In Your Blood and Bones

You and your soul are as much a part of this landscape as the mountains, sky, and prairie grass. That's where home is. It's in your blood, in your bones. It'll always be there; even though people and places come and go, it comes with you. Never forget that. - mom

Five....

I am a fifth generation frontierwoman on my maternal side. I was born in Colorado, just like my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother were...and the mother of my great grandmother came to Colorado via a boat, then a wagon when she was sixteen years old. On my father's side I am black indigenous from an unknown slave ship through the bayou and free Texas, and eventually to Colorado where I was born. I have a complicated history, murky and many-pronged. But it's in my bones nevertheless.

I grew up in the house that my great grandmother built, that my grandmother was born in, and that my mother was raised in. I learned to cook from my great-grandmother's filofax of recipes, black-covered and ancient, full of her spidery handwriting, typewritten transcriptions, and cutouts from various magazines and cookbooks. I learned to play the piano on an instument that's older than the house, and that my great-grandfather taught from. I know how to read the letters sent from a tiny sod floor homestead out on the high plains where she was born, the account-books from her father's business, and can recognise all of the people in the ancient daguerrotypes and photographs we have. Those all live the sea-chest in our basement, dusty and full of the ambitions, dissapointments, and lives of my ancestors.

My house was built 100 years ago, out of cinderblock, stucco, and the hope of a couple who, despite being traumatised by war and a life lived, wanted to make something better than they themselves had. I felt my great grandmother's presence every day I was there. I heard her voice, and saw her face. I also felt the shame in our basement, dark and creeping, the only shadow of my great-grandfather I've ever felt other than the shock of pipe tobacco that wafted through the living room when I and my mother, in fixing a leak in the ceiling, peeled back the paint and found wallpaper from the house's birth.

Growing up in a house like that, I grew up with the angel that was my great-grandmother and all her good intentions, but also the demon-dark of unbroken rings of shame, arguments, anger, and deep holes of sadness that appear when generation upon generation make the same mistakes.

I live in Scotland now, and to me it feels like home. I guess it's because it has been the place where I've learned to be myself, learned how to live, not just survive...no doubt I'll have as many stories from living here as I do from my childhood.

I learned a lot growing up in a house like that. I also learned a lot leaving it.

Four...

My great-grandparents met when my great-grandfather was in hospital after World War One, where he caught deep pneumonia and dredged ptsd from the mud in the message corps. At the time it was called shell-shock. it was assumed that you would get over it, that you could live your life normally after being through deeply traumatic events... and for a time I can only assume that he did. He got a job at the local university teaching violin and music theory, and he and my great-grandmother were deeply in love. Well, in love when he was sober. At night he would go down to the basement and drink, drink till he was violent, till they had screaming arguments and he would beat her and their two children. But otherwise they were happy, and my great-grandmother told my mother that she loved him when he was nice. So he would go to the basement and drink, they would do their best to stay out of harm's way, and do their best to glaze over the neighbor's talk, the son's outbursts, and the bruises on my great-grandmother's arms. He died when my grandmother was in her teens, and my grandmother blamed her mother for her father's actions, saying that it was her fault that he didn't love her. I can only imagine the pain that caused my great-grandmother. His ghost, and the ghost of his shame, still roamed through the house at night when I was young. I started having night terrors when I was about 5, and they continued sporadically until I was 17. It was only when I was older that I realised how deep-rooted the cause of these was.

Three...

