market – Pamela Helberg

Families fall apart in myriad ways. I see it all the time in my work with counseling clients, and my own family is not immune to this fracturing.

After two years of estrangement, I found my father at the La Penita Thursday Market, manning his real estate booth (see D is for Dad). Or should I say, my travel companion (MTC) found him and breathlessly reported back to me.

“He looks like he’s having issues moving, and his eye is kind of funky,” she said. “You really should go over and see him.”

I wasn’t sure. After the initial wash of relief that he was still alive, I chafed at the fact that he had not responded to my emails and texts telling him I would be in the area. I didn’t know what sort of reception I would get. I wasn’t sure I could handle him refusing to see me. But that was my frightened child self.

My adult self, my Mother Self, knew differently. I couldn’t imagine refusing to see one of my own children, no matter how hurt I might be, no matter what they might have done, no matter what their feelings for me. And like I say hundreds of times a week (it seems) to my therapy clients, “we are all more alike than we are different. If you feel this way, chances are others do as well. Operate from that assumption rather than from fear.”

Still, I stood, immobilized by my fear, feet frozen to the cobblestones among the push and shove of gringos haggling over pesos with the artisans and tchotchke vendors. The vibrant colors of Mexico blazed in the early morning sunlight.

“Go see him, Pam,” MTC urged. “He might not have much time left.” Maybe she was being hyperbolic regarding his health (after all she didn’t have a baseline), but she did have recent experience with her own mother’s death, her own problematic parent. “What do you have to lose?”

I often find myself describing family systems to my therapy clients as a mobile, a delicately balanced objet d’art, and when one piece is moved (or removed), the entire piece is thrown out of alignment. In order to restore balance, the other pieces must shift positions or forever be askew.

But, systems resist change. Especially the family system. It seems easier for the missing or moved piece of the mobile to simply resume its assigned place rather than for the other pieces to change. Often, family members will continue to resist the change, opting instead to dangle there in their dysfunction, rather than shifting and adapting to a new arrangement in order to restore optimal functionality.

So it was when my parents divorced at the turn of the last millennium. For the better part of twenty years, I resisted my father’s new reality, his new marriage, his move to Mexico, his pursuit of his happiness, irritated at the changes, the inconveniences, the occasional bad behavior.

Our own Family Fun Mobile grew even more askew when Dad’s wife emailed mid-pandemic (or texted or possibly even called) my brother and then me to ask if we could take care of Dad for a couple of weeks while she had hip surgery. Reader, it seems petty in retrospect, but that request sent us over the metaphorical cliff.

For starters, I had just put my house on the market and literally had no place to house Dad, had I been willing, but I had also spent the past few years caring for Mom, his ex-wife, who had dementia and was now in a care facility. I continued to harbor resentment for what I saw as his abandonment of her (to be fair, she was perfectly healthy when they divorced). Still. Somehow, I saw him as responsible for her all these years later. Even though I can’t imagine being held responsible for my ex-wife even five years after our split.

And I continued to be irritated about how he had treated me when I came out as a 17-year-old lesbian (it wasn’t great, Reader, but it was over 40 years ago). My brother’s refusal to look after Dad sprung from deeper, more recent wounds, but without getting into details that are not mine to share, suffice it to say, I stuck up for my little brother. As I am wont to do.

Long story short, we didn’t just tilt our mobile. We ripped it down and threw it in the trash.

And that’s where it was as I stood in the hot Mexican morning trying to decide if I could begin the process of repair. Our family had fallen apart in some very specific ways. Could it be salvaged?

I took a deep breath and decided to put what I knew into practice, to be the grown up adult I knew myself to be. I told MTC I would find her later, and I walked down that cobblestone path toward forgiveness.

Before my travel companion (hereon referred to as MTC) and I relocated from the suburbs to our new casa in Guayabitos, we made a couple of trips up the coast to explore some of the smaller beach towns: San Pancho, Lo De Marcos, Los Ayala, Chacala. I’d been to them all before on trips when I came down to visit with my dad and his wife, Marilyn. I wanted MTC to see how amazing the coast could be—palapas on the beaches, $1 beers and $3 margaritas in the sand, boogie boarding in the warm waves.

And, I wanted to check out my dad’s house. I hadn’t spoken to him since early in the pandemic when he and Marilyn came to stay with me in Bellingham for a few days. We’d had a falling out in the meantime and I didn’t know if he was even still down here. My last trip to Mexico had been during Christmas/New Year’s 2015/16, and I’d come down with friends on a vacation, not to see my father. At that time, he and Marilyn had rented their home out and were in a smaller, cheaper place on the same street, so we visited once or twice, but I hadn’t been to stay with them since.

Sixteen years ago, about five years after they married, Dad and Marilyn sold their belongings and moved to Mexico where they built a house near the beach in Guayabitos, and I’d been to visit a handful of times. At first, I didn’t want to enjoy myself. I was mad that my parents had divorced, mad he’d remarried, mad that when they moved he had returned all the framed photos of my family I’d given him over the years, mad he’d moved so far away. But, it turned out that I really enjoyed Mexico, loved their home, and had a wonderful time whenever I came to visit. So, it became more difficult to continue my adult child temper tantrum.

I navigated our little rent-a-dent rental car down the cobblestones on Flamingos Avenue.

“This is it!” I exclaimed as we bumped to a stop. “This one with all of the For Sale signs on it.”

I parked the car and jumped out for a better look. I jumped to try and see over the adobe wall. I couldn’t jump high enough, so I wedged the toe of my flip flop between the door and a protruding brick and levered myself up to peer through the high window in the iron gate.

“Looks pretty unoccupied,” I declared. “No car in here. They either don’t live here or they’re out.”

I climbed back into the driver’s seat. “I wonder where they are. If they’re even down here.”

It was an odd feeling, not knowing where my dad was. I’d been angry and annoyed with him the past two years, and now I just really wanted to know that he was okay. Up until now, I hadn’t given much, if any, thought to his whereabouts. Suddenly it felt imperative to find him. And, I wasn’t certain he’d be happy to see me, even if I could find him.

Last time we communicated, I hadn’t been very nice. For a variety of reasons, some of which I continued to feel justified about, others that I could let go of. I did not want to continue our estrangement. I didn’t want him to die thinking I didn’t love him, that I hadn’t appreciated him, believing I’d rather he wasn’t in my life. After all, that’s how things ended between him and his father. I’m a big believer in ending the cycles of family dysfunction (though, I’m sure I’ve initiated a few of my own). When my grandmother died, my dad severed ties with his four sisters. We didn’t need more family cut-offs.

To add to my confusion about whether or not he’d want to see me, I hadn’t received a reply to my Merry Christmas email or my Happy Birthday text. Nor had he responded to any of the emails I’d sent alerting him to the fact I would be in his town for a few months.

I knew that if he was still in the area, and still selling real estate (the for sale sign has his name and phone number on it), he would likely be at the Thursday market in La Penita, the little town about a mile north of Guayabitos. MTC and I made plans to attend the market—it just happened to be the next morning. I knew she’d want to visit the market—it was a cultural experience, a full-on explosion of color and smells, a combination artisan, tchotchke, flea market, textile, Mexican food market. Dad used to have a real estate booth there.

Maybe he still did.