Today the sun came out, big and bright, and warm temperatures melted some snow into water, and you could see it run in the streams for the first time in many, many months. This was such a cold winter. So cold, for so long. Snow banked all over – small snow mountains covering every inch of grass. Frozen hard over the last few weeks to be all but impenetrable except for an errant foot or paw.
But today, it began to melt away, so fast! Amazing how a bit more sunlight and a lot more degrees Fahrenheit can change things.
Times are very stressful, as I am sure (or I think?) they may be with all of us. I have been a student of philosophy, law, and the government for many years. I began as a cross-examination debater when I was 15-16, sophomore year of high school. That year I learned about legal arguments, topicality, philosophical trajectories, speech patterns, structure, order, and logic. Debate was wonderful for me; debate taught me how to speak in front of strangers with confidence, which was a problem I had had for many years. I used to always speak holding my hand in front of my mouth, until I began debate with my friends, hanging out on the outskirts at the end of freshman year.
The government that as inaugurated in January is making striking, strident changes to systems that seemed almost impenetrable in their layers of bureaucracy. I have this theory that people in general are good, and I believe that the layers of that bureaucracy are like the one I am more familiar with: public education. Almost everyone is in the mix for the right reasons, but the structures and inertia can be insurmountable. Watching someone, who I think is on drugs of some kind, speak more than a US President, brandish a chainsaw on the internettelevision, and then use a metaphorical chainsaw on departments all over the government is so frightening.
When my school, which was named Gus Garcia Middle School, in Austin ISD, went under restructuring due to vast failures (more on that another time), one of the things that every teacher had to do was keep a binder at the front of the room, next to the door, so that if anyone from the district, Region 13 Service Center, or TEA could look at data you had collected inside that binder. Data came from assessments. It was so stressful to think that anyone coming in your classroom would look at the binder and somehow “see” something you weren’t doing. The realities of what was happening at the school were complicated and multi-layered and go back to the history of Austin being a highly segregated city. Segregation’s effects linger and can strikingly effect districts perceptions of schools and neighborhood. Resources follow that line of thinking, resources in the form of things, and not people who could really make a difference.
Anyway, I digress.
When I read about the massive layoffs of people, real people with real lives!, I wonder: what are they doing? Isn’t it bad politically to have lots of people lose their jobs when you are president?
I don’t understand what is happening and why and what it means for all of us. We live in a very isolated place almost up to the Canadian border; will anything happen here? If this was 1850, would we even know of anything happening? I just don’t know, and that makes me feel guilty. But is there anything I could do? What would it be?
These are the questions swirling around my mind. There is nothing we can do and yet —
Something big is changing, bigger than anything in our lifetime. The only thing I can compare it to is 9/11 – it feels similar to that time. Everything is uncertain, government are giant jerks, shower, rinse, repeat.
The universe is showing 7/9 (there I said it) planets in a line on Friday night. All year I have thought that the universe wants us to look up. Look up at the stars? At ourselves? In a dream the other night I said to someone that the thing I miss the most when I leave Maine are the stars. I realized that must be true.
Should I liquidate my assets and move somewhere like Thailand or an island off Greece ? Somewhere where the weather is good most of the year and no one cares about its mineral rights or geopolitical power?
I live in a cold place. Maine is about 20 degrees during the day right now, and we have had a snowy winter. It is beautiful here and very, very quiet. It is the end of the line, geographically speaking; we are about 2.5 hours from the Canadian Border. It isn’t far enough away; I feel the feelings encroaching, and the impacts are just barely far away. Yesterday I bought an $11 roll of aluminum foil. Being that aluminum is the 3rd most abundant element on earth, I found it troubling and I then bought it anyway. From now on I will be washing my aluminum foil so that it can be reused. You can’t catch me!
There are so many things I wish to be writing about, but instead I am working on quilts, and walking, and looking at snow, and looking at stars, listening to music, and trying to keep the loneliness and fear at bay. It is very hard. I am a highly emotional person. Sometimes I feel that my heart lives outside my body, and so it bumps into everything.
Right now I am off work for the most part, except when I go to caretake a house that is in my care. This means I get to sleep in everyday, and take my dog for walks, and make toast in the morning. I try to only read the news 2 or 3 times a day. I try to not listen to anything but my favorite podcasts. I try to find little things to appreciate, and I do, everyday. I make new recipes and call friends. I am worried that I am turning into a weird person who channels anger into making quilts. My connection to metalworking seems to be waning, and what does that mean?
I find myself wandering alot lately, as if I am in fog. I don’t understand this. I have so many skills and so many ideas, so many topics to write about and make things about, and yet, I don’t seem to do it. I work at night, sewing tiny pieces of fabric together. I am making a quilt about anger and about seeing. When I start making a block I am mad as hell, and by the end, the anger has dissipated, so I think it is working. The block I am making is called the Eye of God, and the eye is definitely aimed at my poor dead dad, the one who abandoned two twin boys back in 1968 and impacted the lives of many people afterward; his grief became a wrecking ball that just never gave out.
