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Published on September 12, 2019 21:41

They were lying.. And they were stupid.

And evangelicals see nothing wrong with being either or both.

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Published on October 14, 2018 19:41

Dear Dad

“There are only two types of people in this world- those who know me and love me dearly, and those who will never have the pleasure of knowing me.”

Dad,

I didn’t want to say anything, but now I realize I don’t give a fuck- in that weary, thousand-yard stare kind of way of a soldier who knows he’s fought the wrong battle for too long.
I feel a little like your one friend you told me about, Greg. I guess he was an old work friend. The guy who stayed up all night, reading the encyclopedia like it was the newspaper, and wound up in the nut hatch. “I’m crazy,” you told me he said. “You don’t want to talk to me.”
I can relate.
That’s not 100% of the picture, not even close. Honestly, things are good. My wife and I are doing alright and my youngest son is growing up happy and doing well in school, and we’re both receiving therapy for our autism. I’d say that’s really the biggest major change- figuring that out about myself.
Most days, I’m pretty happy- and I take medicine to ensure my happiness, and for the most part, it works. If I avoid certain topics, certain agitators, I do alright. For the most part. For a fundamentally damaged person. My rent is paid, our bellies are full, and I know financially how I’m going to raise my child, and that’s really all that matters to me. I didn’t exactly set the world on fire financially, but oh well. It may seem a bit unambitious, but it’s a better life- and a better 2nd Act- than I ever had any right to think possible for myself.

I have two children, as you know. I know the pain of having an estranged child. My oldest hasn’t spoken to me for almost five years and I’ve no real idea why, and I doubt that he ever will again.
And I have to respect that.
But I know that I fought for him, for years and to the tune of thousands of dollars, just to be a part of that kid’s life. That’s the kind of man I am- and I don’t understand the kind of man you are.
I’m now five years older than you were when I left your home; I can look back on my young adulthood and realize how foolish and headstrong I was at times. In my better moments, these memories make me laugh. I’m well into my middle-age, and I’d like to think I’ve gained a little perspective on life. Mine, and yours. Parallels and elipses, always circling one another and yet never making contact. I see you at various ages, and I see myself. I process the choices you would make in my stead, and then what my own responses would be in yours. I can imagine all sorts of scenarios and situations….and yet, I cannot for the life of me imagine a time where either of my children would not be welcome in my home, no questions asked- even if I was broken down to living in my car.
Maybe I place undue emphasis on it, but fatherhood is about the best thing there is.
In a way, I feel sorry for you, because I don’t think you really know what I’m talking about. It’s not about the family pictures on the walls or how they look when presented to your co-workers or the grades that come home in their report cards, it’s about looking into that kid’s eyes and knowing that THEY know that they are loved. Nothing else is more important. I just couldn’t look at myself in the mirror were I to allow my kids to live on the streets, or anywhere that I couldn’t ascertain their happiness, contentedness or safety. At any age, under any circumstances. I would be ashamed of myself, and feel like I wasn’t a real adult. I would feel like nothing else in my life that I accomplished would be worth anything- because I’d failed in my true measure as a father, and as a man.
So far, I’m batting .500 on the son front, but balls take funny bounces. I’m certain that challenges lie ahead that I haven’t yet imagined, and we all have to learn to live with change, the only constant any of us can expect. Change hurts, and change changes you. Change turned me into a real bastard, and I’m doing my damnedest to not pay the gift of Anger forward to another generation. I want my son to not have to go through life laboring under the weight of a chip on his shoulder the size of Montana. There are better ways to spend one’s life.

In 1988, I was seventeen years old. I’d shit in my own nest at my mother’s house, and I was stupid enough to follow my hubris and bullheadedness right out the door. 17 years of coasting and belligerence were clearly over, and I needed to get my shit together. I needed my father. You had a six-bedroom house, with only two children, and yet I wasn’t good enough to live in your home.
Thank you so much for allowing me to feel that.
How would you feel about your father, were he to do that to you? How would you feel about yourself? How might you feel about your siblings, knowing that their father was a better father than the one you had? Through the years, I wonder, did you ever notice a distinct LACK of a relationship with me? Did you ever pause to wonder what was going on between you and I?
Let me clear up any mystery: I am FUCKED-UP on the issue of YOU, and I have been, on and off, for most of my life. If any of this comes as a surprise to you, then you simply don’t know who I am. And please don’t think that I blame you for every little problem in my life, because I don’t- I’m a realistic (if somewhat damaged) person and I know that many of my battles have been self-born. But I do see the connective tissue between an unmangled child and the example he’s given when it comes to his own perception of his worth as a person, and I can still make out the little holes and burn-marks on the parts of my life that you’ve touched.
You blamed your wife- and Jesus, was there anything you didn’t blame on her? I certainly believed you…and then I caught the blame from you for conflict existing between her and I arising as a result. Maybe it really was her fault, and maybe it wasn’t. She couldn’t have been much older than thirty at the time, and it’s unfair to judge relative children by the same standard we judge reasonable adults. I was certainly a messed-up kid, no charmer, but I wasn’t a fucking criminal- like the beloved nephew of hers that you were always on the hook for helping out- and I was YOUR SON. I figured that the very least I deserved was food and a roof over my head, maybe some love and guidance and an opportunity to correct my course and re-enroll in school. But that was asking for too much, I suppose.
You were either a man who let his wife browbeat him out of having a meaningful relationship with his son, or you were a man who had no interest in his son and blamed that fact on his wife.
I asked you for a year’s worth of shelter and parenting, and you fucked it up so badly that I lost 7/8’s of my biological family as a result. This is why we don’t talk.
Last year, I tried to contact my cousins, simply to send my condolenses on their father’s illness. Imagine my shock when we began to speak and catch up and I then realized what I had been missing for 28 years…a sense of family, and of unconditional belonging. A place in the pecking order.
I deserved that, and you took it from me; you, who can’t even remember the year I was born.
You told me, “Sometimes the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”
Thank you so much for that. I get to re-live that every time I see Star Trek II or III on TV.
My own sister had no idea I even existed until she was almost ten years old.
And that, my man, is what the head-shrinkers call “Fucked-up.”
Some time later, you told me that you had forgiven yourself.
Good for you.
I never have.
And to be honest, no explanation or apology will make me feel better.
I don’t want to feel better about this.
You can blame me, for not coming around in the years to follow, but ask yourself this: would YOU have come around, under those circumstances? There’s no way on earth you would have. It was made pretty fucking clear to me how little I was wanted, how little my presence was desired, and so- my sisters grew up and grew older and died without really ever getting to know their brother, and you grew old without a son to speak of. I didn’t do that. YOU did.
You made me feel that I was worthless, or at the very least that you thought that I was. And I internalized it. Sometimes, I thought you were right. You threw me away, and for a time, I tried to do the same. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t want to be reminded of how little I mattered to you, and I can’t talk to you without being reminded of it.

