Dear Daddy

 Dear Daddy,

    For many years you existed, for me, only in my mind. I understood the rules of biology so I knew you had to BE...somewhere, out there in the ether, floating around like a balloon on a string, tied to something I couldn't see.

    I would miss you. Wish for your presence, your appearance in my life. I wanted you save me, to be my knight in shining armor. Never once did I consider that you might be a bad man, lowly and foul. If anything, I was the bad one. Tainted, stained. At the same time I wanted you, I knew I didn't deserve you.

    It's hard to believe that you're worthy of love when you grew up like I did. Mother is your world. She's God. But instead of Gaia, my mother was Kali. A destroyer grown from anger but never did she slay any demons, only created them. Maybe she was Gaia, after all.

    She hurt me, in all the ways a parent can hurt a child. And I would think of you then, and feel ashamed. I knew why you never came. I was bad. Parents don't want bad kids. Daddy's don't want fat, ugly, stupid little girls who should have been aborted.

    But still I wished for you. I wanted to sit in your lap. I wanted to hold your hand. I wanted you to gather me up in your arms and hold me so tight I couldn't breathe. I wanted to sing you songs and recite the poems I wrote for you. I wanted you to tuck me in at night and protect me from the monsters under my bed. I wanted you to think I was smart and pretty.

    You were always on my mind, in my heart. When I was eight, I learned your name. Kim. She said you were short and had red hair. She told me a very brief story of how she met you and how I came to be. I don't know why she finally chose to tell me anything at all, but she made sure to convey the knowledge that I was the result of a one night stand and that you knew about me and didn't care. She didn't tell me that I was the spitting image of you. Maybe she had forgotten your face by then. The memory burned away by alcohol and drugs.

    It didn't matter to me. So many secrets in my family. I knew they were there. I could feel them all around me, pushing in on me, invisible to the eye but plain as day in the pain they caused. But now you weren't a secret anymore. Not entirely. I knew your name

    And I would think of you. My daddy Kim. I wondered what you must be like. What did your voice sound like? Were you ugly like me? Did I have any brothers and sisters? I never blamed you for not being there. Fathers left. It was a fact of life. My brother's father left. My cousin's father left. My friends father's left. It wasn't something I couldn't forgive in a heartbeat. I thought about you all the time, carving out a space in my heart for you, loving you without knowing you.

    But as I got older, I started to doubt her story. As my mother sank deeper into alcoholism and the abuse worsened, I began to wonder if what she'd told me was even close to the truth. Nobody believed her story. Not her mother, her sister, her best friends. None of them had ever heard the story she told me. She never spoke of you to anyone but me, and just that one time. After that, there were no more details. It was like that special night had never happened.

    As I grew older, grew up, I slowly let you go. I knew I would never be able to find you. And I knew that even if I did find you, you'd most likely be disappointed in me, if you even wanted to know me at all. I contacted various people over the years, here and there, when the mood would strike. Eventually, I crossed all the names off my list of people who knew my mother around the time I was born. Again, no one had any knowledge of you. I came to terms with the fact that I would never meet you. I accepted what, to me, felt like a profound loss.

    I was married with kids by then. I was so grateful to my husband for not leaving us that I let him get away with doing and saying terrible things to me. I allowed him to diminish me. Invalidate me. Gaslight me. Talk to me crazy. Deprive me of my sanity. I allowed all of it because I thought he was a good man because he stayed. I couldn't see him as destructive because he didn't follow the narrative in my mind of the man who leaves. Well, he did leave eventually. That's when I finally started waking up from my long marital nightmare.

    By then, though, I had found you. Through the wonders of technology and science. A DNA test. And to my surprise, you were indeed the man my mother had named as my father. I didn't have any expectations of you. Hopes, but no expectations. In fact, I did my best to prepare for the worst possible outcome- that you wouldn't even speak to me or in any way acknowledge my existence. But you did. 

    I can't say that all of your answers to my questions were completely satisfactory, but they sufficed. It was difficult to receive confirmation that you knew of my existence but chose to never seek me out. But I could understand why you didn't. It's not a choice I would have made but I understood how you could come to make such a choice. I was just grateful that you were willing to speak with me and also to allow me a small place in your life and your family's life. It's a privilege I don't take lightly.

    You wrote me beautiful letters, kind and funny letters. You wrote letters to my children. You sent us gifts at Christmas. I have photos of us together from our one lovely, awkward meet. That's so much more than I ever got from my mom. She never wrote me anything that wasn't filled with hate. She never once gave me a gift in my whole life. I have NEVER in my life laid eyes on a picture of she and I together because such a picture never existed. 

    Because of our mutual financial and health situations, and the state of the world, I don't know if I'll ever get to see you again. If I don't, I just want you to know that whatever it was I needed from you, emotionally, that you gave it to me. Your kind words, the effort you made at being a father to me even at this late stage, is priceless to me. It means the world to me, and I will always be grateful to you for that.

I love you Dad.

    

    

    

Spring Maze Escape

Spring has sprung. It's a cool morning and the tears are hot on my face. 

I'm at a crossroads. 

Again. 

Life doesn't seem so much like a journey along a winding path as it does a maze. Towering walls I can't see through, can't climb over. 

I guess that makes me a rat. Except I'm not as smart as a rat.

I don't know which direction to head in. I don't know how close I am to solving the maze, if at all. The exit could be around the next corner but I wouldn't know.

I'm tired. Bone weary of it all.

So I'll just sit here, not knowing where to go next. Tired and not knowing if I have the strength to move forward even if I did know where to go.

It's lonely here. I'm sleepy. I just want to rest.