There are other wrecking balls around, swung by other men who are, no doubt, lying about something very big, so sad and empty that all they can do is destroy and hurt. It is an old story, but I am tired of it all. Tired of the actions of men, chimpanzees swinging their dicks around, holding automatic weapons, not thinking about everyone behind them that has to pick up the pieces. My current interpretation of the patriarchy is that is tired and cranky (hangry maybe? hangry for actual human connection and permission to be…..) and, like a tired and cranky child, it is striking out at any hand that comes near. Our Vice President says to Germany and other partners in Europe to be cooler to the Alt-Right parties who negate how bad those Nazis were, our President lets an unelected person have access to critical data systems that hold information like the fact that I moved here from England sometime in the 1980s on the coattails of a man who was running away from his poor decisions, his anger, his family, everyone who could have comforted him and forgiven him. He ran to New York City and we took a helicopter around the Statue of Liberty and we never went back. Smash.
It is no secret that I did not vote for our current president, nor will I ever support a man who I knew best from his episode of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous“, a show I loved as a kid. I cannot support this person and I don’t understand how anyone can, but I am clearly wrong as the majority of voters did indeed support him. I wonder, though….will they in a few months?
I keep thinking about a marble running down a hillside or a dune. The marble starts at the top, shiny and beautiful, and starts wending its way down a hillside. As it moves, it carves a shallow trench in its wake, perhaps it hits other tiny pebbles, runs over grass or shells. When it reaches the bottom, no matter its small stature in an of itself, its actions have permanently (or impermanently, as after all, everything is impermanent) changed the surface of the Earth. People who think that the actions of the president will only impact the 2 million or so people he wants to fire in the federal government and will not hurt them are delusional. The marble that is mass layoffs in our government will pick up, roll over, carve out, and forever alter so many unpredictable aspects of our life in the United States. Only time will tell.
I am going to work on forcing myself to write here, to document. I have so many things to say and stories to write down. I want to write about meeting my half-brothers and how wonderful they are and how excited I am to meet them. I want to write more about Mary Ann and taking care of Cody’s grandma, Maw Maw. I want to write about my volunteering for the local hospice group and trying to find my way again after losing my confidence over the last three years. It is a long and great journey, so much to say! I cannot let the fear of the present moment erase these experiences and these stories.
For awhile, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize myself; who was that, staring back at me with little wrinkles everywhere, eyelids that are changing, a worried brow, gray hair? For a while, I knew that it was, indeed me, but a me that somehow had changed. Now, they have come together and I see the same old face in my current new face.
This blog has existed for about ten years, and so much has happened in those interim ten years. For a long time, I was good at writing regularly, at night, by myself, in my house. But then ten years ago I got together with the man I am now married to, and my evening behaviors changed. To me, writing is a solitary act. I really don’t like to do it when anyone is home, even with the door closed. I somehow feel that it is important not to be interrupted when channeling whatever this is.
Here I am today, writing stream of consciousness style, so please bear with me. Today is my friend Mary Ann’s birthday and she would have been 46. She died two years ago. She visits a lot, but we can’t talk anymore, and that is what I miss the most. I also miss talking to my dad, as we did during his last few years of life. We had had a lifetime of fights (since I was a teenager, so half a lifetime I guess), that we gave up sometime after I got married and we moved Maw Maw into our house after she had a stroke. Taking care of her made me realize that our lives are very finite and we can leave the planet oh so quickly. I vowed to never talk to my dad about anything important ever again, and we began talking all the time.
Today I am thinking about his first, secret-to-us family in England. What is weird about this iteration of thinking, after now knowing for about 2 months, is that I feel the most compassion for him that I have ever felt. I never could feel this compassion for him in life because he never told us about this thing, this majorly big issue in his life that explains so much. When I asked my aunts about him in 2017 and they told me they wouldn’t tell me, I thought all kinds of things.
I thought he had gotten someone pregnant and his parents were really mad. (Partially true)
I thought maybe he had gotten drunk and wrecked a car and his parents were really mad. (No)
I thought he had fought in Vietnam and had PTSD. (Not true; now we aren’t sure if he was ever over there, but he said he was, so……)
Basically all of the things I thought it could be were way more colorful and interesting than a breakup of a marriage in its infancy, and leaving the infants that came along with the young marriage behind, never to see them again. It’s just so damn sad.
