Category: Random Musings
Protected: It’s just a post (pw protected)
Protected: The stories they tell.
Protected: London
I Wish I Knew My Father Even Though I “Knew” Him.
[Trigger Warning – Domestic Violence, Abuse, Death]
7:00pm, or later. The door slammed shut. Dad was home. Home from his long daily commute to New York City. From his taxi ride to the train station and one hour train ride under the Hudson into the city where he’d cross under a tunnel and go up an escalator to one penn plaza where he worked from the first day of his career to his last analyzing the risk of pension plans and pitching his firm’s services to companies in need of guidance.
I hid in my room, knowing what followed would likely be my mother complaining to him about how I failed to do something that day and request my much-anticipated punishment. They would fight for a bit, because that’s what they always did, and if I was lucky the fight topic would shift away from me and I could continue feeling bad about what I failed to do anyway. Or I’d be called downstairs, my name screamed loudly, and I’d walk down prepared for my punishment.
This only during my early years. It all must have stopped by the time I was 7. But the memories of those many nights are strong. I’m not sure what I as an under 7 year old could have done that merited those disciplinary beatings, though it sounds like I didn’t clean my room or do my homework. I didn’t listen to my mother. Not that he did either. But that wasn’t the point. It seemed particularly enjoyable for him to have control and slip his belt off around his morbidly obese waist to crack it against my behind, occasionally missing and hitting my back as I squirmed in pain.
My behavior never actually changed. All this did was make me more committed to not listening to him. I recall crying in pain but never willing to say I’m sorry or admit to any wrong. So I just let him beat me until he was done with it. Most times it probably wasn’t that long. A few times, I assume now he had a rough day, and it went on for a while. Once my shirt slipped up and he happened to be using his belt backwards with the buckle end hitting my bare flesh. I spent the next hour studying the welt on my back in my closet’s mirrored doors, crying, and telling myself over and over again how awful of a person I must be to deserve this.
It was difficult to ever get to know my father, and I feel I knew my father best bent over his bed, being beaten by him. I remember once I turned around and saw the rage in his eyes. It wasn’t just about my not having cleaned my room. Though that was the inciting incident. It was clearly his disappointment in me not being the perfect child. Perhaps also his belief in me that I could be so much better. The disappointment hurt far worse than the lashings ever would. But also in that rage, in the burning snap of belt against my back, there was belief that I was so much better than I was. Belief from the man who I respected without question. Who knew everything. And I felt horrible for disappointing him but quickly addicted to this method of telling me that he thought I could be so much more than I was. While I was a failure, he beat me because I had the potential to be a success.
Many years later, as my father lie dying in the hospital, as he lost his mind and the worst of him came out while he was strapped to a gurney and lashing at the nurses, I saw that rage again. It wasn’t exactly dormant through the years, as he frequently would shove my mother across the room and call her names. Once, when I arranged a surprise party for his 60th birthday, he got so enraged as my mother took photos of him arriving that he grabbed the $700 camera I had purchased for her as a gift and hurled it to the floor.
He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Many new him for his generosity, his sharp intellect and passion for learning, his warm-hearted laugh. But he was always the victim of his environment. Always looking for a scapegoat to lay the blame on when things didn’t go his way, or god forbid anyone criticize him.
As the oldest of six–five boys and one girl–in a working class household, he seemed to be left to his own devices as he was not only the first born but also the most introverted and the least of a trouble maker. While his Italian-Slovakian father–who grew up without a father and with a strict Slovakian Catholic mother–was beating his brothers into submission, it sounds like he was typically sitting quietly in his room reading a book.
School came easy to him. Valedictorian of his high school with acceptance and scholarship to MIT, but he went to a state school instead, which he always said he regretted. And then, not too far into his masters study in theoretical physics at Cornell, he dropped out. It just went from being too easy to too hard overnight, it sounds like. He only knew how to handle life when it was easy. When everyone admired his intellect. When he didn’t have to try. So it seems.
