Los Angeles
By Andrea Scarpino
On heavy nights, I think about family, its many complexities, how it can feel like suffocation and also safety, or at least a past, a thing that knows you, faults and all. How, wrapped in family, I can feel myself regress, act like a person I used to be, not the person I’m trying to become. I can feel myself slip away.
My mother is 70 years old today. She walks with a cane, is in near-constant pain from fibromyalgia and other complaints. She looks and acts much older than other 70 year olds. She struggles to remember things and lives in her own reality, telling herself impossible stories about where and how she might live, what we might do together if she comes to visit, how she might take care of my niece. Stories that have no hope of coming true. She hasn’t always been a good mother, the mother I would have chosen if anyone had asked. But it’s difficult for me to walk away from her. Mired in her own demons, she did the best she could. I believe that.
My brother is angry though, at our mother. He called the night before her birthday and did nothing but upset her. She’s called me crying three times, asked what he means, why he is angry. I’m caught in the middle, not wanting to insult or worry either of them, and growing angrier myself as the conversations continue. My brother has every right to be angry. She wasn’t always a good mother. But he wants to hurt her like she hurt him, and that doesn’t seem fair, not on her 70th birthday.
A heavy morning, negotiating pasts, hurt feelings on every side, I look up the word family in the Oxford English Dictionary online. Etymology: familia (household) and famulus (servant). Definition one: “The servants of a house or establishment.” Definition two: “The retinue of a nobleman or grandee.” It’s not until definition five that we get: “the body of persons who live in one house or under one head,” a closer match to how we think of the word today. But my favorite is definition four: “Rom. Ant. A troop, school (of gladiators).” The example is G.J. Whyte-Melville’s 1863 book, Gladiators: “You look as if you belonged to the family yourself.”
Indeed. Family as a school of gladiators, ready to do battle, ready to protect and fight and kill and maim. My father used to say that Roman gladiators wore their swords on their right sides because their arms weren’t long enough to cross their armored bodies and draw a sword from their left. I’m the only Italian in my family, the only one with short arms, my brother’s father different from my own. My mother is taller than me even now, stooped over her cane. She has long, strong arms. My brother is a foot taller than either of us, does martial arts, could break both my arms before I knew what was happening. They’re both better equipped for battle than I am, better able to duel to the death.
I’m of a different gladiator school. Make peace. Forgive. Show gratitude, even if what you have is not what you’d prefer. Fight when need be, but run away too. Try to understand family, even when they’re not interested in understanding you. Leave the past behind, its long tentacles around you still, but gentle now, almost kind.
Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:
Planet of the Blind 
This is a beautiful reflection, friend, for of wisdom. Having lived away from home for 8 years and now returning, I’ve thought a lot about the mix of comfort family brings and how they can hold you in a sort of personal stasis, not allowing you the space to become.
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