My grandmother, the one born in the house I grew up in, married young. She and my grandfather were, to all outside eyes, very much in love. The child of an abusive alcoholic she was tee-total, stubborn, and would rather have been damned than to live the life that which was thrust on her. She went to college, where she met my grandfather: a tall, upstanding young marine just back from training camp and with a moral compass as tough as iron and equally unbending. She dyed her dark auburn hair platinum, changed her name, and decided to become a radio and tv personality, becoming beloved throughout the southwest, travelling far and wide. She and my grandfather had two children before they divorced bitterly when my mother was in her teens, when the arguments became too loud and the rifts too deep. I saw, from the distance that even one generation gives, that my grandmother's survival had depended on her narcissism. My mother described her as a queen of hearts, soft when she needed you but manipulative and cruel when she didn't. She was away so much that my mother was raised by her great-grandmother, in the house that she built. My grandmother married several more times, each time uncovering a different level of hell: there was the one that made her First Lady of the state (some would say it was her that made him Governor), only for him to be a violent drunk at night and nearly force her out of a moving car. There was the stalker, the fling, and probably countless others...until she decided that she was done with the spotlight and the busyness of it all and moved to a cabin in the mountains with only herself, her neighbors, and the deer and blackbear for company. She continued her narcissism in small, crackling ways all through my childhood, and I only saw the end of that when she lost her memory seven years before her death. She died when I was twenty one.

Two...

My mother grew up in the house my great-grandmother built, a refuge from the manipulation and the verbal and emotional abuse of her parents. She's told me that she at every turn tries to differ herself from her mother, to be warm and caring when the world was cold, to love unconditionally and seek truth over beauty. That in itself is fraught with challenges. She travelled the world, wide eyed and trusting, writing stories and becoming a loudspeaker for those without voices. There was still work to be done, however: the poisoned river of karmic trauma runs deep and leads you to make decisions that, no matter how hard you try to differ yourself, can take you right down the same path worn down by your ancestors. She had a handful of relationships before my own father, and they decided to raise my sister and I in the house that she had grown up in: the house my great grandmother built, where the ghost of shame still lurked in the shadows, and infected the walls.

One...

I grew up in the house that my great grandmother built, with a knowledge of my family history so ingrained into me that I can show you exactly where the sod-floor homestead is that my great-grandmother was born in, can show you her husbands music, can read their handwriting and ledgers. I grew up with my mother and sister and (sometimes) my father; my mother desperate not to repeat the mistakes of her mother, her mother's mother, and on and on back through our blood. My father and mother were deeply in love to all outside eyes (does this sound familiar yet?), except when my father lashed out and would scream at her deep into the night in our basement or whisper abuse at her on a date night; except when he would drink too much, drive too fast, not come home for days on end referencing his "busy schedule"... until the dark days outnumbered the light and I had to call the police on him after a violent outburst that he had been preparing for for weeks. I would lay awake in the dark, listening to every whisper of the night, hiding from the door and the phone and the sound of the gate, living a half-life surviving in the house that my great-grandmother built, where shame and good intentions gone wrong leaked through the walls and down the chimney. To get away from it all my sister went to university in a different country, married young....

Zero...?

.... and I went to university at the age of seventeen with my mother's encouragement and love right behind me. I don't think I would have survived any other way. I'm fully aware of the karmic legacy left to me by my fore-mothers, but I am also aware that I don't have to continue it on. I have agency in the path I take, in the decisions I make; I do my shadow-work and am doing my best to recover from the trauma of my childhood. As much as I'm glad that I got away, I will always hold that house, and that landscape, close to my heart. It makes me who I am. After two generations living in a place your blood is completely altered to allow you to live there in the conditions provided. For me, I was born with that genetic knowledge already coded. All of the beauty of the sky out on the prarie, the mountains' shadowy silk behind, the smell of pine and sage, the smell of dust from the radiator I would sit by in my childhood and the tast of the air after a rainstorm... that's in my bones. It's in my voice, in the blood that's in my veins. And as heartbreakingly sad as it all can be, I know that without it I wouldn't be who I am today.

My mother is in the process of selling the house that my great-grandmother built, to make the space for new hope and dreams to come to fruition there. She will find home and a new life somewhere else, as I have here in Scotland. My story is far from over, and I can only hope that someday any children that I have will feel the same connection to their home here in Scotland as I do with that old cinderblock and stucco house, along with as much reverence for their pasts and for the heartbreak and joy that a life well lived can foster.

I'll do my best to make it so. That's all anyone can ever do.