Lately, sometimes, I get so sad. It’s like something is literally hanging around my neck with a weight. What’s in the weight? I don’t even know. Is it just me? Am I a melancholy baby after all? It would seem so. I used to be more fun though, I think. Why is this weight so heavy and how do I lift it? I don’t want to feel this sad and anxious all the time; emotions so overwhelming and a general feeling of no one liking me. And coupled with that, a crazy desire to keep everyone happy so that I don’t say things when I am angry or sad or irritated or when I need to. Those two things must be intertwined; some ouroboros that is.
Earlier I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in Texas and we were talking about how reflective the 40s is. This decade is wild and whack. I don’t understand how the shift is perhaps a bit more money in the bank, or perhaps an investment (house) or something, and then people start to die? Right now, I think this trade off, this change, this phase, level-up, or whatever you want to call it, is bullshit.
I also accept that everyone dies and literally they have to die at some point. It just seems that it is weirdly becoming a regular part of life, and I am having to adjust to it and “deal” with it, and try to understand it and be at peace with it. One of the things I learned when Maw Maw lived with us is that death doesn’t scare me. I think I knew this, as I when I got very sick in high school and didn’t die, I think I chose to no longer be frightened of it and be open to it all the time. When Maw Maw was dying, a day that I haven’t written about yet, it was very weird and mysterious. Watching someone leave the planet “is NOT like in the movies” (I said this over and over at that time).
Why can I not seem to get out of thinking about Maw Maw, my Dad, Mary Ann, and my friend Kate (who died this past summer). I am shaken by Kate’s death; I always thought she’d end up working for the federal government and be interviewed on 60 Minutes or something. Mary Ann I just miss. My Dad I just miss. Those two were my phone people; I spoke to them almost every day. I haven’t had my phone people in over 2 years, and I miss them. Maw Maw I miss, but she makes me smile and laugh. She was old and she was ready to roll out. I just miss her, again, because it would be fun if she was here and we could watch a movie. They just seem to live in my mind right now; I am not sure what to do about that.
When I think of my Dad right now I just wish I could tell him that it’s ok, we know, and we just wish he would have told us because everything is fine. It happened so long ago, before he had even met my mom, and I know that no matter what happened, it was not an easy decision and I am sure he didn’t want to make it. My Aunt Margaret told me about his white wedding, and how beautiful it was, everyone in white dresses and my Aunt Helen was the flower girl. She told me she has photos somewhere and I so hope she can find them. I have a hard time imagining my dad as a 26 year old person. How was he ever that young?
I wish I could tell him that it’s ok because it is. It explains so much, almost everything. It explains why we came to the US, and why his family didn’t know that. It explains, perhaps, why we fought so much. Did he feel guilty every time he looked at me? Did he feel guilty all the time, ashamed, anxious, afraid, and did he transform those feelings into rage and anger? (Seems so). It seems so sad, what a waste of time and energy. My mom said that she would have welcomed the boys into the family, but who knows if they would have wanted that, or their mom. I know that with Cody’s situation with his baby mama, she was (metaphorically) driving the bus and made it extremely hard for him to see or have partial custody of his son. It took many thousands of dollars and hours of time to secure those rights. But, he did it, he chose to fight for them. Why didn’t my dad fight for his boys?
I can only imagine how sad he must have been, and that is how I have compassion for him. I wonder if he knew it wasn’t working when they were living in Scotland and found out they were pregnant. I wonder where they moved after that. Did they own their house or rent it? Was it near my grandparents or her parents or neither? How much was he working then, and doing what? I know that he was a cigarette salesman at one point down in Devon/Cornwall, but was that before when he first got back from Australia, or between Outward Bound and Noble Denton?
It is such a drag that I probably won’t know the answers to many of these questions. The tragedy of this story, or at least one of the big ones, is that the boys’ mum died the same year that he did. She died still with his last name, after all that time.
I feel better after writing a bit. Please bear with me as this all comes pouring out. I am so scared to let it, but it feels like a weight lifted when I do.
Grief, again. Grabbing hold of my heart and squeezing it in a vice. Some people describe grief as being shaken by a wild animal, but mine is a cold squeeze and I feel like I can’t scream out even though I want to. If I scream, someone might get mad at me for being too dramatic or sensitive or overly-emotional. If I scream, people might know and worry or be mad at me for making noises in quiet places. I said this to my therapist two weeks ago and just remembered it:
“If I look at it, then I may be sad forever.” Where does that come from? When I say it outloud or read it, I know that it is some part of my brain trying to trick me. I can’t be sad forever, and how would letting this out make me sadder? Perhaps it’s the weight? It doesn’t want to let go?
My Dad was an incredible storyteller; when he was dying, nurses at the hospital would ask my brother and I if the stories he had told them earlier were true. One asked, “did he really jump out of planes?”. After he died, we received card after card after card telling stories or sharing condolences about the loss of him, and the loss of his stories.