And he met my mother while in college, so she was there by his side through all of that. When cleaning out the house recently we found love letters she wrote him that were sweeter than cotton candy. I couldn’t imagine my parents having this kind of relationship. My father never respected my mother. But perhaps early on he enjoyed her admiration. Though I’m told he knocked her glasses off her face on their honeymoon, so that clearly didn’t last long. She called the police a few times years later, but never left him. Once or twice, in my preteen years, I rushed down the stairs to separate them to try to protect her, even though it’s likely they were fighting about me in the first place.
It is difficult to both admire my father, be sad for his failed dreams, and angry at his inability to care for others outside of how their existence would feed into his idealistic self image. Clearly he was depressed, no man who weighs that much is a happy man. But he seemed to find contentment listening to classical music or watching his movies or baseball games or working out physics equations to try to keep his mind sharp through old age. He had a few friends from his early years that stuck with him, who maybe knew him before he got so bitter.
I’ll never be able to unsee the comic strip of the last months of his life. When his mind lost itself. When for a solid month he didn’t remember who I was. Then, somehow, his memory came back. I don’t want to relive that in words right now. But it was all very traumatizing. If there was one constant in my life it was this man who was at least consistent in his stubborn ways, always with an answer, highly anxious but not showing it, ready to debate any point and gaslight you into oblivion. But all that was gone and what was left was the child he long lost, afraid, confused, and again left alone for his final breaths.
Despite all of this I miss him more than the world and I’d give anything to bring him back. I wish I asked him a thousand more questions, but it is unlikely he would answer them anyway. He could talk about anything at all except himself. I don’t know if he knew himself, if he ever spent a moment ruminating on how he could be better. Certainly he worried about paying the bills and likely the loss or addition of a client. But as he so harshly judged everyone around him, did he ever once question his own ways, outside of maybe the failure in graduate school and the acceptance of an ordinary life?
I’ll never know. Because it seems no one really knew him. And I only knew him in those moments of rage, his eyes widened and flesh red, taking out his disappointment on all of us. Because we weren’t grateful or grateful enough. Because we weren’t perfect. Maybe because he wasn’t perfect. But of course he would never admit that.
Protected: Fiction: Control Alt Delete
Life is Trauma
Many mental health disorders are fueled by a general mindset that in the absence of particular textbook traumas in our lives, we ought to be happy. No bashing on happiness here, but I find it disconcerting that we hold ourselves to being happy for the privilege of being, as if that makes sense at all.
Birth itself is a traumatic experience. Luckily we forget it, but we all go through that trauma to start. Can you imagine what kind of PTSD we would have if we were able to remember the day we were born? Evicted from the comfort of darkness and the only home we’ve ever known, squeezing through a tight space and being forced out into the light, our shoulders nearly dislocating. We enter a world that is filled with wonder and a million opportunities to break our hearts.
In the best case, we grow attached to those who love us and we love them back, and one day their heart stops beating and they are gone. We create stories about heaven and god to try to provide comfort, but even believers face the trauma of mortality.
Besides death, though, life is a story of loss. Time plays tricks on the mind, but overall life isn’t that long. And as we grow we must mourn the loss of ourselves over and over. Once 30 we are set in our ways, generally responsible for consistency and not looked to as creators. By 30, our lives, at least the part of our lives where the world was ahead of us, is largely behind us. Our bodies start to remind us that despite telling ourselves we will live well beyond 100 we are fast approaching the middle of the part of our life where we still have mobility and our minds. As our grandparents and parents age and pass, we see those we remember as youthful or at least middle aged now hidden behind wrinkles and grey hair and walking with support of various devices. Aging is no longer the story of our elders. It is the story of us. When did this happen?
Ones 30s are an odd time where we either ignore our mortality until suddenly we are 40, or we fixate on it and try desperately to close all loose ends of building the adult life we thought we wanted as doors start to close. As a woman, at 36, I feel this biologically. The need to procreate is fueled both by the strange desire to have kids and knowing my time to build a family, as least one of my own DNA, is almost up. I have a strange impulse to have 3 children, although it is unlikely at my age with one, but hopefully possible. My husband is happy with one and thinks I’m mad to consider more than two. I have a plan playing in my mind — if I have one more at 37 and still feel strongly about 3, I can have my last at 39 or 40.
