Spring New (Bee Hiving) Moon
You know how things go along for a long time and nothing happens, then bang, things happen? Sollie and Rigel got into it again and in breaking them up Rigel bit me. Not bad, a scrape really, but it bled, around and below the right side of my right knee. I had been using the knee to separate the two. This is out of hand at the moment and I’m not sure what to do next.
In addition I have a family member in crisis, a faraway crisis, so it’s difficult to tell what’s exactly going on. That means trying to do my part from 12,000 miles away. My family, and I may have not mentioned it here before, my mother’s family to be precise, has a history of bi-polar disorder. One of my Aunts was hospitalized most of her life, another for several years and a third in essence starved herself. My mother never showed signs, but she died at age 46. Although afflicted from time to time with melancholy, I’ve never manifested the bi-polar symptoms, nor, at least up until now, has either my brother or my sister. That’s not to say that we haven’t had struggles of various sorts, the kinds brought on by life, but deep depression, no.
This may be a referented depression; that is, one occasioned by a definite external circumstance, but it’s so difficult to say without being there. And even then…
When I was in analysis, with a Jungian, we discussed nuclear families and John, my analyst, said, “You have an atomized family.” It was true. After my mother died, our lives began to spin apart from each other. I left home first and eventually moved to Minnesota. Mary next, ending up after a stint teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in first Kuala Lumpur, then Singapore, where she has lived now for many years.
Last of all Mark left home and moved first to San Francisco, then in 1988 took off on a round the world trip. After crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, working on a kibbutz in Israel and harvesting olives in Turkey, he found his way to Southeast Asia, too. Bangkok. He has been there ever since, more or less, teaching English as a second language. We have ended up far apart, physically, and distance imposes its own psychological barriers. It’s just not as easy to see each other, help each other.
Now that both Mom and Dad are dead, we have our own worlds, Mary at the National University of Singapore, me here in Andover and Mark in Bangkok. Once in a while Mary comes home, I’ve been over there once, but it’s difficult to stay really connected.
Now something is wrong. And I’m not sure what to do in that case either.