My brother and I always said that we knew that parts of the stories were true, but we never knew how much, or if some of them were real. Turns out that he spoke around a core truth, a center story, about which we only learned three years after his death.
Before he died, he said to my brother and I a great many things. Just before he went into a coma, in which he laid for 9 days, he told both of us individually that he wasn’t afraid to die and he knew this was the next step in his life, in his journey. This conversation, to both of us, was comforting and I think it was to him, too. He repeatedly told us that we had to take care of our mother.
One of the common themes of his stories was his time in Outward Bound, both teaching in Devon and helping boys of under-resourced backgrounds who had gotten into trouble, known as “Borstal Boys”, and trying to get another school started with little success. We always assumed the school he wanted to start was also in Devon. He spoke about it and told us that it was his biggest regret that he didn’t just try harder, that he was sure that it would have worked eventually, but that he felt that he had to earn more money, and so he eventually abandoned it.
It turns out that there was a story at the core of this story, and probably, at the core of all the others, too. It turns out that he was married in 1966, had two twin boys in 1967, and somehow left that relationship and his sons by 1971. He never told my mom this, or my brother, or I, and his family kept this secret until this last October.
This has been so hard for me to write about, despite peoples’ suggestions that it will help. For some reason, writing about this has been difficult because it scares me. My brother and I found our half-brothers (we think) and last week, sent them handwritten letters asking them to speak with us. They are 58, we are 44, and 40. Writing the letters was hard, and putting them in the mail required a lot of energy and focus, Why? I cannot tell you, although all I know right now is that I feel that knowing this story, and sending the letters, put something in motion that I now can’t take back.
When my Dad got together with their mother he was around 24 years old. I can’t even imagine my Dad as a 24 year old. For some reason, he was always old. Like my brother says, he will be 50 in our minds forever. But he was 24, and then he got married when he was 26, and had two boys when he was 27. Just like my husband Cody did. Just like so many people did. And then 4 years later, he no longer had them, had left them, and had asked his whole family to keep the secret, which they did.
For about a month, I was really mad about this. Sometimes, I still am. Right now, though, I think – why? And I know that there must have been a reason why. Tragical romance? Raising twins as babies gone awry? Lack of involvement in child raising on the part of my dad who was a rig worker and was 6 weeks on, 6 weeks off? Parents didn’t like him? All of the above and so much more?
This is the first time I am writing about this. I keep having emotional outbursts that are inappropriate. I keep thinking about my Dad. I have so much compassion for him now; more so than I ever have. I also want to shake him sometimes and I wish I could talk to him. Somehow I feel that this is the core issue that the whole family rotated around, even though we didn’t know what it was. Years ago, in 2017, I asked my aunts (his sisters) if there had been something that had happened that stopped him from having a close relationship with his family, and especially his mother. They told me it wasn’t their story to tell. Now I understand that, and they were right to tell my mom first. But, I feel somehow ok, good, accepting, forgiving, and curious about how I knew something was off.
For years, my heart has ached at my lack of family. I always wondered why we moved to Texas in 1983, and why we never went back to England. Now I know. I feel like I knew about my brothers even before I knew who they were or what they were to me. It’s as if their absence was a presence in my heart, all along.
I hope to write more about this and explore how it is changing my perspective toward myself and my dad and my place in the world. It is wild. I just turned 44, and I have decided I will live to 88. This means that my life just started its second half; just started over again. Right now I feel so sad sometimes, so angry, so confused; what am I supposed to be doing? Where am I supposed to be? But I suppose Destiny interjected the need for me to know the answer to the big question. The answer is: two brothers, twins, born in January, fellow Capricorns. I hope they want to speak to us.
There is an old, leather-wrapped Jefferson Magnifier that years ago I stole from my parents and use it to read words and letters largely from time to time. As the moments pass and we get closer to the inauguration of the 47th President, I keep thinking about magnification, this time of ideas, rather than random passages in old books.
I wonder if the new strategy is to employ loyalists who won’t say much against, well, anything, and to wear down the resolve of those of us who still believe in parts of the government as good, functional, useful, purposeful, and necessary for our mutual survival as a country. I am consistently reminded, also, of the Batman movie in which Christian Bale is Batman and Heath Ledger is The Joker, and Alfred reminds Bruce Wayne that “some men just want to watch the world burn”. It could be that, too, I suppose.
I wonder how does someone advocating for the slashing-and-burning of the FBI impact me? Does it? What if the Department of Education is dismantled to pre-1979 laws. Would they go after those laws, too? What about IDEA? What about school lunch programs?
I wonder.
When I pull back on this philosophical magnifying glass, I see that this is both a detail and a long-term strategy that started way back when I was little and Reagan was president. So many big ideas had been codified into law during the 1940s-1980, and his administration wasn’t able to do much about it. But what about this one? 40 years later and a whole lot more vocal and indignant.
