Yes.
I am aware that tomorrow is June 1st and not November.
It has been one hell of a month.
So much happening.
Amazing things truly.
I love my life, I’m lucky, I’m graced, I’m blessed.
And.
I might just being going to Hawaii for Thanksgiving!
Yup.
It will be my first time, unless something unusual pops up and I find myself in the islands, which I am not opposed to, but to tell you the truth, I hadn’t expected to hear the news today that I might be in the islands for the holiday.
My family I work for brought it up today.
I will have off that weekend from school and work, well, since it is work, will let me have the time.
It’s not a real vacation for me, I’ll be working, but, oh, the location does not suck.
Not at all.
And like I said, I’ve never been to Hawaii.
I really should go, I am part Polynesian after all.
Puerto Rican and Polynesian on my father’s side.
German and Scot on my mom’s side.
I had someone tell me once that I was a Polynesian princess mixed with white trash.
Heh.
I might have a little trashy in me.
I definitely have some princess in me, that’s for sure.
Nevertheless, I am thrilled at the idea.
I love that the family really wants me to be included in their lives and I really love working for them.
Tomorrow marks five months of work and it’s been such a great job for me and the parents really appreciate me and the kids love me.
I love my charges.
LOVE.
Both of the older kids were under the weather today and one of them stayed home from school.
Work was huge amounts of snuggling, singing every song I know from my years of being a nanny, and an almost endless repetition of a lullaby that I usually sing to the baby, and all the babies I have ever worked with and a lot of my toddlers too, to the oldest boy while rubbing his back and petting him and just sitting and crooning to him.
He is the sweetest boy and super smart and vulnerable and the request to keep repeating the lullaby and stroking his soft blonde hair, oh, my heart, I just wanted to curl him up in my arms and kiss away the fever.
He got lots of love and I got to be the Queen of Snuggles.
I also got to do some cooking while he was watching a movie, sick days get movies, and I revelled in the cooking.
It feels good to cook, I miss it sometimes, cooking for a partner or my family.
I used to cook all the big holiday meals for my family and oh, the baking, and the stews, the jams and cheesecakes and pies, the cookies and pork chops.
Midwestern much.
Aside.
I said “bubbler” today and the woman looked at me like I was an alien.
Bubbler is water fountain in Wisconsineese.
I made up that last word, rhymes with cheese, bubbler is a total Wisconsin word, there are a few more, but that one slips once in a while into the conversation, or “pop” instead of “soda.”
Once and a while my roots show.
I am, however, not so connected to my Hawaiian and Puerto Rican roots.
My father wasn’t much around growing up and though I always kept in touch with my grandmother, I didn’t have much idea about Hawaii.
I had things from Hawaii that my grandmother would send and I remember boxes of chocolate covered macadamia nuts and once a grass skirt, coming in the mail from my grandmother.
I think we had placemats too and a few books about the islands and where the family was from.
It wasn’t until I moved back to California as an adult that I met my father’s side of the family in a more concrete way.
I remember meeting some cousins for the first time and being blown away by how much I looked like them, how they looked like my sister, and how I was actually lighter skinned than the majority of the family.
“They look like me!”
It was a relief and in a way an almost instantaneous connection that I had not always felt with my mothers Germanic roots and Scottish ancestry.
I was neither pale skin nor blue-eyed, or green-eyed as my mother.
I did not have blond hair.
Nope.
I got tan.
I didn’t really burn.
Well, once in a while, after long ass days detassling corn in the fields around Waunakee during the summers when I was working the crews, I might get a shoulder burn or a heavy crop dusting of freckles.
My mom though, my God, she could burn so easily, such creamy white fair skin.
Yeah.
So coming to California and starting to get those connections to my father’s family was a revelation.
I’m still not as close as I suppose I can be, social media does most of the work for me and there’s still stuff with my father that I have reservations broaching my family about.
I ceded his care when I was in Alaska in the hospital to the head of the administrative at the hospital.
I love my father.
I have exquisite and amazing child hood memories of him.
I also have some pretty awful ones too.
But.
He wasn’t around and when he had the accident that lead to the coma that led me to Anchorage, I went almost more to settle my own heart, then for anything else.
I sat by that hospital bed in the ICU for four night and five days.
He was in a coma the entire time I was there.
I held his hand and talked to him.
I forgave him.
And.
I asked for him to forgive me.
I made friends in Anchorage and the fellowship there carried me when I wanted to collapse into the snowbanks and the cold air and just cry my heart out.
I managed to not get stuck in any snowbanks but I won’t ever forget the dark night sky outside the window of the room the hospital hospitality house put me up in, for families of critical care patients at the facility, and the roughness of the sheets on the bed and how alone I was.
No.
That’s not true.
I wasn’t alone, I had God, I was carried, but I was by myself.
I was grateful, beyond grateful, to be there for my family and to relay messages out to the world and to let my grandmother be in contact with me and my uncle and my cousins and the love seed that was planted there.
I have never talked to any of them about letting go of my father’s care, but I did visit my grandmother that next summer and it meant everything to me to say “I love you,” and in that moment, as I was leaving to get on a plane from San Diego, in my grandmothers arms, I could feel how much she loved me too.
I will always have that moment.
And I look forward to getting to go to Hawaii.
Even if it’s not with my employers, which is sounds like it might actually be, I will go.
I have some more healing to do in that corner of my heart history.
I will swim in the ocean and walk on the beaches and turn my face to the sun.
I will go home again.
Although it has never left me.
Impressed as it is on the cheekbones in my face, the wide plush smile on my face, the curls in my hair, the freckles on the crest of my nose, the wilderness of my hips, the sway in my walk.
I have not forgotten.
I always have had the islands in me.
Always.
Auntiebubba 