Protected: London
Protected: Shadow, a poem
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: Narcissist’s Daughter
Protected: Fiction: Control Alt Delete
chilled conclusion
The air pressed against her skin. A thousand invisible paper cuts of equally invisible ice.
A subtle shift from a light breeze did not offset the tiny tears to her flesh. Her steps were quick, but not quick enough to make much progress, as she wore far too little for the season. Just a sequined slip and thigh-high boots paired with a jacket meant for fashion not warmth, accentuating the molecular hairs that pressed up from her skin in protest of the winter air. And soft ivory skin too exposed to the moonlight surfaced across the gentle curvature of collarbone which slipped out of the satin jacket with each step.
She left her house with no particular destination in mind. Only a mission to not stay in the same spot for long. To let the moonlight drench her with its luster as she traced the paths she walked again and again, albeit not so frequently on such a cold winter’s night.
But this escape was purposeless as much as it was purposeful. She hoped that the chilled slices to her flesh would turn off all other sensations. That somehow—somehow by feeling everything at once, ripping in to her, all would fall into place.
Answers would be provided without questions asked.
The air would force her surrender,
and she would allow it that surrender with its silvery silence.
Through the six slits between branches boasting above her head she noticed a star slipping through a sea of soft clouds, illuminated by its simple force, yet mostly forgotten by breadth of the night sky’s endless navy.
She closed her eye tight and imagined the starlight dancing on her skin. Down her neck, to the nape of it, slowly down her spine, to the back of her right thigh, and down to her ankle, then exploding out of her toes towards the forever ahead of her. And again imagined its journey down the left of her, until it left again, bouncing off back to the universe, already forgetting its flare through her flesh.
Defeated by the stars and the slick surrounding she slipped back to doors which enclosed the perfect everything. Soft sheets, warm bed, hot shower, cooked meals, a furnace producing heat on demand. She crawled into bed, tucked herself in tight, and let dreams find her again, through every heartbeat of night’s pulse, until a piercing sun jolted her weary disposition into a new day’s reality, always awaiting the night.
The Sunrise Over a New Year
The layers of our reality simmer. One jelly and warm, settling in from a recent embrace from a loved one. One dry and flaking. Overcooked. Still struggling to stay together. One grasping the earth. In perpetual silence. Reclusive and alone, heavy with the weight of all the layers on top of it, but comforted by them like a weighted blanket. Yet another stiff and cold, protective, hiding the many layers within, aware of its fragility despite holding up well to the outside gaze. It is perhaps the weakest layer of all.
We are all our layers, though some may forget to tend to one or avoid another as it’s complicated to keep them all together day in and day out. And some are a bit simpler too–perfectly designed by the local chain bakery for a child’s birthday, while others opera cake with hundreds of thin layers carefully pressed together only to quickly come apart.
As the knife of aging and climate change and global pandemics and unfulfilled dreams and loss of loved ones and loving ones presses in on us we avoid, much like the allegory painted in the movie-I’ve-only-watched-the-trailer-of Don’t Look Up. Certainly ignoring the slow death of our world is worthy of a film to wake us all up. Much like the premise of the film, it won’t. But there is also the slow death of us. That’s inevitable. But we die every day as our dreams die and as our mortality becomes clearer with the aches in our bones that creep in when we do something we’ve always done and get worse by the year. And in the close of another year, we perhaps celebrate making it to the next one, in lieu of the prior year living up to its potential. Well, here are another 365 days. Here is another chance to do or fail at doing what we ought to do. For its far too time consuming to hold our layers together. The best we can do is watch the sunrise. Run or walk or lie alone in our beds and wonder. Or do, as some do, the productive types. But how many aren’t distracted and unable to achieve all they think they should achieve in five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes?
