Part 12

When I was about 17, my dad almost died. My mom had taken my brother and some of his friends out to the lake for the weekend, and my sister and I were at home. My dad was not feeling well, and had been in bed for days.

This in itself was not unusual. He often spent days at a time on the couch watching TV and binge eating. I suppose he was camped out on his bed this time because my mom was out of town. Regardless, by the second day after my mom had left town, it became very apparent to me that my dad really was sick.

My sister and I had been checking on him every now and then, and I started to become really worried about him after he started getting really still and acting weird. Weird, as in, not mean and not eating and basically just sitting there sweating. I told him he needed to go to the doctor, and of course he was like, yeah right.

Sometime after that started, he began hallucinating. He was talking about things that were not actually happening, and did not seem to know where he was or what was going on. I knew this could happen with a high fever, and since he had been so adamant about not going to the doctor, I called our neighbor who was a nurse.

She came over and checked him out and said he really needed to go to the hospital. I called 911, and an ambulance showed up, and I don’t really remember how everything happened, but my dad gave the paramedics a fight about going to the hospital. That probably made their job much more difficult because my dad was really big, and fat, too.

I did not stick around to watch. I went downstairs and waited instead. At some point, the paramedics got my dad onto a stretcher, down the stairs and into an ambulance. Oh yeah – he also puked all over them at some time during all of this.

They asked me where to take him, and I said Piedmont Hospital, because that is where they took me when I got to ride in the ambulance for my ovarian cyst not too long before that. My sister and I got in his car and followed the ambulance to the hospital.

My sister was pretty upset at this point, but for some reason, I was cool as a cucumber. I had even considered getting my dad’s wallet to make sure I had his ID and his insurance information. I had also been trying to get in touch with my mom, and was finally able to let her know what was going on, so she was on her way back from the lake (in Alabama, about a two hour drive) to the hospital, too.

I maintained my cool head for the next few hours, while my dad got checked into ICU and I gave them all the information I had from his wallet. I took some of the cash out of his wallet to get a snack for my sister and me. And then we waited.

I don’t remember how long we waited, but I don’t think it was more than an hour or two before my mom showed up. I do remember that my sister and I were sitting in these chairs by a TV in a little alcove right off the main hall of the floor. I kept looking toward the hallway, hoping to see my mom.

And then she came around the corner and came up to us and put her arms around us, and I just cried like a baby.

My dad ended up being fine. He had some kind of infection – thinking back about it now, it may have been a complication of some sort of STD or something…hmmm. Anyway, we were told he had some kind of infection. He was back home in a couple of days, acting like it had never happened, except to be mean to us for calling 911.

That was the second time my dad almost died during my lifetime – that I am aware of. The first time was when my brother and sister and I were kids. We were on the boat in Alabama, and it was cold. My dad decided he could water ski until we got to this beached area, then glide up onto the sand instead of getting back into the cold water.

It probably would have worked if he had not gone up a cement boat ramp instead. His skis hit that cement and he just flew out of them into the ramp and rolled a few times and ended up all crumpled and unconscious. It was horrifying. He was ok that time, too.

The third time – that I am aware of – that my dad almost died during my lifetime, was when I lived in that apartment in Midtown. I got a call from my mom saying that he was in the hospital in ICU and was not expected to live without an immediate heart transplant.

I was devastated. Jonny came up and stayed with Wes (then two years old), and then I went to the hospital.

It was scary. My dad was not conscious, but he was snoring like hell, which was reassuring. It occurs to me now how afraid I was that he would die – I was absolutely terrified that he would die. I didn’t even really like him by that time in my life, but I was so scared of losing him.

Anyway, I wrote a note to him while he was unconscious. I wanted my mom to give it to him as soon as he woke up, because I was not allowed to be in the ICU for that long, and there were not high expectations of him surviving.

I had gone to the hospital gift shop and bought a spiral notebook that was in the shape of a monkey. On the first page, I wrote about how much I loved him, and that if my heart was big enough, he could have part of it, and that next time maybe he could have a kidney fail, because I could actually spare one of those to give him.

He ended up miraculously recovering and walking out of the hospital a few days later. I had all of these hopes that his near-death experience would bring us closer together, to get him to see how valuable I was to him, how much he loved me, etc., etc.

It didn’t.

He got even more of a god-complex, acting as though his survival of this attack on his heart made him invincible, and as if we - his wife and children - had been the ones who tried to kill him.

After that, he pretty much abandoned his company, his family, anyone that ever cared about him and thought he cared back. The company went into bankruptcy, he left the country for long periods of time, the GBI was looking for him, evidence of multiple infidelities came to light.

I lost my apartment – it was devastating. I moved back in with my mom – again. She had kicked him out by this time, though, so I felt much better about coming back home.

After my dad was gone, our house turned into this place where people had fun and felt good and hung out. Seriously, neighbors had never really just stopped by before, and all of a sudden it was like Grand Central Station. It was really fun.

People were seeing the crazy in my dad – there was no longer any denying it. There was no longer any denying the kind of person he was - yeah, he really IS that horrible.