I hope that the federal government is not changed to a point where we can’t recognize it. I don’t know what that would mean for most people, especially young people and poor people and unhoused people and immigrant people. This last week’s news was emotionally draining for me, but I am trying to read the news about once per day. I do want to know about as much as the media will report. I hope they continue being brave and sharing details. Without them, I am not sure what might happen. I do remember that there were no press briefings during his last administration. Will that happen again?
This all so strange to experience, this shift in the United States. The shift is so dramatic as to be alienating and exciting but not in a happy way. The other side I think probably feels the same way except they are excited in a good way. This is so tiring; I hate that I am feeling so tired by all of it and I feel like my writing is not as clear as normal. But that is ok. Like one of my best friends said today, “it is all so fleeting”.
It is not everyday that you have a major life revelation, something that stitches some theories into the facts column of your memories, forever cementing but also altering your life. Last night, my mom sat myself, my brother, and my husband down to “talk about something for an hour” she said. Three hours later, we had learned that:
My father was married a very long time ago to a first wife, sometime around 1965
My father and his wife had twin boys who were born on 7 January 1967
My father’s first wife “couldn’t cope” with raising twins (on her own? with an unhelpful husband who “worked alot”? with perhaps post-partum depression that was undiagnosed?), so she moved back in with her mother and
They never spoke again
My dad’s family, who knew his first wife, who had been to his wedding, and who knew his twin sons, were asked to honor the request of no contact, which they did for 54 years, until a few weeks ago when my aunt told my mom she knew something but she also knew it would be hurtful. My mom asked her to tell her, regardless, and here we are.
For years I have wondered what precipitating event caused my father to lose contact with his family, for after this, he barely spoke to them for 15 years. In fact, my aunt didn’t even know that I was born in England, one hour or less away from where she had her second daughter, born one month before me.
In 2017, I went to England for my cousin Sally’s wedding in the Lake District. It was beautiful and I can’t wait to go there again. Whilst driving through London with Aunt #1, I asked her, “did something happen between my dad and his parents? Like an argument? Did he do something to disappoint them or something? And that’s why you all stopped talking?” She said, “It is not my story to tell. You have to ask your father.” Whilst walking through a town in the Lakes with Aunt #2, I asked her the same question, and she gave me the same answer.
In 2009, when I was getting divorced from my first husband, my parents came to see me. I was confused as we weren’t especially close at the time. Now, looking back on it, I suspect my dad felt that me going through a divorce would be very difficult. I know my mom was worried about me, but she said that they felt I was handling everything very well (later writings will go into how good of an actress I am – Oscar caliber). In my laundry room, my mom let slip that my dad had been married before and that “divorce isn’t that hard, eh Michael?”. This is when I learned he had been married before for about 5-6 years. When I asked him why he had never said this before, he said he didn’t think it was important. I asked him, “what, are you going to tell me that we have half brothers or sisters somewhere?” he said a definite “No.” He lied.
Why did he lie? To me? To my mom? To my brother? What happened and why?
Tragically, his first wife (first and second wives were both named Susan, oddly), died about one year after he did, in 2022. He was born in 1939, she in 1943. He died in 2021, she in 2022. He had his twins when he was 28 years old. I cannot even imagine what my dad was like/looked like/acted like when he was 28. My husband had his son when he was 26 and I remember what he looked like: an adultish person.
Thankfully, all of my dad’s siblings have told us we can ask them anything now that the cat is out of the bag. But sadly, both people involved are dead. Strangely, she kept Blythe as her last name all these years, as have done the boys. Why? If it was such a split, wouldn’t it make sense to change names or……….something.
Did he ever pay her any money to help raise them? Were they ever in contact? Why did the split even happen in the first place? Apparently my grandmother took care of the twins when she could. She always loved babies and was great with children. She also had to live with this condition of giving up her first two grandchildren, and, her daughters say, fought it until my granddad insisted. I cannot imagine how painful that must have been for her, for him, for his first wife. It just seems like so much pain, and I will never know the reason why, probably.
When I asked my dear Uncle Denys why this happened, why we left the UK and our entire family, when we were having tea after Sally’s wedding, he said, “it was a different time”. Maybe it was? What does that mean? Did he know?
This opens up so many questions. Is this the reason that we moved to the States, so that he would never have to deal with it? It seems so. Why did he never tell my mom? Why did she never insist on meeting his family before they were married?
Because, oh yes, my mom never pushed on meeting his family. He said they didn’t want to meet her, and she accepted that, despite that his 5 brothers and sisters would have loved to meet her, and did, about 15 years after his first divorce, when he was married to his third wife and living in Houston, Texas.