10 years ago I would have said I would never have a child at 39 or 40 but I failed to do the math of waiting to have my first child until 34. And with infertility challenges I wasn’t sure I could have a baby, so I tried not to fixate on it too much. And then, with some medication and luck, I had my first. A rather traumatic 74 hour induction (really the last 24 hours was the worst of it), my son was immediately taken from me after birth because he wasn’t breathing. Thirty six hours later he figured it out and we got him back. He lived.
And now he’s growing fast and has somehow gone from a blob to a real human being with thoughts and feelings in two years. I see him, and despite all the trauma of life, despite my general melancholy, despite moments where I look at him and think how fragile he is, how I have brought him into a world where only death is certain and where viruses and climate change and race and wealth inequality make for a world that is uglier than a two year old can grasp, I find these tiny little moments of happiness in my heart. Zaps of light in a world clouded with darkness. I am reminded of my purpose—not a purpose of myself but of building a family. For my child and future children. To try to make their life better than mind, within the little control I have.
Still, the weight of past trauma and future trauma weighs on me. The ideal outcome is that my children outlive me and remain healthy for their lives. I can’t control this, though I can try to protect them, support their mental health, teach them to be wisely cautious while not limiting their opportunities. Giving them room to chase their dreams when dreaming is still on the roadmap. And, I don’t know, the potential trauma weighs on me. Especially in these times. Where every decision is a calculated risk, or at least there is a heightened awareness of this. My son lives in a bubble. He has no friends, or at least none he can play with in person. His mom now works from home so mom and dad are always there to soothe him when he is scared or bored or lonely. It is a nice little bubble, but a deceiving one. I like it because we dangerous as the world is, it feels safe. Small. Controlled.
In my small apartment there is not a home but there are walls and a roof and a front door and that’s our world. We go out for walks on a few familiar routes. We drive to grandma’s house. It’s as if we live in an old tv show with limited settings where all the action happens. I still remember the rest of the heart big world. How less then a year ago I was experiencing a wild manic episode while in London for work, and spent a day after our conference ended wandering the cobblestone streets of the city at night, singing to myself under my breath. I wasn’t in a good place then, mentally. I felt completely out of control and afraid of myself. My mind was in full-on self destructive mode. It was as if with the world so big and life moving so fast, without control of it, I needed to crumble. I’m ashamed by things I thought and occasionally said. I am not that person now. And partially this lockdown has helped me continue drifting back to earth. The shrinking of my world. Focusing on what matters. Giving up on making things constantly different and dramatic and intense to combat the reality of walls closing in. Breathing too deeply in a room slowly losing all of its oxygen. FOMO.
And then there is the quiet. The days which are known in their repetition. No longer even getting out of bed. Just hours of working until the day is through and trying to have energy to play with my son after that and the sleep. These days they slip away. But here they are. The trauma floats outside my door. Potential traumas of all the many things that can go wrong at any moment dance in my view — earthquakes, fires, illnesses, accidents, choking, gun violence, and all that. Immediate threats and future ones. The fall of democracy. The overheating of our planet. All the many things that can and likely will go wrong in my lifetime and my children’s lifetimes. Coronavirus. ACM. The diseases here that are real now. The news stories that make me glad to be able to close our door and lock ourselves inside our humble abode and shelter in place instead of facing the reality of a great big world with so many unknowns.
I know this won’t last forever. In this time I aim to build this family that my body tells me I want. I hope to convince my husband of it too. And to raise children who hopefully aren’t as anxious as I am with even more kindness in their hearts. And I’ll try my best to ignore the trauma of the world, the passing of time. For all of the things out of my control, the many, many things, I must focus on what I can control, and let the rest go in acceptance that there will be horror and there will be tragedy. But I ought not to waste the moments in between failing to live in a comedy with joy, somehow. Simple joys. I hope to find that. To stop living for the passing of time. And to start living within the little time there is left, however long that may be.
50lbs.
This evening, I put on clothing only to be worn in my house, and took a picture of myself in the mirror to examine my weight loss progress. Looking straight into the mirror I felt saddened by the folds of skin and fat still hanging around my 2 years postpartum belly. That will need surgery to fix, I thought, turning around to see if any other angle was more flattering.
