so here I am. a petty thief, a terrible mother, a slut, a whore, a bitch, a cunt.
and?
am I not still worthy of investment?
did I become untenable, obtuse, distasteful?
have I mutated to a form that is unrecognizable in it's deformed attempts at love, it's crushing softness a volatile brick in your belly?
I cannot change.
my wings, while clipped and mutilated, are still in good repair.
I want to tell our story
but I can't really believe
the love you created for me
and make me watch you leave
into the mouth of someone new
your honeyed tender lines
I can't imagine that she knew
your hidden hands in mine
I watched you slipped and sodden
the shadow of the man
a love, a light... forgotten
discarded by your hand
I want to tell our story
I want to sing our song
Our time a recent memory
an illusion all along.
If I had to list the times I have felt insulted by my father, I would have a hard time adding them together.
It's just part of the operating system by this point in my life.
He doesn't mean to. But the injury lands square on my heart each time, that place that still feels bruised and rotten, like the underside of a tomato left on the counter too long.
But the eggshells keep me stifled, cramming my own feelings into that little moldy black hole, until I decide to throw the illusion of the relationship into my personal, proverbial compost bin. I accept the rot, and trust that, with time, something nourishing and beautiful will grow from the rich soil of my grief.
Because, to be fully honest, my father is a stranger to me. I do not know him.
He has been "in" my life for as long as I can remember. But I do not know him.
I dread his texts. Because I do not know him.
I don't have trouble recalling my memories involving him. They are there, and still fresh. The feeling of dread, the sickening feeling of being in a space with a large, unpredictable man, is all too fresh in my mind.
I don't know my father.
Looking back, with clearer eyes not blurred by sentimentality, spending time with my father never felt much different than being at a family reunion and having an old man insist he remembers you in diapers, and reaches for you and demands a hug or a kiss. My body feels sickly in this scenario... there are so many confusing messages, it's hard to nail down the one that makes the most sense. I feel drunken eyes on my small body, and whether the demand/request is that of an emotional need, or a gender expectation, it is no matter. My body, my face, my entire being is being scanned, touched, pulled in to an encounter that asked of me to be pretty, sweet, and easy... consent was never an option.
How does a little girl reconcile the many convoluted messages she's received in one short lifetime?
By the time I was 6, I had internalized the following messages from my elders:
1. I was not wanted as a daughter, but was needed as a joke, a servant, a repository for my mother's insecurities and cruelty.
2. I was a toy to be grabbed, perverted, and discarded by my mother's husband anytime.
3. I was to take care of my father, according to my grandmother, who would talk to me about her impending death, and she thrust upon me the mistruth that I was too sick to participate in sports or friendships, and that my father's caretaker was the position she was training me to take up once I was old enough.
4. I was my father's emotional support blanket, but not much else.
I learned my worth as my father's daughter had a shelf life. As long as I was small and outwardly uncomplicated, and willing to sit in his lap and let him absorb my youthful softness (the smell of beer plays a huge role in these memories, as do my father's swollen and bloodshot eyes), I was doing The Right Thing. If he smacked my behind or laid his drunken and heavy hands on my head to clumsily stroke my hair, I was not to pull away. When I stopped holding his hand in public (the hand-holding more for his benefit than mine), I saw the look on his face, and felt his wall go up shortly after. As puberty set in, I was, in my awkward and scrawny body, left alone to figure out how to manage my dirty sexuality and eventual bloodshed, but I was not alone in deciding what my body would be used for. It was decided, long before puberty, that the adults in my life had access to my body first, whether that was to molest, to cling to in fear, to put to work, or to train to be a good housewife to both my father and to my future older husband (the 'older' aspect being an early part of my training).
But back to my father. Who is he? Why do I not know?
My early training would see my ignorance of who my father is as a personal flaw in myself. In my older years, now almost 44, I recognize that it is not, nor has it ever been, my responsibility to "know" my parents. The work simply isn't mine to take up.
I recognize the perceived harshness of my words. But bear with me.
I toddled right into guilt, subservience, obligation and caregiving with my first steps. My purpose was pre-decided... I would be the trophy of pretty things, I would be the one to inherit the jewelry and the good china, I would fix my dad, and I would never, ever complain, or let my hair get too messy. I had to be pretty, because men were already interested in me, at 6, at 8, at 12. I shouldn't upset anyone, especially my father, because he was A Good Man, and that was not open for discussion. Unless I was at my mother's house, in which the narrative was mocking of my father, openly, and without concern for my young heart and mind.
After all, weren't there dishes to be washed and diapers to be changed? I was a little person with a lot of work to do. My experience was, and sometimes still is, to be silent, and obedient.
In my desperation to be seen, to be loved, I held a space open for my daddy. I remember countless days wondering if he would crash his car and die because he was always drunk. I remember writing him letters I would never send, begging him to stop drinking, to come and get us from the man who abused us at home. For most of my 44 years, that space has remained open, the walls filled with coloring pages of the life I thought I could have. But on those walls, in those spaces, no reality lives. It's a shell of a sentimental imagining, the floor littered with dirt left behind.
I, in my delusions, imagined it to be fairy dust.
There was never a father that I can remember. A man was there at my dad's house. A large man, who I only remember drunk, or resentfully sober for a few days here and there, who made me uncomfortable as he lay drunk and passed out in his underwear on summer vacation, waking long enough to tell me to come lay down with him.