I have written about this here before, but sometime around 1970 my dad lost touch with his family and regained contact with them around 1985, after we had emigrated to the United States. My granddad was ill with progressive health problems, and we came to England and met the family for the first time. The aunt who orchestrated this meeting is the same that spilled the beans to my mom two weeks ago, She is truly amazing and a creature of love and acceptance. I love her so much. After the first English meeting, my grandparents came to Texas and saw us there. My granddad died very soon thereafter, in 1989, of cancer and heart problems. He had been a nuclear chemist and the exposure to chemicals damaged his body. My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer in the 1960s, looked around at her 6 children and her scientist husband who didn’t pay bills but knew how to (mostly) build an atom bomb, and said to her doctor, “I can’t die!” and didn’t until 1994.
What is bothering me so much about this story is the lie at the center of it; a lie that, to me, is wholly unnecessary. Why would he leave behind his children? What about his wife? Did he love her? Did she break his heart? Did he break hers? Yes, yes, and yes? We could have had two older brothers. (We think we have found them. One looks just like him, with eyes just like me and my brother’s. The other looks like my granddad, to a T. Round, bald head, round nose, nice smile.)
28. When I was 28, I was getting divorced from my first husband. I owned a house in Austin. Did he own a house in England? He always told me he sold his boat to buy his first house with my mom. Is that true? The trick of this lie is that the two people who were really involved are now dead.
This experience, which right now is only 24 hours old, has taught me that is never worth it to lie. Never. What would have happened if he had just told my mom about all of this, like we would all expect to have happen between two people committing to each other in marriage? Would anything have changed? Only one, to be certain. The lie wouldn’t have been there. My uncle used to stay with them, he says. My grandmother helped with the babies. My aunt was living with my grandparents when they split and she remembers everything.
My dad was always best in a group, at a party. In person, he was very challenging. He was avoidant, afraid of commitment, and angry. When he was confronted, he became so angry that he was scary. I suppose that guaranteed that no one would get close. He drank to excess, creating health problems for himself and his family. He died three years ago, and during the last year of his life, became very emotional. He cried alot. He said to me once, “I used to be a great man” or something similar. I told him, “you ARE a great man, Daddy”. Despite talking to my brother and I a lot over those last two months especially, and we did talk, a lot, he never told us about this. Was this his wound? Was it the reason that everything else happened? It seems so. By avoiding three people, or perhaps four (apparently my dad’s first wife’s mom did not like him and did not want them to get married), he dragged in 5 brothers and sisters and their partners, his second wife, friends(?), my mom, my brother and me. All drawn into a web of sadness that was never soothed or understood, just forgiven, because that is what you do when people die.
This is just the first time I will write about this. I had to get something down, some sort of recording of how it feels to know an answer, perhaps the answer, to the question that I have been asking about my father for years. I knew something had happened. I thought it was something in Vietnam. Right now I don’t even know if he was ever there. I don’t know very much about him at all. Today, I feel like I know more and less, good and bad. My takeaway from 43 years on the planet is that it is both/and yes/no good/bad all the time, together. They are mixed, hand-in-hand, like dough, chocolate, or clay.
In some ways, it feels like a circle has been closed, soldered shut with fire and time and communication, finally. I wish I could hug my dad and tell him I am so sorry that he felt that this was the best decision he could make at that time, and I also feel like shaking my dad by the shoulders and shouting, “WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK?”. It is both. I understand the sadness and shame, but the lie? The behavior? My brother and I hope to reach our brothers and we hope that they want to speak with us. Beyond that, no expectations. Goddammit, Daddy.
p.s. I hope you know the reference in the title today. I think it is the appropriate spell for today. I wish I could shout it at my dad.
Today, I found myself holding my head in my hands whilst standing at the counter full of gold jewelry. I was thinking about being a public school teacher for 20 years and how the president-to-be wants to eliminate the Department of Education. I was thinking about life and careers and goals and how maybe, it’s just not all that important.
I listened to sad music for awhile, made jewelry for awhile, and then proceeded to watch my dog barf and poop in various spots throughout the gallery (really hope I found all of them!) for the rest of the day. He even pooped in front of two customers. Yikes.
Then it got dark, and the moon ascended and when I got outside it was bright white-yellow and the clouds were just covering its glow and they were blue and grey and it was magical. It was so damn dark for 5:05, let me tell you.
Then I came home and cried for a while and talked with my husband and then talked with my cousin and they both told me to look around and stop being such a sad sack. OK they were nicer than that, but they did tell me to look around at all the good stuff.
Why do we spend so much time on the bad? Is it because so much of the bad is flying at our faces at any given moment? Why isn’t the good flying at our faces?
My friend Kevin is telling me to think about things that are in my control versus things that aren’t. This concept is my new personal project. Control is an illusion but it is so deceptive, so slippery – I want to try to hold onto the smoke of it so much!