I want to close my eyes while the maze walls dissolve around me, leaving me to float among the stars, unbound. 

Untethered.

Lost, perhaps, but free of those walls, at least.

Refuge in escape.

It's the last hope I have, driven by despair from the whole of my being. All of my failures and my successes. All of my ignorance and all my knowledge, too.

It's all I have left to hope for right now, at this moment in time, at yet another crossroads in the maze.

Letting Go

Tonight I gave it to the full Virgo moon.

I lit my candles and called my corners.

I set my intentions.

I burned you away.

I let you go.

Again. This Time, With Feeling!

I would rather feel than not feel. 

I would rather know

Every.

Single. 

Pain.

There is. Everything under the sun and moon and stars.

Every hurt, every sorrow, every fear, every anger that exists, than to feel nothing at all.

Every soul crushing moment in life.

But also,

Every joy, every love, every triumph, every good thing to be found in this world, in us.

Every heavenly ascension in our soul's journey.

I would rather feel it all than nothing. Some people are happy with nothing.

Not me, though. I understand that I have to experience the bad with the good, to be a more fully formed human being. That I have to embrace pain and not only seek what's pleasurable. I appreciate the universal dynamic of good vs evil, light vs dark, yin vs yang. 

Because it's all inside me. It resides there, waiting for me to learn from it, grow from it, integrate it.

We cannot stand in the sun without manifesting our own shadow. 

Both are worthy of our attention. Necessary in our path towards becoming real boys and girls.

I would rather feel it all than to be an empty, smiling thing that feels nothing.

It's my gift. My strength. 

I wish it could be everyone's.

Inside Out

What would you look like if your exterior appearance reflected what was inside?

I would look like a burned thing, charred and blistered and fluid filled. Every hair singed away. Black scorches where my eyes used to be. Faint plumes of smoke emanating from my body and moving into the atmosphere, leaving me behind.

I would look like a ghost. A scary thing hiding in the dark that mostly haunts itself. Dragging my rattling chains, moaning in agony for all eternity. Ever hoping someone would see me and exorcise me from the land of the living where I don't belong and send me to the next world.

I would look like a child's broken plaything. A toy that no longer works. I don't get passed down or on to the next child. I get thrown away because I'm simply of no use any longer, and there are plenty of other things, better things, to make-believe with.

I would look like a flowering weed, stubborn and awkward. Struggling to survive places I never should have been, never should have grown. Places where there was not enough sun, not enough shelter, not enough love. People trample me underfoot, hack me down only for me to grow again, against my own will.

I would look like a prism. Rainbows of color flashing, warning, dazzling the beholder. A trick of light without substance. A bauble of distraction that first spins one way, then the next and never dances any other dance. I cease to be when you close your eyes, like I was never really there.

I would look like a tiresome burden that people would prefer to avoid. An old homeless woman suffering from dementia, sitting on a park bench surround by shopping bags filled with little treasures I dug from someone else's trash and have already forgotten. Small and bent and dirty. Wrinkled and frail and yellow. Confused. My fear would look like anger. 

We always talk about inner beauty but other things reside there. 

Things that are not so pretty. Not so easy to face, either in ourselves or in others.  

We hide them there and for good reason. 

Because who would love us if we didn't?

Birthday Wishes

wish- verb.  to feel or express a strong desire or hope for something that is not easily attainable; to want something that cannot or probably will not happen.

Why are we taught as children to make a wish when we blow out the candles on a birthday cake? It seems particularly cruel. To be made to believe that, for some odd reason, when we close our eyes and purse lips at our fiery pastries, extinguishing the flames that represent each year of our time on earth with the living breath of our bodies, that some sort of magic happens. That in that momentary darkness, that dimming of illumination, something that cannot be, will be. 

It's False Hope. Back on it's bullshit. I'll take Despair over that peculiar abyss any day of the week.

Today is my birthday. I'll make a cake but I don't have any candles. I don't have any wishes, either, so that's okay. Not that there isn't anything I long for. There certainly is. But no wishes. What I desire most may not be easily attainable but it is something that can happen, probably even will happen, at that. 

I want to be free. 

I want to find home.

I want to receive all the love I can and give it back to the world, like the moon gives back the sun's light, with my face made of scars and the stars all around me, shine shine shining.

Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dear Holly, happy birthday to me.

Ode To Mister ______

I thought about you today. You know who you are. I actually think about you most of the time. Most of the time those thoughts are unkind. Not today, though.

Today I missed you. I wanted to tell you about how they're clearing the brush away from the creek across the highway. You can see it now. It's pretty. I thought about how you used to want to go down there. Now you can. Or you could. 

But you won't. You're not here. You don't know that the bramble has been cut away. I won't tell you.

I won't tell you for the millionth time that I miss you. That I wish you still loved me. That you hadn't given up on me. That you hadn't left.

I won't tell you for the millionth time how angry I am. That I wish I had never met you. That you're an asshole. That I hate you for what you've done.

I won't tell you any of those things because you already know. You know what you've done, the hurt you've caused and the catastrophe you've left behind. You know all of that and it doesn't bother you much.

I don't know how long it will take me to move past this. Twenty years together has been most of my adult life. Now I'm living a different kind of life. I'm still adjusting.

So, for a while, I'll talk to you in my head, my heart and here. You never did read my blog. Or listen to my words. Or see my pain. You'll never know.

But maybe it will help me somehow. Help me to be able to leave you in the past, where you live now, where you belong.

I thought about you today. It won't be the last time, I'm sure. 

I miss you.

I love you.

I hate you, too, though.

Get fucked.