It’s hard for me to celebrate birthdays. Since my father died. It’s hard for me to buy into this concept to teach children that they should look forward to aging. But I understand why we do it. It prepares us to discuss death with the core milestones of aging already being attached to celebration. My children growing older is of course entirely preferred to the alternative. And yet as I see how fast they grow and age I look back to my own childhood and mourn the loss of my own innocence and naivity, despite it not lasting long. For my oldest, at 3.5, I think back to myself as a young girl, likely receiving her first strapping or at least aggressive spanking, for failing to clean her room, or being over stimulated by the world and falling into a temper tantrum. I don’t remember much of myself at that age, or any age really. But seeing my children grow makes me feel a bit more sorry for myself, and also a bit more understanding why my father would get so angry. A child is just a little adult with big emotions, and those of us how are highly sensitive have even bigger ones. It’s easy to forget that we are just children. Still multi-layered, but freshly baked and needing time to settle in before being served up to the world.
My three year old often asks where grandpa is. I answer that he is far away. I wish I had some heaven to explain to him but I don’t. And I won’t. Eventually I will have to tell him grandpa is dead. Maybe that won’t phase him. As a child people are old or not old and the old die and that’s not disturbing since that’s what happens to our elders who look and act much older than us. It takes a while to truly understand that we also get old, and our parents get old, and every single person will one day be rendered obsolete. It’s a painful thought. It gives meaning to live yet is the cruelest joke ever played on consciousness.
For my son, I fear him losing those he is close to who are older as well. My father’s death before his birth will probably be accepted without question as long as I don’t mention his age at the time (67.) But then how do I prepare him for all the loss ahead of him? How do I teach him not only of mortality but of all the horrors of the world? I learned them. We all do. But it’s somehow different when we are parents and we both envy our children’s innocence, try to protect it, but also to help develop that outside layer into the firmest perhaps stalest crisp to protect them from the pains to come.
My son does not like sadness. Or being mad. Or anything negative. If you say one is sad he will immediately correct you and say “no you’re happy.” Even a “mad scientist” must be a “happy scientist” and the “mad dash” to our appointment in the pouring rain needs to be a “happy dash.” For a kid who refuses the notion of sadness and madness, it is difficult to teach him that emotions are ok and necessary. How else can I prepare him for the losses to come? How long do I hide the world from him and let him “be a kid?”
This, while my layers are shifting and settling into lumps and my outer layers slowly crack as life rumbles eagerly beneath my feet. My crumbs start to push others away. Shooting out as sweet projectiles attempting to garnish some attention and purpose. Briefly noticed and left to stain the surrounding environment. And back into yourself you go. Back into imagining your layers more taught and plentiful, your heart beating somewhere in all of that, its constant rhythm, for now, no matter what stories you carry on your shoulders and down into the earth. And the sun does rise. Over fences and forests and mountains and meadows. We all see the same sun rise and set, until we no longer do. And we all harden in time. Sliced and set aside as leftovers and eventually discarded. So what now, in this next year, minus one whole day, is there to do to refill our filling, moisten our crumble, and solidify our surface with sweetness, not just accepting the baker’s hand of time.
The Addition of All the Many Moments and Sum of All Their Parts
There will come a time when I won’t care what others think, or what I think for that matter. That time may be coming sooner than I think, for I’m far too tired to care this much for much longer. It seems caring about much of anything puts me at a disadvantage in the grande scheme of things. I still watch in awe how the confident function, and examine my reflection in the mirror and attempt to gaze back with half that confidence. I always end up half laughing , half crying. I’ll never be that.
It is difficult living in this bubble of brilliant type As with a few amongst them who have figured out how to play the game and get ahead. I’m trying to do just that. My head keeps spinning. I don’t know why I can’t think like everyone else thinks. Logically. In a structured way. There is structure in there somewhere, past the swirling seas of patterns and potential. I’m trying to find it. Structure, and release. How to offer high quality with little emotional cost. How? I don’t know yet. People do it, so it must be possible.
I feel guilty I have little emotional energy to spare for the actual state of things. I read election news and social media feeds and catch up quickly on how fucked up the world is and hope that maybe despite being so fucked up things will eventually in due time (maybe 10 days time) hit a wall and swing back the other way. Though the Supreme Court is now stuck without questionable intervention due to questionably rushing a nominee through. Yet some people really will be happy and benefit from a conservative government in power—I don’t agree with those people, I don’t think it’s fair that many must suffer to support their views, and yet some people will be happy. Those who prefer a woman to die than to abort her child. Do they not deserve happiness too? I don’t know. Who really deserves happiness? We are all pretty awful creatures and in the end to ashes we go. So, if anyone is happy at any given time even for the worst of reasons, isn’t there some sick beauty in that? I don’t know. I’m trying to see the rusted glass half full.
