Blank

I've got nothing today.  I was going to write about my possibly forthcoming high school reunion but I couldn't think of much to say about it... something about choosing your own past and how much do you want to carry with you but I couldn't form a whole blog about it.

Boundaries

When you love someone, are you expected to protect them even if it is from the truth?

I have been blessed.  I was fortunate enough that both of my parents remarried well.  In fact, I regard both my stepfather and stepmother as true family so much so that I named my son for my stepfather and made my stepmother his godmother.  Yet, some doors have remained closed; I do not discuss my father with my stepmother.  It seems she reveres him and I cannot undo that with a good conscience.  It is not my place.

However, I am now in a predicament.  My stepmother has recently joined Facebook.  She will in all likelihood discover my blog unless I remove it from my profile.  Common sense urges me to do so and yet vanity prevents me for removing it.  Vanity?  Is that right?  Of course, all writers harbor some vanity otherwise they wouldn't submit their work for general consumption.  Is that what is really holding me back though?  Or is it that I secretly wish I could open her eyes to who my father really was?

Mary Alice was not the other woman.  She was a true friend to my father before their relationship became romantic.  She is considered a grandmother to my children just as my own mother is.  Our own relationship is healthy and loving.  Am I willing to jeopardize that?  Certainly I have already faced some familial discomfort as my brothers are less than thrilled that I blog. 

I want to believe that I cannot be responsible for who my father was... but am I responsible for what I tell the world about him?  If it is the truth, should it still be uttered?  Should my father be protected because he is not here to offer his side?  Am I taking advantage of his death?

Love and pain have always been intertwined for me.  If I continue to blog am I foisting the same upon Mary Alice?

What I wasn't

So after I wrote yesterday's post, I tried to make a assessment of my actions and see how I actually measured up to Gran.  I am sorry to report that I am lacking in the ladylike deportment category.

One of the things I admired most about David Lovelace's brilliant work Scattershot is that he could humbly write about his most awkward moments as a manic depressive.  Of course people realize now that mania and depression are two symptoms of being bi-polar, however how much of our actions can we really blame on this disease?  I have read that bi-polar people suffer low self-esteem and that in women especially this can manifest in promiscuity.  What about snapping at your child or arguing with your spouse?  What about shooting up your high school?  Where do we draw a line between personal responsibility and the disease?

It is painful to look back and assess my life.  Two suicide attempts, dramatics, less than stellar grades, failed relationships, jumping from school to school and then job to job.  I look back now with a jaundiced eye... who was I?  Where did the real me surface and how many of my failures can I blame on being bi-polar?  

When I was 26, living in Richmond, and unemployed I met and started dating a very handsome young man who was 4 years younger than I.  That in itself was not the problem.  The problem was that I gravely ill and no one knew it.  Everyone assumed that any depression I felt stemmed from being unemployed and once I entered this relationship with Kevin, people believed that my spirits would lift.  They did, briefly, and then the disease strangled me.  I pushed Kevin away, sure that I was unworthy, a pervasive theme throughout my life.  I kept telling him the age difference was insurmountable and when he had had enough and called my bluff, I was devastated.  I drove my car into the country and picked an empty county lane.  I emptied the contents of a ziploc bag full of prescriptions I had stolen from my mother's medicine cabinet into my lap and methodically began to wash the pills down with a six pack.  This is where things get fuzzy.  I drove to Kevin's house, who I knew was out of town, and entered his apartment (because I knew where the key was) and fumbled drunkenly through his things.  I don't remember what I was looking for or even what I found, but I ended up back at my mother's house.  I walked into the kitchen while she and her friend Sally were chatting.  I know I spoke to them but I cannot recall what I must have said.  I rushed to the back bathroom and drew a bath.  I can still feel the warm water enveloping me, washing me. I submerged hoping to just fall asleep.  My mother in the meantime was banging on the door threatening to break in.  I promised to open the door but instead hastily clothed myself and jumped out the bathroom window.  Either my brother Andrew or Sally caught me there.  And that is how I ended up at the UVA psych ward for a week.

What was me?  Since childhood I have been characterized as dramatic... am I?  When did this disease surface?  What could I have accomplished without it?  What can I accomplish now that I am medicated?  All I am certain of is what I wasn't... and that was healthy.

To emulate a Lady

My Gran will be 88 in September.  Every day she wakes is a gift to me; doctors said she would only live 4 weeks two years ago.  She is battling cancer with dignity and aplomb.  She has never complained or questioned why.  In short, she is conducting this battle as she has conducted herself her entire life - like a lady.

I wondered before I sat to write this piece, does the term Lady still connote something positive?  Or has it become antiquated?  Does anyone want to be a lady anymore?  We are now raised to be independent, which is good, but frequently I hear independent women described as "ballsy".  Would a strong woman in the business world relish the term Lady?

