The First Step

I hadn’t planned on this being a current events update on my day to day life. I have been living in my head for some while and this was meant to be an experiment to get me out of my head by writing it all down. Turns out what’s been in my head has happened to play out in my life this past week. So this will be similar to current events. It’s also coming to my attention that some if not most don’t understand my need to go public with what are private events of my life. I don’t have an exact answer for that; it’s in part due to the commitment, I’m accountable to myself and to the 70+ people that visited my blog so far, it’s also because there are many parts of my story that others may benefit from, parts that I’ve spoke out about before, parts that I know have already made a difference for others and hopefully will continue to do so, and in part, maybe most importantly because this is my opportunity to have a voice.  

I’ve had a lot of feelings over the past week: frustration, anger, annoyance, sadness, I’m not even sure anymore. And one feeling I hadn’t really felt before, the feeling of not being wanted. I sound like a sap, like a baby, but I’m over it. It’s honest, it’s how I feel. I’m stressed by a feeling of powerlessness to make a bad situation, a hard situation any better for anyone involved. I confronted my dad, who has been an alcoholic since before I was born, who has, to me, been distant and uninvolved for my whole life. Any therapist I’ve ever spoken to has been convinced and asked me countless times whether or not I had been abused by him, where did he hit me, where did he touch me? Well, he never did. It took hours to convince them that really he hadn’t. I’m not even sure if in the end they believed me. His abuse has come in a different form, in a lack of communication other than a drunken rage. I have feared him all my life. I broke a window in the basement once when I was in 5^th grade, and I sat in front of the door crying and begging my sister to protect me and calling my mom to make sure she got home before him so he couldn’t kill me. In more recent years I wanted to confront him about a beer can I had found in our living room, he was outside grilling over a fire in the backyard, I knew that if I went out there and caught him in his lie that he would probably throw hot coals on me or the grill itself, and then how would I go to work the next day with my legs all burned? I’ve feared him always, he’s never hit me, he’s never touched me, but the threat of it, the fear of it, has always been there, the rage is so unpredictable, and I have no doubts that he is capable of horrible things. I have no actual memories of him in my early childhood, I can remember pictures of him and I together, I know that he was there and at events, but I don’t have memories of him. I was very sick when I was 3 years old spent a month in the hospital, I remember a lot about it, (I’ve been cursed (or blessed) with an extremely vivid memory) like the girls that befriended me and would come eat in my room while we watched Barney, or when they took the skin biopsy from my hip, I remember our new neighbor visiting, I remember the Barney and Mr. Chicken Head dolls I received, but I don’t remember my dad being there, at all, ever. My mom tells me he was, ya know what that’s fine I’m sure he was but I can’t remember it. I do remember being there and struggling while he was dying in the MICU at North Shore, after he fell while working. I remember being terrified, seeing so many tubes, seeing the boy across from him, bandaged from head to toe, I remember the waiting room, and I remember all the times, I saw the transport aides come up in the service elevator to bring another body to the morgue. I remember giving him a sip of raspberry Snapple while he was in the four person room on bipap, he choked and went vasovagal, his eyes rolled back in his head, everything started beeping, and they laid down his bed like he was crashing, I was shuffled out of the room, in to the hallway by myself. He was okay though, but for a while I was 15 years old in the hallway by myself thinking I had killed him. He continued to get worse, needed to be intubated, needed another chest tube, needed a trach, every day was going to be his last but it never was, he got better. And despite his uninvolvedness, everyone was there to support him. My beautiful cousin Marissa who had been dying all her life and would die 6 months later because the doctors couldn’t save her, couldn’t cure her, couldn’t give her 27 year old body a second chance at life, called each and every day to check on him. The attendings and residents on the unit said that he was the miracle patient that makes all of the pain and suffering and death involved in their job worth it, because for every 99 patients that die and that they can’t save, there is 1 that lives, that they can help. That was my dad.. His accident was October 10th or 11th… the next day I had to take my PSAT. He came home December 14th, I’m pretty sure, but dates don’t matter.. He kept a beard because one of the doctors that saved him had one, he said that he was going back there dressed in a suit and looking like a new man in January to tell them thank you for saving his life, for bringing him back from death’s door. But he never made it back. He sunk himself back into his usual routine of alcoholism and depression. And he’s been there ever since. There is not anything in this world that will bring him out of it. Not me, not my mom, not my sister, not anything. We’ve tried. We’ve tried and tried, and he’s lied, and lied, and lied his way through rehab, his way through all 12 steps probably 12 times. He won’t change. And he’s killing all of us. He’s killing himself, and that’s fine, that’s his decision, but he can’t continue to drag us down with him. I confronted him, I told him how much I hated all of the things he’s done. Like the time I was the only one home when he came in puking from the barbque at our new neighbors, or like the many many times he picked me up from a friends house, from school, from anywhere drunk off his ass, or when he got arrested for a DWI and I laughed at him and asked him didn’t he think he was going to caught, and he said to me that he didn’t think he would be drinking, and then went off on how he wasted his phone call to my mother.  I told him about all of these things, I told him that I felt his behavior is unacceptable, has been unacceptable and that he hasn’t suffered any consequences, or made any effort, or apologized for anything he’s done to us. He looked through me, with dead eyes. He said he didn’t know what to say, then said I’m sorry, once. My confrontation, which was just meant to say things cannot go on like this, and I don’t know what else to do, blew up, to an even larger confrontation, that in the end I really felt had meant something, had changed something. We left it at that, with everyone, except my dad a little bit torn up. I left to drive back home to Binghamton, he asked when he could call me during the week, and I said anytime. By Saturday, I hadn’t heard from him. No phone call, no apology, no concern. He doesn’t care, or maybe he does, but he doesn’t care enough. I would give anything to not be in this forced relationship with him, to not have to go home and live next to him, I don’t think that this can be fixed and I don’t even care to try and fix it, but I never felt so unwanted before. This isn’t something that I should have to deal with. The change that I thought was coming, the difference that I made was short-lived... I have bigger and better things to do, and he will not change for anything. That is something that we all need to come to terms with. I feel that I have done that, what I haven’t come to terms with is the pain and suffering and havoc that he continues to wreak over my mother and sister and in all fairness over me as well. And also our friends, our family, and the stress that overloads in to our other relationships.

I am refusing to have daddy issues, I would like to be done with this. All anyone keeps saying is that they are sorry it is so hard. It is so hard but it doesn’t have to be. I want everyone to see that. I want my feelings to make a difference, I want for them to matter enough that we can all walk away. I want to end this before the damage becomes permanent. I want to end this knowing that even though I’m not okay now, I will be okay later.

I have bigger and better things to do, than to deal with a selfish individual, who is not willing to put his family before himself, who has manipulated, and lied to every person in his life. I have an advanced care planning project to work on, I have a 4.0 in graduate school that I would like to maintain, I have an amazing partner that I would like to celebrate, I have so many things to be proud of, to be happy about it, to rejoice in, but right now, I’m not. Last night, Ian said I miss you, we live in each other’s pockets and he is having to miss me, because of all of this, because I am drowning in all of this, when I could be doing such bigger and better things. I, right now, have too much to be happy about, too much to be in love with, too much to be proud of, to be drowning, I’ve had enough of the bullshit, I’ve had enough things happen to me to weigh me down, but I am refusing this. I will not be made to feel this way, and I will not be powerless to it. How I will do that, I’m not sure yet, but this is where I’m starting.