It seems to be shaping up to be that kind of week. I got news that my Dad is back in the hospital again. Despite being "friends" on Facebook with several of my cousins, things get to me kind of slow about goings on back home. Like sometimes snailmail speed slow. I don't fault anyone, it's not a priority and I know that. But it is frustrating at times.
Throw in a little Olympic crap (I can watch Michael Phelps swim a lap or maybe two, and one of those little girls jump around a bit, then I'm bored. I don't get the fascination), Chick-Fil-A and the manufactured crisis, and trying to plan to move a business AGAIN, a day of severe neck pain and a lawnmower issue and well....
I made a decision a few years ago to stop associating with some members of my family, most especially my immediate family. Ours has never been a peaceful coexistance, and after Mom died things went downhill to the point where every time I'd travel home to Tennessee, I'd spend half the trip back crying, and the next two weeks severely depressed. John got horribly frustrated with me, because he wasn't on those trips and he just couldn't get what was so bad - so what if we had a little tiff? See, his family is the total opposite of ours - they get into it on a regular basis, get loud, wave arms and stomp around a bit, then it's over. No grudge, no long drawn out vendetta, it's just done. In our family, we remember every slight, no matter how small, and we bury it all until it just gets to be too much and we explode. And when we explode, anyone within shouting distance gets hurt.
So I think even John is a little baffled as to why I decided to put an end to the pain being dealt out to me by those I have no defense against. Not recently, but not too long ago he was still encouraging me to go visit Dad again. He doesn't understand, as a number of others don't, that at this point it's not a choice I can make. The last time I found myself in my Dad's presence I got physically sick and had to leave immediately. While I love him and always will, (and we know that we have no say in who we love), too much happened over the years, there is too much rage, too much hurt. And there is nothing he can do to change that. I have been told that until I let my anger go, until I forgive, that I am not in a state of Grace. Well, that may be. But it doesn't change things.
There's been a lot of misinformation and disinformation associated with me and my name over the years. A lot of it came from my ex-husband. I won't lie to you, I was a very troubled teenager and I ran away from home a number of times. I also drank and occasionally smoked pot. I made some less than intelligent decisions in my teens and early 20's - but nothing on the scale of what was passed around about me by my family. By the time I was 26 I had grown out of all of that, I was in school, supporting myself and the kids, working two and sometimes three jobs to pay the bills. Did I cut up, cut loose on occasion with friends? Yes - just like everyone else. But there have been no arrests, no jail time, no rehab programs, no halfway houses, no drunken car wrecks, no car thefts, no attempted murders, no thefts of any sort, no marriages destroyed....in other words...my record is looking pretty clean in comparison to a great many members of my extended family. Oh yeah, and in that time period I also managed to buy and sell several houses, start and sell two successful businesses, I'm a published author and I've been quoted in The Nation. I got a college degree, I married a wonderful man and we've been together for almost 20 years, and I found several of the best friends any one person could ever have. And yet I'm seen as a failure.
I don't know if the people that made the stuff up just thought that I'd never hear any of it, or if they just didn't care. Either way, if you believed just half of the gossip exchanged by my good Christian extended family members, it's a wonder that I'm alive today. I should at the very least be in an AIDS ward someplace.
I remember the day that Dad apologized to me for believing my ex-husband instead of me. His excuse was that James was so credible, being an engineer and an Air Force Officer and all, that it wasn't until James broke promises to him that my Dad realized what a skumbag James was, and that maybe I had been telling the truth about him all along. When I asked him about the time I came to his house, bruised and bloody after yet another beating by the Officer and Gentleman, about why he didn't help me then, his answer was "Honey, every married couple fights".
I think, at this point, I'm pretty much done trying to prove myself to a group of people who have no interest in knowing who I really am. As one cousin recently opined, it's amazing that we're all from the same gene pool. I am so completely different - all of Dad's kids are so completely different in so many ways from the rest of his family... which makes me think it has to have something to do with Mom and what she brought to the genetic pool, and our upbringing as well. One of the things Mom taught all of us, but especially me and Kim, was that there were no limits on what we could do. Just because we were women we should never think of that in relation to anything we wanted, and I don't believe either of us ever have. I know I haven't, and judging from Kim's success as a business woman, I don't think she did either.
But unfortunately what she neglected to teach either of us was that being women, we would be judged to a higher standard than our male counterparts all of our lives. Behavior that society accepts for most men as normal is seen as risky behavior, promiscuity and general skankiness in a woman, even today. My father could go on a drunken binge and leave home for two weeks, and other than his brothers going and finding him and sobering him back up and bringing him home, there would be no reaction by his family. It was like it never happened.
If I'm beginning to sound a little angry and bitter well, you're right, I am. I have no desire to see Dad. I don't. My great-grandfather was more of a father to me that he was, and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about Papaw. But Dad spent our younger childhood drinking and fighting with Mom, running around on her, blowing his money...there were far too many nights that we sat in the dark at our home because Dad had drank up his paycheck and Mom couldn't pay the electric bill. Then when I was 13 Dad drank and drove and a woman died because of his selfishness, and the somewhat pitiful life we did have went to hell in a handbasket at that point. As Dad was scheduled to be released from prison three years later, Mom got the courage to file for divorce and it was like Dad not only divorced her, he divorced us too. We three kids used to call ourselves the stepchildren, because that's how we were treated. Dad remarried almost immediately to a woman on her 5th marriage and with 5 children, the youngest one only 5. Her unmarried daughter who also had a child also lived with them. When his wife started abusing us, Dad did nothing to stop it, even leaving so he didn't have to witness it. He made himself a good life with her family, and left us feeling like we'd done something wrong, but we never quite knew what. I'm glad he raised her son to be a good man, and was a good father to him. I really am, because I love the guy like a real brother, not a stepbrother. Always have, and because I love him I am glad that he did have a good father. But I think it makes it difficult to discuss Dad because he sees one man and I see a very different one.
And now I sit here, angry with myself because I let it happen again....I let my extended family fool me into believing that I belonged, that I had a home, that I was valued and appreciated and loved. I guess I'll never learn. And then in one instant, it was all out in the open. That's when I realized that some things are just never going to change, no matter how hard you try.
One of these days I will learn to stop giving my trust so easily. Because people do not change. Leopards cannot wash away their spots, and if someone believes something about you, it's very difficult to change those beliefs - true or not. Maybe that's why I feel closer to people I have no blood relation with, but who have known me much better than my family ever has. These people know the true me, know what I am really like, and they love me, and they show me that love every day. In the long run, all I ever wanted from anyone was that they love me and let me love them, and it seems to be the one thing that continues to elude me when it comes to my family. My Mom loved me. I know that. My stepbrother loves me. I know that too. Until today I would have named some other family members as well, but now I'm just not so sure anymore. Which has absolutely nothing to do with me loving them. But then again, love never does.
