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.