HUMAN PARTS | MEMOIR
You’re Not Like the Others
When someone you love takes an axe to your personal narrative
“You’re not like the others.” Those were the five words my elderly Italian aunt used to gut and fillet me in a cramped hospital room, eight months before her death. My aunt, Nancy, had been sent to a rehab facility to recover from a hospital stay for dehydration and a kidney infection.
At 88, she was rightly proud to have maintained her autonomy along with her very sound mind. She could express her desires directly, often very directly, and was her own best advocate. I was one of her caregivers, regularly checking on her, taking her to her doctor’s appointments and running errands, which is what placed me in the direct line of fire when the words hit the air.
At first all she did was steeple her two boney index fingers in her clasped hands and tap them together slowly as if summoning the pain to rise.
“No, you are not like the others. Nothing like them at all.”
Slack jawed, confusion spreading across my face, I frantically reached for her words, pulling at them desperate for an explanation, slapping them away as they slinked towards my heart. I remember stammering, trying to get her to explain what she was talking about, but even though I was free falling through a gaping hole under my too narrow hospital chair, she did not offer the lifeline of a single word. The screaming stillness of my fall must have led her to believe there was a murk in whether her blow had landed.
When she spoke again, her cryptic phrases seemed to have been intentionally sharpened during her silence,
“You’re just… never mind, I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”
The hole I had been tumbling through opened into a yawning vortex, as the borders of my crafted and cultivated identity broke apart and flew in directions I didn’t even know existed. The “others” were my twelve siblings, and she could not have chosen a sharper knife with which to wound me.
When you are the ninth of thirteen, your very self is stitched to the hem of the dresses and pants of those around you, ensuring stability in a household where even the dust doesn’t stop moving. You are constantly adapting to ever-changing idiosyncrasies, unconsciously adjusting to ionically charged environments, fine tuning your very mood with the rise and fall of the emotional waves around you.
You cannot not be shaped and cured by the heat of every distinctive and quirky personality. You are in many ways part of a connected, reflective group shadow. By the age of maturity, your special parts have been expertly Vita-mixed to project a smooth, integrated narrative of the whole. Your number in line becomes your very middle Christian name: “Ellie, Number Nine.”
As you navigate life, you are preceded and followed by each blessed or cursed word and deed of the collective. For most every moment, save for that rehab disembowelment, you feel by the very grace of God, your soul has been handpicked to land in a wonderment of perfected loving chaos. This lucky thirteen defined me down to the very spiral of my DNA, and she had to have known that. What she was saying, more to the point, what she was doing, had such precision and intent, the seismic shift at my core was palpable.
It felt like a calculated strike.
My failed attempts to get her to elaborate left me sobbing in the parking lot. She had hurt me so deeply, mostly because I had no idea what she was trying to say to me and why she felt the need to say it. What was extremely clear was that for whatever reason, my very person was such a tribal anomaly, she felt compelled to point out the deviation before she left this earth.
Moreover, her undeniable inference was that I was less than. I am embarrassed to say I paid too much attention to that wound. I didn’t let it scab over; I kept it raw and oozing so that every time she needed my help or called, the pain would keep me alert.
I said a prayer each time I turned into her driveway, monitored the minutes I spent with her like a seasoned corrections officer, and deferred her requests to unsuspecting siblings whenever I could. My emotional connection to her had snapped back on me and I would be ready for the next strike. I could not let her sever my identity any more than she had already managed to do in those fleeting moments, in that smelly rehab room.
To be brutally honest, my pain and anger were at such a level, I spent my days and nights trying to decipher whether I still loved her. She never explained her words or offered a follow up to our one-sided traumatic conversation. She could have been angry that her independence was slowly being stripped away, upset with my suggestions of how to prepare her home so that she could continue to live there as she aged, or she could have simply been ticked off for some other reason and felt the need to lash out.
More threatening to my core, she could have meant exactly what she said. I will never know. It has been over a year since she passed and as I reflect on my connection to “the others.” I am slowly coming to the realization that her words may have jarred me onto a journey to understand my life’s path and its knotty connection to an identity I have been dragging along like a suitcase full of puppets.
I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had made more of a conscious effort not to cling to this baker’s dozen tale so tightly. If I had resisted the urge to unpack that valise when sharing and shaping my own storyline, my own identity. My rearview mirror tells me that maybe there were too many sets of footprints shuffling along my path. The few times I was convinced I had blazed a solo trail; I was not at all surprised to find I had stuffed a few of them in my backpack, just in case.
It was far too easy to remain buttressed from top to bottom, supported and protected by a narrative far more interesting and intriguing than a simple number nine could possibly offer. It was safer that way, more comfortable to postpone the leaving, the setting down of something so lovely, so unique. It can define you and remind you that there is a specialness within. Perhaps I had been clinging too tightly because I questioned if I could be those things on my own, outside of the others; lovely and unique.
I am realizing I was lazy with my life at times, with the decisions and risks I could have taken that would have enabled me to create a vibrant, strong identity, independent of my twelve siblings. I wonder if my aunt had seen that in me. If she knew exactly what she was doing, and that she meant to strike at me so deeply. It did feel so personal, so intentional.
She was a teacher above all, forty plus years in public education. She knew the power of words and her time teaching would have shown her that sometimes hard truths need to be said, severing needs to happen to bring about change and growth. If it doesn’t happen naturally, sometimes a pointy finger is needed to help with the cutting.
I loved my upbringing and to this day consider myself blessed to have been stitched to the hems of such lovely and unique humans. But had I allowed myself to slowly release my grip on the headlines of the horde, offering them up to make space for storylines specific only to me and my personal journey, perhaps her words would not have had the strength to open that vortex. I would have already proven to myself that I could lead with the whole of my life while still honoring the parts that tethered me.
“Ellie, you’re not like the others.”
This time, with the resurrection of self-awareness in my back pocket, I would simply nod, cross my legs in that too narrow chair, smile gently at her and say,
“Yeah Auntie, that is true. I’m not like the others, but I come from them, and I am lovely and unique in my own right.”
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