While my father is not and was not a child molester or pedophile, these moments left me feeling frozen, scared, and without agency.
I remember my father picking me up from school and immediately placing headphones on my head. I thought this was strange, but our lives were strange.
At some point, I could hear him talking. This was long before cell phones, and I was confused. I moved the headphones enough so I could hear him clearly. Who was he talking to?
He was talking himself through what to do while driving.
"Okay, brake."
"Stop."
"Press the gas."
"Turn right."
"Steady."
He was wasted, but aware enough to tell himself how to drunk drive his kids home from school.
I remember the distinct smell of Miller Lite, which I will likely never forget. I remember how strong it would smell on the way to school, and how ill and disgusting and unwanted I felt as I went from one strange setting to another.
My father likes to tell wistful tales. He smiles, and to most, he is the sweetest, most gentle man. He helps old people and is kind to strangers and animals. He knows which Bible verses to share to comfort someone. And he knows a lot about Alcoholics Anonymous.
But I'll get to that.
When my father shares warm memories of his childhood, there is a break for me. Why? Because I feel I am being sold on something, though I am not sure what. I know that my own childhood was nothing like my father's, so at times, it can feel as though he is taunting me somehow. I doubt that is his intent. But each time, after he tells me a story, I feel like he watches me. I do not know why.
Sometimes he laughs while watching me. Again, I do not know why.
I know that I dissociate often in my father's company. He does not know this, because he doesn't know me. He does not know the decades of grief I carry that still exhaust me to this day. He does not know about the sleepless nights, the night- and day-mares of trauma. He does not know how I still hear the sound of a policeman's shoes as they came down the hallway, as I prayed they would pass my room and not enter. He does not know the work I put in to grow myself up while he was doing whatever it was he was doing.
He does not know how deep I dig to care for myself and my children, every single day.
He does not know me; yet, he wants me to know him.
He wants to start over.
I, wanting a meaningful relationship of any kind, wanted that too. But as time goes on, I have to question... what does "starting over" mean?
When my father says he wants to start over, at which point on our shared timeline is he imagining? Because from where I sit, I do not know where to start a relationship with an almost 70 year old man I do not know and only remember drunk, absent, or cold. The times I do remember my father being warm, now feel like a mean trick, like someone who is nice to you at school just to embarrass you when you let your guard down.
I do not wish to be an emotional salve to assuage my father's guilt.
I do not want my children to be denied a healthy relationship with a family member, as they currently only have 2 (relatively uninvolved) grandparents; but more than that, I don't want my sons to get emotionally trapped in a role that demands that they stay small and uncomplicated, a role that has them giving more than they can expect to receive from an elder who has not shown up until or unless an emotional deficit is presented- this could be a holiday (the default sentimental obligation), or this could be a moment of detecting one's own mortality.
Either way, I strive to mother my children away from being someone's emotional support animal.
Whether or not my perspective is seen as harsh, my resolve remains. My children deserve to be seen and approached without expectation of what they can give to an adult.
And so do I.
I refuse to elaborate further.
It has occurred to me that I have been attending AA meetings since I was around 10 years old.
At no time since my father started taking me with him to meetings, have I heard my father apologize, express remorse, or even acknowledge his actions or behavior as they've pertained to my life. He often tells me the stories of alcoholics, seemingly to extract some sympathy from me for the addict. I don't know how to tell my father that a lack of compassion or understanding is not the issue. My issue is, in the short visits we do share, much of it feels like he is filling the air with words that make him feel better about his decisions. They don't have anything to do with me, and there is not an effort towards understanding my experience, only an insistence that I see his, or another alcoholic's situation, and feel pity.
Maybe I am projecting, maybe I am assuming, but one can only guess at so much when the dialog is so highly edited and abridged.
That's not to say my father doesn't sometimes ask about me. He does, but in that very pedestrian, small talk sort of way. As soon as things get real, he's gone. All I hear is the same detached laughter I have always heard, and it brings me deep sadness to realize my father's laugh feels more insulting than connective.
I don't know my father.
I know the feeling of choking on eggshells when I think of him.
Will I always remember him this way?
who was i?
was i a dancer? a singer? an artist? a writer? a healer?
a teacher? a mentor? a friend?
a counselor? a sister? a mother?
a child? perhaps of some expansive, nameless God?
who was i?
I wonder where I went, where I got lost, where I am going.
I wonder what I want.
Mostly it's simple- I want my kids, all of us together in a safe home, playing, laughing, running, jumping, dancing.
And then... there is the me from before.
Before I got hurt, there was a teeny tiny small me, who hadn't yet created dreams for herself. I was just... there. Existing, in a baby body, taking in the world around me.
I wish I could hold me. I want to by my own mother, to soothe me and stroke my baby fine hair and tickle my toes and give me my milk and rock me to sleep, to kiss me on my soft baby head, and watch me sleep.
I want to hold my little hand as I learn to walk, to experience my toddler-sized joy and wonder, I want to kiss my little tiny fingertips that simply must reach out and touch the world.
I don't know what happens next.
I don't remember it, but my body does. I don't even know how or where to start in therapy... how do you describe something that happened to you before you even knew what you are?
I am home.
I am safe in my body.
I am home.
I am safe in my voice.
I am home.
I am safe in my writing.
I am home.
I am safe with my children.
My children are safe with me.
I am home.
I am home.
I am home.