This post is a bit of a ramble. Kevin also asked me what will I do if the worst case scenario happens? I don’t have an answer to that at all. What will I do?
I was just outside, eating leftovers on my front porch. The house, when it was for sale, advertised said porch as a “farmer’s porch”. I am uncertain what that means. It is stained this bizarre burnt-orange UT color, which contrasts terribly with the sage green of the house. I hope to change it sometime soon. But I really hope to shingle the house soon, so that the color of the farmers porch doesn’t matter as much.
I was just talking to the stars, as I do. I was talking to my friend Mary Ann, too, about how much I miss her and wish I could talk to her. I wish I could talk to her about how weird everything got after she died and what bitches her friends were to me and to a couple of other friends. It was a mass disintegration and reorientation around a small crew of rich bitches. I guess it was inevitable. I asked the stars tonight: did I move to Maine, change my life, sell my house that I loved so much, because I hated my job and my best friend died?
The answer: not exactly. When I left Maine last time, it was like I left my art here. I still did art in Texas, but not to the same caliber or with the same intensity or regularity as I do here. Texas moves so fast and there are no seasons and there are so many highways; it is easy to just go with the flow and not examine yourself all that much. Also, in rapid fire over the course of three years, Cody’s grandma moved in with us, she died, there was a global pandemic, my dad died, and then Mary Ann died. This summer, Kate died and a few months ago, Michelle died and so did Brian. It has been terrible….let me rephrase. It has been bewildering to me. What happened that made Brian and Michelle so sad that they chose to leave us when they had taught me so much over the years? I can see Michelle smiling at me across a table, laughing, tossing her pretty blonde hair, laughing to keep from crying. Brian I can see spinning in a classroom, sharing music and asking us to think more deeply, to see connections. I remember the night he showed us True Stories when I was 15 years old, and didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand alot of what he taught us til I was in college. I have been listening to lots of Stars of the Lid and I feel that lessons are held within those songs, too….lessons to slow down and think. Think, and then do.
So Texas moved too fast, and Maine is so slow. We are changing into the fall and the air tonight is chilly and brisk and beautiful. The stars twinkle; there is a special fall-winter sharpness to the starlight that I love.
I am so thankful to have this time to investigate and think about what is going on with me. I am thankful to be able to ask myself: why am I so sad right now? Today I told my best friend that maybe I can’t be happy anywhere and he laughed and said something about how our dopamine levels are probably off or maybe we were both born in bad moods.
I think my new question is where the sadness is coming from; what is its origin story? Can I find it? I am sure I can. For so long, for years, it was my abortion that happened when I was 15 and the guilt I felt around it. I no longer see it that way; I now know that it was the right decision at the time. My new task is to examine these feelings of now and figure out where they come from. I think they have something to do with my job two years ago at Booker T Washington Elementary and working with two very challenging children. I didn’t know what to do, I am afraid that I hurt them, and I know that they hurt me, physically and mentally. I don’t even know how to describe those experiences yet, but am looking forward to working through some it with my therapist this fall. Cody says it wasn’t my fault and that I did what I was told to do and what I thought I had to do. I remember though, many moments when I just wanted to run away, to hide, to close my eyes and have it be over. Unrealistic.
I wonder what trauma response that experience touched on; it pressed a button to be sure. Lately I have been so interested in epigenetics and how sometimes our responses are not ours, but learned and coded in our genes to predispose us to bad moods, sadness, depression, anxiety, etc. I need to read about it. I am convinced there are generations of sad, scared people inside my soul. I have to tell them that they need to stay in their time period and let me explore mine.
It is the end of August – the light is sharpening in its angle and the sun is moving ever lower on the tree line each day. I did something wild and left my public school teaching job about 2 weeks ago, and here I sit, in my favorite armchair, which I share with my favorite dog, wondering.
We moved to Maine one year and two months ago. Moving cross country in your forties is no small feat and it has been harder than I thought it would be. Peoples’ lives have changed and everyone has aged. Houses are so expensive, if you can even get one. Wages, if you’re lucky, just barely keep up with the costs. There is this other aspect of middle-aged life that I am curious about, too. It is the sadness; I wonder where it comes from, and does everyone share it?
With middle age comes a lot of experiences, and I think quite a bit of loss. There are a few people that I know who have made it to their mid forties without significant losses of loved ones, but, on the whole, it seems that the decade comes with an acceptance that people you love are going to die, and sometimes, a lot of them are going to die, closely together. Some of them will be old, and so their deaths will be understandable, but some will be young, and will die so quickly that it is like whiplash when they go.
My friend Kate passed away last month, a week shy of her 50th birthday. She died after being sick for 11 months. I will write more about Kate later; she deserves a deep-dive into my many times and experiences with her and learnings from her, but suffice it to say for today, her death scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know that that could happen: that you could be diagnosed and pass away in 11 months. It cemented a decision I had already made to jump into the unknown.
