I don’t really know what i have to say with this entry. It just seemed time to write again. Where to begin….
Moving back to my hometown has been both blessing and curse. While I finally feel that I now have some amazing resolution to my past with my father, I feel that I have moved physically the closest to my mother but emotionally – further than ever. I get the feeling that part of living her life as an adult for the first time requires her to remove herself from her past. Considering that I very much so look and act like my father, I believe I am part of her cathartic removal. Am I ok with this, for now, yes. Will I always be, absolutely not.
IN my current resolution with my father, I spend a lot more of my time with that side of the family. It feels good to feel a part of a real family life. I think it’s the first time I can successfully say that. I spend a lot of time with my kid sister. (I can’t remember what her alias is here, so for the sake of easy we’ll call her Posie.) Posie is 15. She doesn’t really know about my past or my fathers. She was here over this past weekend. We got to talking and in her typical fashion, she had a lot of questions. Why didn’t I see our Dad for so many years, what happened? I told her about being the product of teen pregnancy. YEARS of not knowing who I was or where I came from. What it was like to find Dad. To talk to him for the first time when I was her age, 15. How he was completely open and honest with me about who he had been and who he wanted to be. How he wasn’t always a good person. A sober person. She had no idea.
What I knew had been told to me in strict confidence by my father. When I was first diagnosed with Cancer and reached out to him in hopes of finding closure in case I didn’t survive it, he answered some questions for me I’d always needed to know. That he didn’t really get sober until I was about 19 or 20. That if I had known I wouldn’t have had a relationship with him. The weekends where he disappeared for entire days or didn’t show up to get me at all were spent getting high. That things were a lot darker then I thought. That before he got sober he was doing heroin. In family pictures I started to recognize the difference between him high and him sober. That during the years I didn’t know him he was drug trafficking for some names in the game. He went to prison for a few years. He was not a nice man. And the biggest blow of all, there was a time where he beat the shit out of every woman in his life, including our two other sisters.
When it came to Posie, I wasn’t quite as graphic. I told her this gently with love and honesty. I always seem to be the person in her life to tell her the straight story on things. This was a big turning point for her. She had no idea, but said so many things now made sense to her that never did before. How he could never chaperone her school trips, our state does background checks on all parents before trips. How when in elementary school our Dads friend had given her a tour of the police station where he worked, finger printed her, and through her dna pulled up our fathers mug shots and arrest record. And how she was then quickly taken to another room when she said why is Dad’s face on the screen? Why he so strongly believed in God.
My stepmom is Posie’s mother. She and Posie have a very strained relationship. But I think she found more respect for her mom knowing how she was such a big force in our fathers final sobriety. That what got him sober for good was the fear of losing her, she never did drugs and didn’t stand for it. Eventually Posie’s birth was the thing that motivated him to get it right. How our sisters and I admire him for finally getting it right, getting it right for her.
It was an emotional day. I love my sister so much. I worry Posie will blurt out something like she knows this stuff. But at the same time I have zero regrets for telling her about what we really come from. Why things have been so complicated for so long. It’s a weird place to be in with her. That good bad place where the truth makes things suddenly bearable in a bittersweet way. I think that is my way of protecting her in a sense, to arm her with the truth.
“You have to take care of them now. You have to take care of each other. You have to be strong. ..the hardest thing to do in this world… is to live in it. Be brave. Live….”
Biggigity Switch 