My dad spent my entire life creating this picture of me as a crazy, lying, vicious, unstable, unreliable, horrible person. He told people lies about me, but at the same time was telling me how much better I was than everyone and was special and just like him.

I had always felt as though people had looked at me strangely, treated me strangely – or at least, like I was strange - and now I knew that they definitely had been. All of the shit I had been through and all of the fucked up stuff people saw happening to me – they all believed it was because I was this horribly fucked up person because my dad told people that is who I was.

They expected it of me, and I filled their expectations.

I suppose in some way I expected it of myself, as well, and it was all too easy for me to eventually say “fuck it” and start on a straight and narrow path of self-destruction.

But now…it was obvious to people that my dad was insane. I mean, a lot of people had caught on that he was a big douche bag, but now it was very clear that he was also bat-shit crazy. All of the things I had been trying to get people to believe and understand about me for my entire life seemed to suddenly have credibility.

It was awesome. The best thing about it was that I was able to believe things about myself that were good. My whole life had been a big mind-fuck. I knew what was real, but only to the extent that it was not twisted and contorted by my dad and the way I learned to think as a result of that.

I was constantly fighting myself, trying to convince myself and other people that I was smart, and good, and capable – and not crazy.

Now that my dad had made it abundantly clear that he was the crazy one, it was a lot easier for me to see that I had been right about myself all along.

I mean, I have never thought I was perfect, but it was so difficult for me to accept that I was BAD, EVIL, DIRTY– all of the things I had been taught and conditioned to believe about myself.

It was also so difficult for me to accept that I was NOT these things – I don’t know if that conflict will ever be resolved completely in my own mind.

Regardless, at the time that my mom finally kicked my dad out of the house and his lunacy became abundantly apparent, I felt a freedom I had never before experienced. I still loved my dad and wanted him to love me – I guess I still want that today – but it was so nice to have the source of everything negative about me discredited.

I wonder a lot about why I would still like for him to love me. I guess it's because after everything is said and done, he is my dad. Realistically, I would not have anything to do with him, even if he wanted anything to do with me, which he doesn’t. But there are some unrealistic components to my perceptions, as there are with everyone's. There is a difference between what my mind knows and what my heart feels.

I feel like there is something missing in me – I see images of dads and daughters everywhere. Dads with their little daughters on their shoulders, dads dancing with their grown up daughters at their weddings, dads who are there for their daughters to turn to at any stage in their lives.

Father’s Day is pretty hard for me. There are so many Father’s Day cards specifically from daughters. It is not that I simply miss having that relationship, it is that I do not understand what that is like at all. I cannot imagine having a dad to whom I looked for safety, or for acceptance, or even for love.

I want all of those things from my dad, and I have spent the large majority of my life trying to find them in him, but it has just never happened. I used to actually believe that he loved me and wanted good things for me, but I cannot comprehend what it would be like to just have a dad whose sole motivation for giving anything to his daughter would be to make her happy, or to feel safe.

I mean, I believe it’s possible – but I just don’t get it.

The Disney cartoon version of Tarzan (you know, the one with the horribly tortuous soundtrack by Phil Collins) has this one scene where little boy Tarzan holds his hand palm-to-palm with his gorilla mother’s hand. That’s where he expects his hand to fit, but somehow it doesn’t, and not just in size – the whole thing just doesn’t make sense on some level, but that’s all Tarzan knows of a mother, so that’s what he loves.

That’s what seeing daughters with their fathers feels like for me.

At this point in my pattern of thinking on this particular topic, I start looking at what I DO have in my life – my mom, my husband, my kids, my siblings, my friends – I have a lot of people in my life who love me, and who I love right back. A lot of people don’t have that, and I am grateful.

By this time in my life, I can think about my dad without almost throwing up, or shaking with fear, or crying from a broken heart. It’s taken a lot of work to get to this point, and it is still hard, but it does not crush me anymore.

Ok, I’m going to go hang out with my awesome kids now. Writing this post sucked.

part 11

For some reason, the closer I get to where I am right now, the harder it is to write about all of this. Huh.

Anyway.

The last few years of the millennium found me doing a lot of changing around (I suppose that’s what a lot of people were doing for the last few years of the millennium). My relationship with my dad just kept getting worse. He set me up in an apartment in midtown (ATL, yo) to get me out of the house and his business, and the way he got me to go along with it was by fixing it so I could go to school.

I went to art school for a quarter – it was awesome! I had never felt so normal anywhere in my entire life. It was a beautiful experience realizing that I was an artist. What kind of artist, I had not figured out yet, but I was definitely an artist. I was very good at all of my classes and with all of my assignments, but I’ve never been one for managing my own life very successfully.

I ended up only going for one quarter. There were a lot of reasons, but a big one was that I couldn’t handle living on my own with Wes and having the rigorous schedule and work load of full time art classes – having all art classes meant I was up all night a few times a week working on projects. Even after all of that, I still didn’t get a lot of them turned in on time, and did not get very good grades. I did get a lot of encouragement from my teachers, though, and that meant a lot.

