About a Dad

My dad left us when I was four. I had two big sisters, both who were in their "teenaged rebellion" phase, and I was just a teeny baby. FOUR. My mom, who was studying to be an RN, and working in a temporary nursing job that required her to be a student to keep, had to quit both school and the nurse job. She got a job as a bartender-- a job that would be one of the things she did for many years after that. 

Incidentally, (I'm not sure I'm using that word right here. Maybe it's monumentally). He left us for my mom's best friend. Who had kids of her own, who he ended up raising. Which meant that, in the long ago days of the early 1970s, he didn't pay any child support. My mom was on her own supporting three daughters, who were all still schoolkids. This was, to put it mildly, hard to impossible. 

I have a vivid memory of a summer day I came back from my next-door bestie neighbor's house (my sisters were out doing teenagers-with-boyfriends-to-visit-and-pot-to-smoke things.) My mom was in the recliner chair that she always sat in, and she had thrown something (I think it was a coffee cup? But it had probably been full of alcohol) through the glass front door (not a screen door if it had glass. What do you call those?) The front porch was covered in shards of shattered broken glass, and my mother was sitting in the chair, her face dark and unreachable. I think I said something like "Mommy?" and she said, in a voice filled with dark places you don't want to go, "Go Away." 

I can't even imagine doing this. How and where was she that she told her four-year-old child to go away at night while she sat in a fugue state (I think. Something like that) in the living room? The four year old having to fend for themself, with no adults to help. Sheesh. I'm still kind of scared for little me. I send back into the time travel mind that it's okay. Kim. You'll get out of the dark, and you'll not let other people be in the dark in the future. In spite of the pain you feel. 

I myself have been in some dark places but if I had a child in the darkness, I think that would have pulled me out of the dark to help them. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it. Save your pain and your spiraling for another time. 

I was hungry. I was scared. It wasn't cold, but it was dark. Here, there be dragons.  

I hid on the front porch under a porch chair for hours. My oldest sister eventually came home, found me there, coaxed me out, and we went inside. I'm assuming things were cleaned up, my mother eventually came out of whatever depressed state she was in and things were hunky dory, right? 

This memory has haunted me for so long. I've written about it before; I've tried to write it into a fictionalized auto memoir. Back when she was still alive I thought I couldn't do it because it would hurt her, in spite of Anne Lamott's advice 

I've been mad at my dad, mad at my mom, mad at the world, before. We lived SUCH a hard life because my dad chose to follow his urges and leave us and then not take care of us. But he had done that before and abandoned his first family, some half-brothers I've never met and would kind of like to meet now that we're all old and can realize that it's not about them, but it could be about us. I imagine their mom did not have nice things to say about us, though. 

In between that day and today there were bouts of homelessness. Hunger. Some petty theft on the part of that one sister's boyfriend of the most amazing BBQ I've ever had and still long for. And there were mistakes of my own before being the mom to my smarter than I deserve eldest girlchild. She tells me that my mom was doing the best she could with some really bad situations and yeah. She's right. And she's awfully forgiving of that, in many ways. She has a distance and a kindness that I don't really have, even today, even now after it's been more than thirty years since I lived that life. That "I don't actually know where my next meal is coming from and I have to rely on strangers for help" place. 

I think my mom told me to go away that night because worse things were possible in her mind at that moment. She couldn't be a mom because she was a hurt animal. I wish she were still here today to talk to about that because I don't think we ever sat around as adults and discussed who she was then. 

But hey, this post started about my dad, and I have to circle back (Chekov's Dad, if you will). He was a complete deadbeat. MANY many many of the struggles of my childhood, and shit, even today (because I have awful teeth from not seeing a dentist for the first 22 years of my life and it STILL affects me at 55) are because he couldn't be assed to send us 100 bucks a month for food. 

I had a little bit of an epiphany this morning. I reached out to him when I got married and asked him to give me away. He did, and was really happy about it, and drove down to Florida to be there.  He brought the woman he left my mom for, actually, because even though they weren't still romantically together, they were weird roommates. My mother in law even asked me who that woman was and when I told her, said something along the lines of "your mother is a lot more forgiving than I would have been." And yeah. I think she was. To a point. 

My dad-- he failed. On so many levels. And one of them was having a sort of hands off approach to us. He seemed to only relate to us when we reached out to him. To respond when WE initiated it. But shit, ya'll. We were children. HIS children. And he had a responsibility to take care of us, in one way or another, a responsibility that he just bailed on. My sister never forgave him for that and when he died, I think it hit her way harder than it hit me because of that lack of forgiveness. She was a lot like him, in a lot of ways. 

The day he died, the day I heard about it, I was in a sort of brutal twist of fate, teaching the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas to my intro to lit class in Louisiana. 

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I had to read that out loud because it was in the days before we had computers in the classroom. That, my friends, was HARD. Still is. It's a poem I do not teach anymore. 

*************************************************

I refuse to be that person. That dad who lets their child, the person who you are responsible in one way or another, for, lead the way and initiate the conversation, reach into the dark without any support. Not entirely. A long time ago I vowed that I would not mess up someone's life, if I could avoid it, and let them be the one who lead the conversation. And I've mostly done that. But now, I might be thinking about how my dad messed that up and everything sucked after for us. Even if I forgave him, it doesn't take away what he did.  

I'm owning my own attempts to be someone who fights the dying of the light. Even if it's hard. 

Even if I fuck it up, and I will, and have, and did, and again probably will, I'm going to say "hi." I'm going to try. I'm going to say I love you and I'm going to cry and I'm going to risk messing it up. And I'm never, ever, going to say "go away" when someone tries to talk to me. Even if it's the hardest thing I've ever had to do to make something better than it could have been in the worst place I've been. I have made the hard choices, and I don't regret them, but I will not be that man who ran away from any kind of commitment after he'd made mistakes. I will own up to any errors I've made, if necessary, and sheesh have I made mistakes someone could write about in a "not warm" way. So. That's where we are today.  And I realize this is a little "vagueblogging" but it's what it is, and the literally ones of readers I have will eventually learn what I mean, or not, or I'm just writing for me. But that's what writing is for-- to figure out what you mean to say. 

And I mean to say-- I'd like to be someone people write warmly about.