that Holiday This Past Sunday
Current mood: Lugubrious
If one can really call it a holiday, since the average work week is dormant on Sunday; if they really wanted to reward fathers and mothers, they'd change it to Monday. Parents dig four-day weekends.
If you're new to this maddeningly sporadic blog, I'll give you the briefest of brief: My father, with assistance from my mother and stepfather, disappeared with nary a trace in 1991; sixteen years and more-dollars-than-I'd-care-to-reveal later, I have exhausted myself mentally and physically in my fruitless search and have all but given up. I've moved into the fantasy camp of him showing up at my door one day, or appearing in the midst of a large crowd at the farmers' market. I gaze wistfully at the one good photo I have of him, the artful one taken of him working in the photo department of Walgreen's years before my ideation; I tell Fergus the things about him that I remember, I tell him, "that's your Pop, that's Mommy's father, his name is John," and I don't quell my tears when he hands me the phone and says, "call John! call your Father! I want to see Pop!" I do a tenuous triple dutch between indifference, tremendous sadness and extreme anger all day, every day; no amount of therapy, yoga or chemistry will ever -- I hope -- make those feelings go away. Since they are no longer debilitating, I've embraced them with joy, I take comfort in them, I've made a welcome space for them in my heart and I believe they deserve to live there. I've succumb to the reality of therapeutic grief but since real closure is unlikely, I allow myself the fantastic hope, as well. I don't dwell on that one much, but it makes for some good late-night-on-the-back-porch brain candy.
Throughout my childhood, my father was transient and secretive, moving with relative frequency and exploring career after career in the field of sales: New and used cars, real estate, meat and seafood; my sister's and my weekends were spent travelling two hours back and forth between our mother's house in the DC suburbs and Ocean City where he mostly made his home until the end of our time together. My mother was full of anger towards his common-law wife (my mother cannot abide replacement, emotional or physical -- she'd hate my son if she believed in her heart that I ever truly loved her) and she resented and mocked his unstable life, his frequent job changes and his apparent unwillingness to tithe her his monthly obligation of "child support," the evidence of which I was to believe by virtue of the food on our table and the electricity running the appliances. We enjoyed no great luxury from his monthly supplements, sporadic as they were; during times of extended debt my stepfather would encourage her to pursue legal action and this legal action almost always resulted in a stint in jail for my father because, as I would discover after his disappearance, he was usually unable to pay the money owed.
My father was, and may very well still be, a gambling addict. Horses, sports, slots; I can now recall with crystal clarity hours spent in the arcades of the '80s, places which should have been gleeful and indulgent for children at that time, were exercises in patience and wakefulness as my father tried, quarters on end, to beat his own top score in Pac Man. I see that own obsessiveness in myself from time to time; I will not play video games, gamble or experiment with addictive drugs anymore because I know now that this was his legacy to me, this lack of self-control and a willful ignorance of its destructiveness that could lead to my own death, physical or spiritual. Where I was once powerless and carefree in my unhealthy habits I am now painfully controlled, still indulging myself with tobacco and alcohol but in metered amounts, believing that if I stay within a certain numbered boundary I am safe. I embrace my inheritance because my other half, my mother half, bequeathed me an unhealthy rage and bad hair and I can't make peace with either one of those things; I've got the rage part under control, mostly, but I will never guiltlessly allow myself a measured amount of it because it hurts, it shames, it damages. I can do little about my hair and have learned to live with it. I kill and bury my mother half.
If he's not physically dead, he's surely gone spiritually and emotionally; he does not, as far as my money and the internet can tell me, exist with the same name any longer but he loves me, I'm sure, because he did so wholeheartedly for 21 years and I refuse to believe that that kind of love can die or even fade a bit. I hope, in this regard, that he is a miserable orphan of true love and that in his weakness, his inability to pound the table in objection some 16 years ago when we were signed away like overgrown property, he suffers every waking moment with regret and the knowledge that his younger daughter, at 16, couldn't willfully do what she did and that I, at 21, could barely do more. We were children, powerless against our abusive and manipulative guardians, lied to about our worth and told that we were disposable, disposed. We were to believe that we had little choice, that should we desire legitimacy that pen to notarized paper was the path to validation, to new names and the same old secretive and shameful lives, minus the damaged-but-loving saviour.
Happy Father's Day, Pop. If you're miserably lonely, please find it in yourself to fix that by finding your way back because I don't know how to get to you. You can find me in the book, you can find me here, you can find me in your heart.
