My father is ill

My extended family is a real experience.

Suzanne got ane mail from my stepmother Friday night. She said that my father has been in the ICU all week after a bout of pneumonia and a possible heart attack.

This happened Monday.

Now, aside of the obvious "why didn't she tell us sooner" question, is, "why did she tell my fiancee first and I have to hear it secondhand?"

Fortunately, my stepmother included my sister's and half-brother's wireless numbers, so I messaged them both. My half-brother messaged me back to confirm my father was no longer in ICU, and this afternoon, my sister called to fill me in on the details. Basically, the family up there is sort of dysfunctional as far as communications... my stepmother seems insecure and grabby, and doesn't tell her husband's children (I have a brother and a sister, as well as two half-brothers) what's going on as well as she might.

What my sister basically said was, "if you want the real story of what's going on, don't assume you'll get it from" our stepmother.

To give you some background... my mother was killed in a traffic accident in 1968. My father married his second wife in 1970, so for all practical purposes she's been the matriarch of the family for over 37 years now. But even after all these years, there's a subtle fault line in how she deals with her husband's children from his first wife and her own two sons. I'm not sure which group of us has the better deal, because it seems that with her own sons, she's something of a martyr and hander-out-of-guilt-trips, where with the three of us, she's just selective in how she communicates things. I'm not sure if she thinks she's insulating us from worry, or what, but hey, my father is almost 71 years old, he had a stroke when he was 54 and has needed care and assistance for years now. If he's in the hospital with what initially sounds like something pretty damn serious, we ought to know what's going on, in a neutral, factual way. We're all adults here (even my youngest half-brother is going to be 30 this winter), we can handle whatever we have to handle.

Somehow, it's like my stepmother needs that control that comes from communication.

Talking to my sister -- for the longest time that we've had in years, even though she was at a wedding this afternoon where she was matron of honor -- really clued me in to a lot of things I hadn't realized were going on. Living down here, hundreds of miles from them, I have deliberately not been heavily involved in the day-to-day soap opera up there. But there are some things you don't disconnect from, no matter how far away you are or how long it's been.

He may be her husband, but he's our father. He has plenty of faults of his own, but it's up to us to balance those and make our own calls. We have a stake. Don't take that away from us.

His own father didn't make it to his age. My grandfather died in 1984, aged 70 years, six months. In three weeks, my father will be 71.

In two and a half weeks, I will be 45.

I can remember my father at age 30. And I met my stepmother when she was 21.

That doesn't seem all that long ago.