I hope Biden wins.
I guess we will find out soon. I am grateful my children will be too young to remember much of this presidency. I don’t want them having a picture of “Presidential” as this. My oldest will be 6 if Trump gets another 4 years, so there will be some memories — but mostly of the joy of seeing him out of office (hopefully) as he concludes his second term. Frankly I’m concerned if he doesn’t win this time he will continue campaigning for the next 4 years and run again in 2024. Everything is going to so much shit right now a part of me feels like we are best off letting him destroy us so we can properly rebuild, vs handing this mess to Biden (who he will continue to blame) to fix. Hmm.
It’s unfair of me to think these things. I can survive another 4 years of Trump, probably, but many others cannot. And his administration just announced they gave up on managing the virus. Entirely. What? Just let everyone die? I guess so. Just 1% of Americans. Sorry if you’re one of them.
The whole pandemic lifestyle is getting to me. The first few months I enjoyed—no longer having to commute to an office. Working from my bed in my pajamas. Going for long walks in the late afternoon vs sitting in 45 minutes of traffic to drive home. No having to come up with something awkwardly witty or say or ask at the water cooler. Just me, my family, my apartment, and my food delivery people who I never met other than by name in Instacart.
But now I miss people. I do. I miss being around people. Hearing them. I miss all the things I haven’t been able to do with my son like take him to dance class or little gym or the zoo or go on vacations and show him new things. I’ve invested all the extra free time in buying and now renovating a home, so at least it has been productive (I can’t imagine doing this in a normal time.) There are plenty of positives and yet—I miss my family. I miss my occasional happy hours with coworkers. I miss even more occasional massages and pedicures. I miss getting a professional haircut. It has been almost one year since I’ve had one. I cut my hair myself a month or two ago. It’s time to do that again soon.
I struggle in knowing many aren’t social distancing as much as my family is—and wondering am I giving up too much of my life to hide from something with a 99% survival rate? I mean, not that I’d be attending maskless indoor parties or anything. But what if my son went to daycare to meet other kids his age? What if I took him to the zoo or pumpkin picking? Or to ride the outdoor train that goes down to Santa Cruz that I always wanted to do once I had a child.
My son doesn’t seem to mind that he’s missing out on some aspect of his childhood. He doesn’t know what he is missing, though I suspect he has some idea when I grab him away from other children who come running up to him at the park. In the rare chance we go to the park. How will I, after a vaccine is introduced, teach him it’s ok to socially interact with other kids? Will he easily adapt? Will he shy away from socializing because that’s what he knows? I worry.
At least soon he will have a little brother or sister to play with. I mean, in a year or so when that baby is more than a blob that poops and cries. One day. You know if said blob and I survive childbirth. Which we probably will. I expect this time to be equally as scary as my last birth. Or worse. Or maybe it won’t be. I read a lot about traumatic births. So I’m scared. Women who have survived but who have hemorrhaged. Or who had an emergency c-section where the medication didn’t work. Who can blame me about worrying a bit?
In 13 weeks I’ll have another baby. That’s just three quick months. I am looking forward to it. Not the birth part. But the part after. Not being interrupted from my half sleep in the middle of the night after my child is born to be informed my father died. Not having to beg so many wonderful friends and family to help my husband survive with a newborn as I took a flight across the country, terrified of my blood pressure spiking or blood clotting, to attend my father’s funeral. Maybe some time, this time, to feel happy despite the typical positive birth exhaustion blur. I just want that. I don’t deserve it. No one deserves anything. But I hope I get that experience. A baby that comes out breathing. Who isn’t whisked away to the NICU. Maybe a “normal” birth and a breathing baby and things to go right for once.
