Annabel, 24, Edinburgh
Mom was a conceptual artist and Dad a drummer in punk bands. Once he played a gig dressed only in boxers and tinfoil, which fell off as he played. He stopped playing when I was two, and started taking me to social work school with him on the Green Line. Mom stopped doing art before I was born. When I was two she got chronic fatigue syndrome and spent much of the next four years sleeping. Other times she threw coffee cups, forgot me at school in the snow, loved me, painted with me, was scary and unpredictable. We had the same first grade teacher; both of us were her favorites.
Sister born when I was five and a half; Mom’s immune system revived, cured by pregnancy. A symbiotic relationship was formed. On being parted one time, sister said enigmatically of herself/mom, “Bubba doesn’t want Bubba to go!”
Dad and I were allies and best friends. There are no words for it. We moved to a boarding school and lived in an apartment in one of the dorms. Dad worked too much. Mom cut herself with razors and wouldn’t cook for me. One Thanksgiving she left the family because I had worn my new slippers out in the dorm hallway. She came back five hours later and we all went to my dad’s brother’s house for dinner.
Dad’s family were “hard core New Englanders.” The family business is psychiatry; until a hundred years ago it was the Calvinist ministry. Mom’s family were from the South. In 1900 her granddaddy was living off squirrel meat on a farm in South Carolina. That same year Dad’s great-grandmother was giving tea parties for the glitterati in her Boston salon. She would always invite in her brother when he would ride into the Harbor on his yacht, manic, shooting off a pistol; he spent half his life in a hospital and the other half teaching at Harvard. Mom’s granddaddy was illiterate. In 2003 I went to South Carolina and stood on his land and shot his pistol at a log.
When I was 19 I moved to Scotland and studied history at university. My boyfriend is from Mexico City. I’m not sure I ever want to live in the United States again, but maybe I will. I miss my family.
Annabel—Age 24—Edinburgh, Scotland
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