There were a few good angles in there. A few moments when I thought maybe my body could be remotely acceptable again. Not exactly now, but I’m starting to see parts of my body come back. I can’t say I ever loved any part of myself—but as I lose weight I feel less embarrassed about what I had let myself become.
I’m still 19lbs overweight, and beyond that I think I’d be the best with another 20-30 removed. I said I wasn’t going to focus on a goal, but if I can sustain a long a week weightloss, I should be able to hit my goal in a year. If I can increase that to two pounds a week, which would be ideal, then it can be done in 6 months.
I imagine what I might look like then. November 2020. Right before my 37th birthday. For a moment feeling good about myself, if possible. For myself. I don’t want to do this for anyone else because that’s entirely useless. I’m tired of caring what other people think. This is for my health. It has to be achievable. I got to 140 before my wedding, so what is 30lbs more? Even 120 would be amazing. 125. Once I’m in that range I’ll feel better.
And even though it’s not ideal to obsess about anything I need something healthy to fixate on right now. Something that involves no one but me, myself, and I. A clear objective and path to get there. Alone. With the only reward being how I feel. Maybe I’ll learn what it’s like to have confidence. I don’t know. It seems like a fairly healthy obsession for the next year. A distraction. A much needed healthy distraction.
Trace.
Imagine pupils tracing flesh, noticing. Just, noticing. The way your mouth curls when you smile. The simple sway of your hips. imagine being watched. Noticed.
Imagine being invisible. It happens with time. Happens. Imagine not being seen. Traced. Noticed. Imagined. You wonder.
Remember being traced. Eyes noticing. And you think all that’s left to notice you is the stars and trees in silhouette against the night. You wonder. What it’s like to feel slightly less invisible. You wonder and imagine and your mind plays tricks on you and drives you towards the deep end. There where everything erupts inside out. So you don’t go there. You don’t go where you might be seen. Noticed.
I remember as a child my parents taught me my worth was in my beauty and my lack of worth was in my lack there of. I made funny faces and never believed I could be beautiful. And if I couldn’t be beautiful, nothing I could be mattered at all. And I’ve spent my life longing to be noticed. Traced. Seen. The light that follows the curves of my body, that funnels into the darkness between my lips. Perhaps that’s what we all want. To be called beautiful. Not even with words. But a look. From someone who notices everything but still happens to take the time to notice you. And you wonder. As you age. Are you permanently invisible? Maybe you are. Maybe it’s better that way.
Alone.
I think everyone understands now a little of what I’ve felt through my life. This sense of social isolation. Of the world around you existing and yet there you are, miles away from it, despite it all going on right there in front of you.
I’m trying to get over the loneliness I’ve always felt. I’m not sure the kinds of connections I crave are at all realistic. Those deep, intimate connections where you can be authentically you down to the feelings that don’t make sense in spoken form, but they’re true nonetheless. Those emotions that can only be communicated in art because they exist between sounds and sometimes not in brushstrokes but in the white space. In the way one’s body curves while dancing or otherwise embracing.
And only people who feel this deeply understand it. This perpetual loneliness. Burnt out by social interaction yet craving company as when our only company is our own mind we can get lost in it, tangled in our thoughts. In our childhood rooms wondering what is it that the rest of the world knows that we don’t. How does happiness seem so simple for some, yet so elusive for others?
And—why does knowing people still feel like not knowing them at all? Why is it I long to understand the inner workings of a few, very few select people whose minds are museums of every possible emotion layered with ever-growing curiosities kept safe in permanent collection.
I stand across the street from said museum and study its Corinthian columns. Protective and strong. My mind wanders inside, exploring its many floors and exhibits. The surrealism. Modern art. Photography and film. History and bones. The living and the once lived and the might live one day. The never lived but more alive than anything that ever has. The science and stories and symphony of the stars.
Perhaps it’s just I am void of my own intrigue. My memory nonexistent I am not fact but fiction. I exist in the moment deep in my gut. I exist in a thousand possibilities of the future and regrets of the past. The loneliness hangs there, iced with the blue green flame of well below frozen. In the clay that I am seeking to take form, awaiting sculptors to knead me. To bake me in their kilns to harden me into the form of their liking. To submit to sculptor. To be hardened to further fragility, yet safe, trusting, saddened by sentient solitude no more.
life with interest 