I do.  If I could be half the woman my Gran is, I would be satisfied.  Her grace and humility are pervasive.  She is poised yet approachable.  She is proper but never aloof.  She is careful with her tongue and thoughtful with her gestures.  She is beautiful.

My Gran is the first person I remember loving.  With childish possessiveness, I wanted her love only for myself.  I remember asking her repeatedly who she loved most in the world and being astonished when she kept saying "Grandaddy".  I couldn't fathom that she could love anyone more than she loved me.  Her love was gentle and enfolding.  It enveloped me.  

I can recall with such clarity waiting for her to pick me up from pre-school.  I knew when I saw that big blue cadillac that we would go to McDonald's for lunch.  From there, we would run our errands.  The post office.  The bank.  The bakery for Grandaddy's honey buns.  I didn't need Barbie or My Little Pony.  I was with Gran.  Everything we did was special because we did it together.

When I was older and we had long since moved from Mississippi, I would go down and visit Gran for the summer.  I left my teenage friends, the movies and parties, the kegs and river days, for watching Wheel of Fortune and playing doubles with sixty year olds.  Yet, I never felt I sacrificed anything.  I still felt special just running errands with Gran.

I loved her history, growing up in New Orleans in house where everyone could speak french.  I romanticized her youth but in truth not much because the reality was romantic.  She married young to a man who promised her the moon.  She was 18 and starry eyed.  He was handsome and determined to cut a swath through Mississippi that would land him in money and debt more times than countable.  She stood stoically by.  She raised 4 children while the money flowed and ebbed.  

Throughout her life, she relied upon her church, something that awes me still.  Her devotion is pure and unselfish.  Her faith although always central to her character has never been bandied about.  She has never admonished me for my lack of faith though she will discuss religion readily.  I admire her quiet belief.

Her loyalty to her friends is unparalleled.  She is generous and kind, always available and maintains friendships I probably would've let loose along the wayside.  

She is the epitome of a Lady and I strive everyday to emulate her.

No paucity now

I think I have overcome the drought or at least, I have found a few things to say.  This next poem I wrote for the Library of Congress; they solicited for poems about fathers and daughters.  They elected not to publish this one.

At last, Goodnight

I have said goodbyes to people you never knew

soft spoken boys who thumbed though Pynchon, 

friends whose pigtails and braids fell away to layers and bobs and hues,

and teachers who shored me up, wincing at my hackneyed visceral poetry

and lovers whose names I can't even remember

I have read books that you probably read as well

and I have thrown back whiskey and vodka and beer and wine

and more whiskey

knowing you had done so when the mornings came too soon and you raged at 

your life

I have stepped on stones and dirt and stairs and persian rugs where you had tread

I have held the same hands that once touched yours

but there is nothing that we can share

our histories are parallel and exclusive of each other

except for sorrow, perhaps in that

All Empires Come to Dust

In your late autumn,

a flowering tree.

Magnets

we have pushed each other

round the sides of the earth

then 

met again at the beginning.

A castoff coat

worn through

and given back

as now you the smaller

Modern Love rejected this

I stood there in the fading light of the humid June evening.  In the distance, a barge horn sounded.  He was not more than four feet away from me and yet the distance between us was insurmountable.  The question remained frozen on my lips and he studied me wearily wishing I would just come out with it.  My family had already gotten into the sandy rental car we had driven up from Sanibel that day.  I felt the grit of dried sweat on my arms and wondered briefly if the other diners in the yacht club had been bothered by our appearances.  "Ok, then we'll see you later," he tossed nonchalantly.  In all likelihood, I would never see him alive again and he was letting me, his only daughter, his oldest child, simply walk away.  I thought there really must be nothing left for us to say to one another.  In 36 years, had we ever said anything meaningful to each other?

After our cars had left the lot, and we pulled out onto separate highways, I did my best to swallow my resentment.  He was 59, riddled with cancer and dying yet he had accomplished everything he had set out to do in life.  General.  2 Stars.  Remarried, removed from his first life.  He simply left, started over.  I wondered now if he ever thought about his own father, who died at 60.  After all, this was a man he reviled in life and reinvented in death.  Would I do the same?

We got back to the hotel, showered and put the children to bed.  As my husband and I sat in the dimly lit hotel hallway, sharing a bottle of cheap wine, my anger bubbled up and spilled forth.  I called my brother and fumed at my father's indifference.  As I drank and cried, my sentences and rationale broke down and I ended up rambling about years of perceived neglect.  Even in my deluded state, I realized as my brother patiently listened that I stood alone in my hatred.  Both of my brothers seemed to have had a reckoning about our father and their reactions incensed me.

