. Then my father’s father moved to Oregon. Then my aunts. Then my uncles.
After I graduated high school I stayed in Oregon, but moved to Eugene — a four-hour drive away from where I grew up. Within four years my parents bought a place three houses down the street from where I lived. Then my grandparents moved to Eugene. Then my aunts. Then my uncles.
I left this finely woven structure for the confines of a state prison, and I don't suspect they'll follow me here. I don't know much about knitting or weaving, but it seems to me a knot would be a hard thing to untangle. Being that knot, I say again that I wouldn't choose it.
But then, I'm not sure my father would have chosen to be homeless, or that my parents would have chosen to leave their hometown behind unless they had to, or live a life littered with past due notices in the mailbox and messages from collection agencies on the answering machine.
It’s true that when I look at my life right now I wouldn't choose it, but I take comfort in knowing the tapestry is unfinished. And more importantly, it is not mine alone to weave. | PL
...the tapestry is unfinished.