I can’t let myself get too optimistic for anything. I thought my father was doing better and would make it three months so he could meet my son at Thanksgiving. I could see how happy he was holding my son for the first time. Laughing and joking with him. Telling stories about when I was a child. How my son reminds him of that. Singing to him and reading to him and having all those stolen moments that will never be. I don’t like to get my hopes up anymore. It doesn’t seem worth it. But it also doesn’t seem worth it to live a life always expecting the worst.
So I guess I have to figure out how to fill the glass a tiny bit more so I don’t have to make a judgement call on how to describe it’s respective volume.
Be Anyone Else But Me
When I was 21 and romanticizing overdosing on pills or jumping in front of a train, the one thing that really kept me going is thinking that at some point things must get better. At some point in life I become an “adult” and stop being a trainwreck and start functioning as a normal healthy happy human being in the world. Maybe by 25, or 30, or for sure 35 it would all be better.
Fast forward 15 years. Spoiler alert: it hasn’t gotten better. It’s just gotten more humiliating. At 21 at least there is something mildly cute about being a hot mess. At 36, it’s not cute. It’s incredibly painful. It isn’t romantic in the least bit. It’s cry-in-your-car-and-hope-you-can-hold-it-together-so-no-one-really-knows-how-much-of-a-mess-you-are. There is no reason to tell anyone else. They already know. Or they don’t care. No one should care. You are an adult now. Figure it out.
Yet every word that comes out of my mouth in the wrong one. When I’m told I botched a meeting, that I spoke too much (again), that I am given all these chances and I still manage to embarrass myself and my team, I am finally speechless—because it’s all true. I bite my tongue too late and try to come up with a list of ways I can redeem myself. I feel like it’s all futile. Not just this, but everything. I’m clearly broken. Not in a romanticized way. Not in a wanting to swallow a bunch of pills sort of way. Just in a frustrated and tired and sad way. Like — maybe I can at some point figure out a way to pretend to be someone else so people like “me” enough so I can function properly in society? God, I wonder if people actually think I hold myself in high regard, that I think I’m the greatest thing since the invention of avocado toast. No. I don’t. I am not my biggest fan, to say the least.
I’m scared. I realize I’m so fortunate for everything I have. For all the things I’ve had. But everything is so fragile. Everything can break at any second. The moment I start to feel like I’m making progress I fall so much harder. Therapy doesn’t help. My therapist probably thinks I’m a spoiled brat. I don’t have any real problems. Well, I don’t. It shouldn’t be this hard. I just don’t know how to exist. I certainly can’t model ideal behavior after my parents, two people who only listen(ed) to themselves. I’m sure I’m way more like them than I’d ever want to admit. But in a different way. My dad was a know it all. My mom, well, she just thinks the world revolves around her. What do I think? I think I have to constantly prove myself to have worth. I have to earn my space. My right to exist. Except that clearly backfires. So then why do I do this? I don’t have any idea how to be.
I look at my colleagues and admire their confidence and poise and intellect. I recall again and again how I don’t belong here, and yet I don’t belong anywhere so here is just as good as any other place if I can make it work. After all, I have to work. And I want to make it work. I want to exist in this world of rockstars—people I admire, people who are everything I want to be. I figure maybe if I spend enough time around them some of that goodness will rub off. I don’t know. It’s yet another little bit of hope I have. Thinking it’s possible to shift in that direction.
Instead, well, I’m back where I always am. Because I am not them. I don’t know who I am but I’m not this put together, smart and polished person. Maybe sometimes I can create something people appreciate on its own — if only I could disappear entirely that might solve the puzzle. Or, I don’t know. I am running on fumes here. So terrified. I’m trying. I really am and yet it seems the harder I try the worse I come off. This isn’t a post seeking self pity. No. It’s just where I am. A month out from 37. Acknowledging it really doesn’t get better. I don’t get better. I mean, I’m going to keep trying, because that’s what I do. But I’m seeing cliffs in all directions and I don’t know if I can handle falling yet again. I really don’t know how many more times I can take it. But what other choice do I have? Only the one that I don’t want to make. At least there’s that.
life with interest 