I was 15 when my father left our family.  Acne and the subtle signs of forthcoming manic depression pocked me.  My father's infidelity both titillated and horrified me.  He had failed and I relished his failure.  His smug demeanor was marred and I delighted in his embarrassing plight.  Yet I was devastated for my patient, catholic mother.  However sorry I felt for her though I was thrilled that my father would no longer be a presence in our home.  I couldn't remember a time when I had enjoyed his company.  I had always felt unwanted and now without him around perhaps we could all be happy.  My brother though at 11 was less relieved than I; I hid in the garage and waited for my father to leave as my brother tearfully begged him to stay.

At first our lives did not change that much.  Our father had never been a willing participant in family events anyway.  Gradually, though his absence was felt or rather his new presence became a burden.  He had visitation rights and wanted us to visit him 2 weekends a month in Washington.  Nothing appealed to me less.  I was in high school, with plenty of activities and certainly didn't want to spend time with my father in his bachelor pad.  After a year of forced visits, I finally announced that I couldn't neglect my commitments to soccer, ballet and drama.  There was no opposition.  Even so, I was secretly disappointed when he didn't attend my recitals or plays or see me on the Homecoming Court.  I figured he was the adult and if we were to have a relationship, he should be the one to make it work.  

My depression deepened, coinciding with graduation.  College seemed more like a punishment than an opportunity.  I bounced from one school to another, leaving a wake of confused friends and vacillating GPAs.  My father went to Iraq and then to Bosnia.  I protested the Gulf War.  He sent strange distant letters cataloguing his experiences.  I wrote back and to this day I am unsure of what I must have written.  Accounts of boyfriends and Latin 303?  I intensified my disassociation from him.  I referred to and addressed him as Sandy, his given name and when my mother remarried and I believed her husband to be more of a father than Sandy I had ever been, I began to call Sandy Bio-Dad so my friends could distinguish him from my stepfather, to whom I referred as my dad.

By the time I had met Tim, I had been diagnosed as bi-polar and began to receive proper treatment.  When we decided to marry, Tim called my mother and stepfather and asked for my hand.  We made big decisions, consulting mostly each other and my mother and his parents.  We moved to Texas.  We got pets.  We became pregnant.  We moved back to Virginia and had another baby.  Sandy was updated as we saw fit.  A new address card.  A birth announcement.  He was in Pakistan when his wife called me crying.  He would be flown to Landstuhl immediately; lung cancer had been diagnosed, stage IV.

The rush stung me.  It wasn't grief so much as incomprehension.  Hadn't I believed that someday he would mellow into a kind-hearted old man who would dote on my children?  We flew down to South Carolina for his birthday party.  He looked like Daddy Warbucks and I wished that my heart would soften but I couldn't embrace him.  I had a few too many Manhattans and whispered that we would always take care of his wife.  He didn't blink and I receded.

A year passed.  There were a phone calls.  I wrote a few letters.  Then that sticky evening in Tampa.  I wanted to ask him if he would have done anything differently, if he had wished his own father had done anything differently.  We left each other without asking a thing.

He fought hard.  Seven months later, he lay in ICU.  He was on a heavy morphine drip.  I was crying but still couldn't even whisper "I love you".  I held his unresponsive hand and told him that I would bring the kids to see him.  He opened his pale blue eyes and looked right at me.  Maybe, perhaps, he truly saw me at that moment.  Maybe.

I have now deleted two paragraphs, twice.  God forgive me, but when I sit to write, I miss the mania.  I am a blunted object now; happy, functioning but blunted.  It has been almost a year since I have penned a word.  I am only attempting to write today because my friend Peter Neofotis just read the blog for the first time and wondered how much I had... I was humbled that he read it and ashamed that I didn't have more for him to read.  Certainly, the last ten months have given me much to reflect upon and celebrate but finding the tongue to convey it all is difficult.  

I just finished reading David Lovelace's hypnotic work Scattershot.  Lovelace poignantly describes his lifelong struggle with being bi-polar.  Somehow, he wrestled the mania and managed to write a book.  He did so while on medication.  I am in awe.  Without my struggle, I am not sure what I have to say.  

I have managed to find some creative outlets despite being "evened".  I have started sewing and I find that making clothes satisfies a need.  I suppose cooking fills the void as well.  Wow.  Now I just sound like I am penning a Stepford diary.  Somewhere in me still is a voice.  I need to find the words.  I need to find the story.  It is there trapped among the things that I am still frightened to say.  I know the tale... it is ancient and salted.  It has a throatiness that I am scared to utter while medicated.  So there is the challenge... unearth the story, see if I can give words to this life hymn even while so neatly bandaged.