My eyes hurt today. Well, not just today. Most every day. They tear on their own, whether I'm happy or sad, so that when you see me, you'd think that I was crying, but mostly I'm just wiping the excess moisture from my eyes. Sometimes this comes in handy like at church last Saturday night, it's easy to explain tears away with an excuse. My eyes water constantly. I think I'm allergic to something. It must be the lighting. Except those tears, they were the real kind. My pastor however is convinced I'm where I need to be. She told me that a few weeks back, not expecting a response, but knowing she was right all the same.
The easiest thing for me to do would be to pick up my phone and make an appointment with an eye doctor. I could learn to live without twenty/twenty vision. I could acclimate to a pair of glasses. I could even get it substantiated from an honest to goodness professional that something as simple as an allergy pill could clear all this up. But I won't pick up the phone, I won't make that call and I won't go… At least not until it gets worse than it already is. This is how I deal with problems, ignoring them until they go away, or until they can no longer be ignored.
The writer in me prefers to think of these unwelcome tears – the ones I don't intentionally shed – as a purging of sorts, my body's automatic response to sadness and the removal of it from my life. An ocean load of tears I've stored in silence that I'm no longer able to contain. And maybe in my world of avoidance, there is a shred of truth to my belief.
Last night with the snow blowing like a mad hatter across the highway, creating a white out from the wind alone, I came to a forced detour, a fire truck parked sideways in the middle of the median and its crew with flashlights in hand directing me down a road that wouldn't get me home. I didn't take this detour in stride. I felt put out, thinking to myself how much longer it was going to take just to get where I wanted to be and wondering whether or not the next road would lead me back round to a stop or if it would still be open for travel.
I followed a lone line of cars, neither too closely nor too far behind, until we reached a fork in the road. The cars in front of me all opted to turn left, the quickest way back to the main road but I drove straight on, keeping to the back roads as I'd been taught, knowing from where I was it was my quickest way home. How funny it was to have that thought, that memory from my childhood mind, the lesson I learned from my stepfather still so deeply ingrained that there wasn't a thought to following the pack, and absolutely no fear of going it alone.
I was smiling at the thought of being in control, back in the driver's seat, taking my time over the ruts, the bends in the road and when the snow blew and blustered I let out my breath and made my way slowly through the temporary blindness. Confidence, whether falsified or on demand for the moment, had me believing that my little adventure out of the ordinary wasn't the least bit significant. Accidents happen. Roads get closed. Detours are just the long way home. But I know that even the smallest of things can set some of the biggest of things in motion, and how those moments can alter a life forever. And in the blink of an eye, it can all change, because I had seen what he had not… I had seen him.
The whole thing may have lasted for ten seconds, though to me it might have been a full length feature movie. In one space of seeing him, I took in everything from the truck he was driving to the shocking whiteness of his hair, to the smile on his face that suggested he was listening to something humorous on his radio. I willed him to look, to pay attention, to see that the car he was passing was me but he took no notice and he passed by with nary a glance.
I wanted to stop in the middle of the road, get out of my car and run after him like a child not ready to say goodbye. I wanted to scream, "Dad! Come back! Don't you know it's me? I'm right here! Don't leave me! Don't go away!" But he didn't stop, and I didn't turn around and life - it went on as if it had never happened at all, as if I never needed a hand to hold onto.
The hardest lesson I've ever had to learn during the course of my life is admitting that I can't always be in control. I can make choices but I can't always predict the outcomes, I can love someone and yet have absolutely no contact with them, and I can push away when I mean to hold close. And I can be wrong. I can hurt people with a quiver of words, I can twist them in a way that attempts to mimic the manipulation I despise, but I can also use them to heal, to bring hope, to show affection, to offer love and give comfort. But no matter how they are given, I can never take them back when they are no longer mine to own.
The man who is and isn't my father knows this to be my greatest flaw. The child who loves too much can hate to the same intensity. The child who feels abandoned and betrayed becomes the woman who knows it as fact rather than fiction, growing to expect it from each and every person she encounters, wounding herself repeatedly with the same mistakes over and over again to punish herself for what she considers her crimes. It doesn't occur to her that she might be innocent. She's spent so much of her life feeling guilty…
In my thirties, it seems a little ridiculous to broadcast that I've got Daddy issues. Then again, a girl with a count of three to the one you're supposed to have should be entitled to a certain amount of leniency in this arena. Divorce and remarriage was simply the norm growing up. It still is. People fall in and out of love as easily as falling asleep, though I don't say that to be cruel or unkind. Each divorce that ripped its way through my household was a catastrophic event for at least one if not all of us. And anytime you divorce someone that you love – that you both love – for reasons that have simply spread out beyond the limits of what can and can't be controlled, it hurts like hell. And it hurt like that never really goes away.
When I was a kid, things seemed so black and white. There was no in-between, no gray area where we could lay the blame, when the blame to me was disguised as more than a dozen beer cans consumed in the course of just one night, every night and the confrontations that would always follow by a vast array of players. I think that's why – as an adult or as adult as I'm ever going to be - I hate confrontation so much. Hate it to the point of avoidance. Hate it enough to tolerate bad behavior and allow it to be a weakness in what was supposed to be my arsenal of defense. I simply stall out when faced with a fight which is the oddest thing for a girl with one hell of a temper and the countenance of a lion turned mouse.
My solution for all this was to walk away. But don't believe me when I tell you that by doing so I left the pain behind. I've dragged that around for more years than I care to count and added loads more to it along the way. And I've hurt the man I consider as much as a Father to me as my flesh and blood Dad. They both were –well, are – flawed men. Men who have made as many mistakes as every other man on the face of this planet, men who couldn't possibly have lived up to the pedestal I put them on and toppled off as you would expect they would when it got too high. But when it came to separating themselves out from the rubble, no hand of mine reached down to help them out.
I won't say my (step)Dad never tried. He did and on more than one occasion I turned away and sent him packing without ever leaving my room. But I watched his retreat from the window on Christmas Day and every day there after as I shoved him to the peripheral of my life, as I let the years slide by with no letters, no calls and no contact at all. If you doubt that I have in me the ability to be cruel doubt that in me no more. I'm not proud of my behavior but neither can I change what already has been done.
I went to college, dropped out of college, had a fiancé, had a baby and then only a ring to prove I'd once been engaged, and then a life that seemed to propel forward on its own accord. The first time he broke down the wall was after KC was born. I opened my door and there he was and it was all I could do to keep from crying and knowing how I am with the waterworks, you can imagine that I flooded the room with my tears. But one visit does not solve every little thing; it does not take into account years of problems left unresolved. We tried – as anyone can really try wearing kid gloves and walking on egg shells to resurrect the relationship we had lost but it was a difficult task. It required an amount of commitment both in time and temperament that neither one of us was fully prepared to make, he with the family he now had and me and the baby that was mine.
For years we've gone on this way, half hearted attempts to do the right thing, to say the right thing. But I think most of the problem with this is that I've never simply sat him down and told him the truth about how I've felt for all of these years and I've never given him the opportunity to do the same.
Do I know that man loves me? I've no doubt of it at all. I'm the daughter of his heart and he is the father of mine. And I owe him another chance to help me make things right. And though he doesn't know it, at least not yet, I made a promise at the beginning of this year – one to him and every other person I consider to be important in my life – a promise that I would make each and every moment matter, that I would say whatever needed to be said, no matter how hard it might be for me to say it, and that I would leave no one in any doubt – least of all myself - of how I truly feel. And if the only success that comes from my promise is closure, let it be said that I opened the door to the future and not that I closed it on my past.
