i'm fighting back tears for reasons that are just beyond my grasp. maybe by writing this, i can sneak up behind them and figure out what they are before they melt.
if i took things at face value, i'd say that a fairly minor injustice at work triggered this. never mind that 20 minutes of cursing and being livid with anger and wanting to scream or cry seems a bit excessive for one of life's little downers.
but i know what's really going on, what i spent an hour talking to my shrink about today. how do you mourn the death of someone who's still alive?
i'm hesitating now, not sure how much to say. i don't know; i want to talk about the conflict but that requires talking about its background, which is difficult to do without sounding like a martyr or someone looking for pity. i'm neither.
so my father spent my adolescence married to a psychotic alcoholic who took out her frustrations on his children. and as things deteriorated at home he spent more and more time at work (upwards of 75 hrs/wk) and more of the time he was home drinking. we'll skip over all the little betrayals he committed during that time and get to when he informed me, 11 years ago, that he had no children.
so all this time, i've been rationalizing, because between my mother's death and his remarriage, my father did a wonderful job of raising me. i felt important and special and capable of doing anything i wanted to. questions of gender never entered into it, even. he loved me in a way that felt pure and clear and beautiful. i guess i was hoping i'd have that again some day, i dunno. but i'd decided that he was under a lot of peer pressure to make it succeed (they'd set up a pool at the place he and my stepmother hung out, betting on how long before the marriage failed) and so he didn't notice how bad things were until they were so bad that acknowledging them would have been too painful for him, so it was easier to pretend that she was right, that we were evil children who deserved to be punched and slapped and kicked. i said i could understand how it happened and that it wasn't unreasonable, not in light of how people are, and that it wasn't unforgiveable: beyond his control, more or less.
but he lived with a psychotic (i have a degree in psych and i'm not exaggerating when i call her this) for the seven years i lived at home after they married. he shared his bed with a woman even the neighbors could see was crazy and he *ignored* her illness. they killed my brother and she did her damnedest to destroy me simply because my existence was inconvenient for her. they stole an entire future from me, all the things i could have been had i not been so fucked up i couldn't see straight after i escaped from there. yeah, i like the person i turned into eventually, but not enough to have willingly paid the price they extracted. it wasn't worth it, not even close. there exist no words for the rage and pain, no measure for the bleeding, no way to number the casualties i've inflicted while trying to deal with it.
and now the monster's dead. she died in august, so i think by this time it's pretty clear that he's not going to try to rebuild anything with us, and that's what i was talking about today. i suddenly tried to picture how this contact would happen, if it ever did, and how things would progress. and what became really clear was that he can't just walk in and pick up where we left off. not only that, but it would take a lot of time and effort to build any kind of relationship. i'm not sure i'm willing to do the work.
there's a man who lives in corpus christi. half my genes are his, but i have no idea who he is. i'm not motivated to find out, and i can't think of anything he could say to change that. my little sister wants a big "i still love you, dad" scene. but i don't love him anymore; my scene would be more along the lines of "you absolute rat bastard, what in the fuck gave you the right to try to fucking kill me, and what makes you think i'd be willing to make nice now so you can die with a clear conscience?" so i'm not noble. screw noble.
today i realized that my father has been dead since 1981. he contracted a terminal disease whose first symptom was when my older sister was thrown out on the streets at 16 for disliking his new wife and having the guts to say so (we woke up one morning after she'd said so and she was gone; her name was never spoken in our house again). he died the night he punched me in the stomach and kicked me when i fell down because his wife accused me of calling her a liar.
and i think the hollow empty feeling i've had all day (and tried to put down to "i guess i am bothered by not having a lover at the moment after all") is just grief. i want my daddy back, and instead some stranger is living in his body.
all of this has nothing to do with angst. and i'm not looking for anything by posting it; it's just been running through my head all day and doing this helps me make it real. forgive this trash-dumping/springcleaning.
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deb | sine
self-indulgent once more