The first part of that year living in midtown was magical. I was going to school, and had just begun to date Jonny. The rest of the time I spent in that apartment was really, really difficult, but the first couple of months were, like I said, magical.

It was one of those times in my life – maybe even the first time in my life – I felt like I was on my way to greatness. By “greatness,” I mean that I was no longer striving for a career in cashiering or office assisting. I had my first taste of hope and faith in my own capabilities. I didn’t rely on it much, but at least it was there.

Being with Jonny was very magical, too, and no matter how cheesy that sounds, there just isn’t another word to describe it. We had known each other for a long time, had already been friends for years, which at 20 felt like forever. I had always really, really liked him. He made me laugh and feel very good about who I was. Oh yeah – he was also deliciously beautiful.

When Jonny and I got together, I was scared about the future of a relationship for the first time in my life. Previous relationships had been – well, not thought out. Up until then, I had no concern for how the things I did with other people might negatively affect me or them, or anyone else.

After Wes was born, I considered how my actions could affect him, but that pretty much just meant keeping him isolated from the parts of my life that were harmful to me. At that time, the harmful things mainly concerned grasping at whatever remaining shreds of a relationship there might have been with my dad, and also reviving my career as a big slut.

But then there was Jonny. And Jonny and I had a past. I cared very much about what might happen to our relationship in the future. What if we ended up not being together? It was scary. I mean, it was JONNY.

I don’t know how to really describe it in any other way except to say that there were guys, and then there was JONNY. If you can get what I mean by that, then good. If not, the world is probably not going to crumble because of it.

Anyway, Valentine’s Day was about four or five months after we had started dating. I had the best idea for a gift, and went out and got it, and when Jonny came over and I showed it to him, he was like, “oh” in kind of a squeaky voice that got higher throughout the length of the one syllable.

I have to admit, I was a little scared. When I went out and got the present, I was all gung-ho and excited about it. I had planned to do it for more than a few hours, and even for more than a few days, which was a lot of planning for me, but it didn’t occur to me until after I got it and I was on my way home that the present could be seen as a bit…psycho.

I got his name tattooed on my arm. For realsies. Not even on my ass or anywhere that it could be hidden easily. My arm.

Jonny was pretty overwhelmed, but he nodded yes when I asked him if he liked it, and if it was ok. What else was he going to say? I wanted to tell everybody and he wanted no one to find out. I thought it was because he was embarrassed to have me as a girlfriend, but in retrospect, it was probably more because he didn’t want everyone thinking I was a, you know, psycho.

As fucked up as it seems now, at the time I got those letters permanently imprinted on my flesh, I had no doubts. It seriously had not occurred to me that it might be a bad idea to get my boyfriend’s name tattooed on my body, and especially not only five months after we started dating.

I mean, NOW I would say a pretty good rule of thumb would be to not EVER get ANYONE’S name tattooed on your body. My ex-husband brought it up once when we were still together, and I just laughed – and I was married to him – and we had a kid. So why would it all of a sudden feel like a fantastic, perfect idea to get my boyfriend-of-five months’ name tattooed on me?

Looking back, there are an endless number of ways I could psychoanalyze that situation and come up with a different explanation each time. However, I won’t. I’ll just say what it was.

This is what it was: imagine scrambling frantically your whole life for a key that fits in your lock (you just take these metaphors any way you want – but I’m serious here). You have found a lot of keys (A LOT) and some of them fit in the lock better than others, and some of them have to be forced a little harder into the lock than others. And all of them hurt terribly when they are wrenched back out.

Then imagine you find a key that is not a perfect fit, but for once in your life you realize that maybe there is no perfect fit, and maybe having a key that doesn’t quite even get all the way into the lock, let alone turn it, might just be what its supposed to be. You can’t really change your own lock, and the key can’t really change to fit you better, either.

But you can jiggle it around a lot and accept that this is the way it is supposed to be, that nothing is perfect, and that the idea of life-partners and soul mates is merely a socially constructed whimsy. Its just really tough to find the perfect key out of all of those keys, and there may not even be a perfect one at all.

That was how it was with my ex-husband. I will expound no further on the topic of my first marriage.

And then Jonny. JONNY. There was little, if any, effort at all. The key slid without a single snag perfectly into the lock – just like on cartoons, like butter. And then it just as seamlessly turned. And that was it.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that when the right key fits, it’s the key that’s supposed to be there. Duh. Figuring out how difficult it is to actually unlock the lock and see what’s in there is a whole different story that can be revisited when you’ve been married for six or seven years. Or maybe ten.

But that’s how it was with Jonny. He’s just supposed to be with me, and I am just supposed to be with him. No matter how difficult things get (and things can get REALLY difficult), nothing can change the fact that that key fits that lock. There’s no analyzing or philosophizing about WHY the key fits or if the key will get rusty or the lock will someday question its very existence – all of that is irrelevant. The key fits in the lock – click, that’s it.

A simple fact, really.

Wow. I didn’t mean to get so lovey-dovey, but I have to say – it is pretty nice to be with the person I am supposed to be with. (Insert swoon).

Also, DO NOT get anyone’s name tattooed on your body EVER!!! It’s just a good rule to live by.