Here I am. Seems a little nuts. I own a house and in a week won’t have any health insurance. Somehow, it will work out. My husband is such a sweet person but he, too, is struggling with his own middle-aged sadness. I am not sure where his comes from, because he has trouble identifying his emotions. I think he was taught at a young age that emotions were a weak enemy to be vanquished and sent away; he did that, to his current peril. He says his brain feels like mud. I worry about him and want him to have dreams again.
This place is so seasonal, and here we are, in a transition again. A great friend and I were talking today about how fall feels early, but it’s possible that it just feels that way because we spent most of our lives living in a place with no seasons (Texas). I found a red maple leaf on the driveway two days ago, and today I saw an entire red maple tree on the drive home.
Today I drove into Northeast Harbor to go to work and was struck with a feeling that I don’t feel about it the same way that I did before. I am not certain that I have lost some magic feeling, or just that my feelings on the whole are a bit muddled right now. I am worried that I might struggle to be happy anywhere, and what that means to me. I am curious about how I find peace in accepting myself. How do I keep my inherent loneliness at bay? Or, alternatively, how do I welcome it in and befriend the feeling? My husband and I were speaking about that yesterday; about being people who have always felt lonely, and yet, are together.
Does it come from my 0-3 formative experiences? Is it genes? Is it the crazy stressful harsh and intense family of origin I come from? Probably. But what do I do with this?
I am working on a book that is based on many of the writings I posted here about 10 years ago. Over the next month or so, I will be removing those posts as this blog goes in a new direction; this version of me, not the older version. So many lives in this one life, if we are lucky. One of my mentors, one of my professors from grad school, told me to write everything down. I had said that to someone else, so I have decided to take my own advice, and his, and be here now, writing and musing. I think that I am finding some kernels of truth within the annals of my mind, but it is a deep labyrinth in there and will take some time.
What makes me so afraid? Who is the one who is scared?
I have been thinking a lot about genetics and memories; how many of our memories are ours? I don’t mean remembering your kindergarten teacher, but rather, the memories that trigger our responses to things. How do I deal with change? How do I deal with control and the fear of the future?
Please forgive me as I wax poetic a bit here; it may be too many episodes of Northern Exposure, or too many trees, the way the light looks on the water each day, or the way the light itself is changing as we make our way out of summer. Hard to say.
I want to make this big change in my life. I want to quit my teaching job and get a new job and become an art therapist, even though I am already an art therapist. I want to learn more about it so that I can do it more meaningfully. I want to volunteer/work for hospice and talk to people who are dying, and their families. I want to work with kids who are on the autism spectrum. I want to work with people who have cancer, brain injuries, who are old and who are young.
In about a week or so I have to make this decision and pull the trigger of stability and quit the job that the school district so graciously gave me back in April or May. I feel sort of guilty about this, but not really. I feel that all of us who serve others understand the spirit of a calling; something that tugs at your heartstrings so hard you’d be a fool to not pay attention.
Part and parcel of this desire, though, is this fear. It is REAL. It is fierce. It says: what if you end up under a bridge? What if you can’t find a job? What if you can’t pay your mortgage? What if you disappoint everyone? Isn’t that interesting?
Last night was my mom’s 73rd birthday and I concocted a whole plan for her birthday: fancy dinner out at a fancy restaurant. Within about 20 minutes I recognized that this was all about ME and not anyone else. My mom was answering texts about real estate on her phone, River and Maddy were talking about whatever it was on their phones, Cody looked uncomfortable, my brother and I were just sitting trying to make it all tolerable and workable. We went to the Claremont, which is so pretty, but we stood out like sore thumbs in our lack of pink wealthy Hawaiian print and Indian block print dresses. Cody felt that everyone was looking at him; I knew better. They wanted us to look at them. Dinner was delicious if not exciting, but it was insanely expensive and so, yet again, I learn a lesson by it literally being charged to my bank account. $410 for 6 people seems, even for Maine in July, a bit much.
WHAT AN IDIOT – I said to myself all night, not sleeping. I said it all day, too.
I am about to go to bed now, and try to let it go. An expensive lesson, but a good one. My mom doesn’t care. We could have gone out for ice cream. I so desperately want her to be happy that I spent $410 on that hope; in vain. She isn’t happy, she doesn’t want fun. She is who she is.
Gah.
OK so maybe I am not an idiot, perhaps I am a deluded hopeful person (not much difference there). My mom is definitely at the forefront of my mind’s eye when I think of quitting my job and starting something totally new. I want her visage to go away. I don’t think it’s really real.
So who is afraid? Is my grandma? My grandpa? My father? My nana? I dedicate the next few days to that exploratory mission.
Paciencia, Paciencia 