I experienced more love and affection and “Family” in the two months I spent living at your brother’s house than I had ever experienced before. I was an only child, remember? Even with all the turmoil in my arrival, even with getting pumped for information any time I spoke with you, I started to feel some sense of my worth as a person. They liked me, they liked who I was. I hadn’t felt that warmth EVER in your home. And when I lost them, I really lost people who mattered to me.
My aunt, who was my reading buddy and really the only person I could speak with honestly about my feelings and confusion, went into the ground, without knowing the effect she’d had on my life and how much I really loved her.
My uncle, who liked old, weird movies and cinema history almost as much as I do, went into the ground, not knowing my regard for him. There were more than a few moments in my childhood when he was there for me, and you weren’t. Him taking the time to talk to me and calm me down in the back of the church when you re-married was monumental in terms of me understanding what it is that a parent does, in terms of what I value in a person, and what I value in myself.
My favorite cousin, who was 23 the last time I spoke to her and who was my absolute favorite person to talk to, is now 51 years old, and we’ve missed out on each other’s LIVES.
My second cousin- whose verbal wit and out-going nature I modelled as best I could- had proven personally transformative to me, and I’d never been able to tell her so.
Why? Because I wrote a few spooky stories at a time when I wasn’t in school, or working- waiting for the calendar to go by- and had some foolish literary aspirations? Yeah, maybe, but I never quite bought that. I think it far more likely that the situation with me and with you and your legal and financial obligation to provide for me kind of scared him off. He did want to sue you, for child support for me through college age, as well as tuition, so far as I was aware. That was a father looking out for a kid even if that kid wasn’t his. That’s the sort of father I try to emulate. I think he got a sense of what kind of father you were willing to be to me. He thought you were irresponsibile and selfish and short-sighted, and I think he realized that cracking money out of you each month would have been a headache that the situation with me just wasn’t worth in his eyes. He did have his own family to think of, y’know.
I guess you did, too.
I think he threw me out, at the first opportunity, to get you to step up.
Weirder things have happened, and our “family” isn’t exactly known for emotional truth-telling.
I don’t know, I could be wrong.
It did bother me, the accusations of insanity and incipient rape and murder and all that, and how you did not stand up for me or defend anything about me as a person. If you did believe the accusations levelled at me (as you seemed to at the time), I find it odd that you didn’t seek out any psychological counseling for your child. Then again, maybe I’m a little fucked-up in my thinking, because I also found it weird when you told me that I couldn’t live in your house because your wife was pregnant with another child, or because she thought she had caught AIDS at the dentist a few weeks earlier, but not enough to actually go to the doctor- just enough AIDS that your son was persona non grata.

When the actions don’t match the words, I draw my own conclusions, and I think you knew what was said about me was horseshit. You never told ME that it was horseshit, but you knew. I’ve often wondered how everyone involved, the “adults” in the family felt about me as the years went on, after I hadn’t raped or killed anyone, if they ever felt guilty, or stupid, or cold-hearted or wrong. I wonder if- after a certain point in time- I was even a thought. Somehow, I kinda fucking doubt it.
I do remember you blaming me, verbally and explicitly, for fucking up your relationship with your brother (you know, the one who bullied you and made you feel inferior for most of your life), and I remember hating you for saying that, but burning with shame. I had messed up your family, and I carried a lot of guilt over that. And it never even occurred to me that I would have been right to be angry with you for ME losing MY family. And then it occurred to me. And I got angry.
And it hasn’t stopped.
When I think of you, it upsets me. I don’t want it to, but it does. Thinking of you is never a positive thing for me. I can’t think of you without getting angry, and I can’t have my son seeing me getting that upset. Hearing that you’ve called ruins my entire month, mood-wise. My wife even took the extra step of not telling me when you call, just to avoid any unpleasantness. I’m unwilling to lie to myself to make things palatable, and hearing your voice (even from my own vocal chords) is a sudden and dizzying trip into a Freudian stew of self-loathing and misplaced ancient anger.
All I wanted when I was a kid was to feel important to you, and to feel like I mattered to you, and now the thought of ever wanting any of it from you just makes me uncomfortable and embarrassed.
I’m still no charmer, but I deserve happiness, and I deserve love.
And I sincerely wish both of these things to you- but none of it will be coming from me.

Sincerely,
Whatever I Was Supposed To Mean To You