So, the thing is, I lied in my last post. Not "lying" as in "actively making stuff up"--everything I wrote was true; we did go to a tiny Greek island and we did have an amazing experience--but "lying" as in "consciously omitting big chunks of that experience."
The truth, the whole truth. . . the whole truth is hard.
Like that friend that Owen made? The one who made him feel ok once again? What I didn't write was that when we returned home to Manchester Owen wrote and tried to phone this boy several times. He never responded. Owen was devastated.
And Hugh's jaunts out and about the village? The whole truth demands that these jaunts be set against our previous 48 hours in Rhodes. An entirely unexpected stay (a storm prevented us from taking the boat to Halki as planned), it caught us without any preparation. We ALWAYS prepared before going anywhere with Hugh, who could have been the poster child for ADHD at that point in his young life. So as we wandered about Rhodes, trying to fill the time, Hugh kept running away from us. Keith was of the mindset that, well, he'll be fine, let's not worry about it.Right. A five year old. In a friggin' foreign city. A friggin' foreign city filled with insane Greek teenage boys on mopeds. Fiinally, frustrated and furious, I lost it and began screaming at Hugh while I smacked him on his bottom--right on a busy sidewalk. A cluster of Greek women, witnesses to my breakdown, clucked in horror and shook their heads. I hated them with an intensity I am still ashamed to admit to.
And the entire Greek idyll needs to be reframed in the awareness of the the fact that we never ever worked as a family. I know all siblings fight: I have six of my own. But, as anyone who has spent any time with Hugh and Owen together will testify, "sibling rivalry" in no way adequately describes my sons' relationship. They have rarely interacted like brothers, rarely played together, rarely enjoyed each other, rarely hung out--and never ever looked to the other for comfort or companionship, never even bonded together in an alliance against us. A constant strain, a source of deep grief, the antipathy between the two of them of course simply intensified on family holidays as they had to endure each other for hours and days on end. I remember a good family friend spending some time with us on one such vacation and then turning to me and saying, "Why do you do this? This isn't good for any of you. Just stop it. There's no law that says you all have to vacation together." It took me a long time to give up, to stop it, as she advised. I did, eventually. The four of us have not traveled together since 2002. But that was after Greece.
And then there's the constant fact, the thread that weaves through my adult life: I didn't sleep for the entire trip. And I had a headache every single damned day. So that hilltop abandoned monastery that Owen climbed to? He wanted me to come along. He begged me to come along. But I didn't. I was too fucking tired.
The whole truth.
But surely it's better to forget it, isn't it? Owen is a beautiful man and Hugh is on his way to becoming one. They still loathe each other, but I guess that just as there's no law requiring family vacations, there's also no law requiring brothers to like each other.
This all started with olives. And if every time I eat an olive I want to remember the four of us, eating and laughing together, on a Greek island, rather than all the rest, that's ok, isn't it? All those surveys showing that people become so much happier omce they hit their 50s--I'll bet forgetting plays an essential, probably the central, role there.
This I believe: that one is better off forgetting the whole truth.
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