This is just a place to put down my thoughts, rants, stories, poems, fears, and all that other stuff i can't think of right now.
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This is where you stick random tidbits of information about yourself.
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Friday, February 15, 2013
I'm afraid I may stroke if I can't get some of this inside me out. I am trapped, emotionally tortured and no way out. I'm afraid it's literally killing me and creating such a difficult future for my son. Why in the WORLD would someone KNOWINGLY do things and allow some things they have total control over .. so frustrating. If a child already has some difficulties in his environment, why introduce more when there is no reason to?? If you knew a person was an alcoholic, would you stock their home with liquor and/or offer liquor to those who may be predisposed to alcoholism? It's awful to be totally disgusted by the behavior of someone and be physically unable to do anything to stop it. It's driving me insane.
4:40 PM
Tuesday, January 29, 2002
Well .. this is my first "blog" and my first post to it. But it is an old post really because it is an old journal entry that i wrote on February 23rd, 2000. i was encouraged to put it up for others to read so i am doing so now. If i had to name it anything, it would be called "Daddy".
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February 23,2000
Where to begin… to know me… to know me. Perhaps at the beginning. Well, that is a relative term. Perhaps from where I feel is the beginning of my psyche, what makes me “me”, began??
After 16 months of loving me, enjoying me, whatever the joy and sorrow and worry parents feel for their children, my mother and father decided it was time to work to have another child. My mother had been using birth control pills, which I would have to think was fairly controversial during that time for wives but I may be wrong. On this day, Mom started, as in began her period. She had then, of course, taken her last pill and when these few days were over, she and my father were to begin. My dad was, well I guess most would have described him as sort of a “good ole boy”—rambunctious, sort of wild in his younger days, though he was not especially old on this day. He was 27. His friends were of course wild as well. Truth be known, dad had spent some months in a state penitentiary in Tennessee … really for passing out drunk in the back of his friends car. But that is a tale for another day. On this day, dad had had enough I guess. He had a wife of just over 2 years, a daughter he cherished by all accounts, and though he had often been a drifter when it came to jobs, he was in one at this time that was not only a good one but one he also enjoyed. I will have to ask mom what this job was as right now it escapes me. His “buddies” were not progressing, growing. They were still behaving as if they were 18,19,20, and apparently my father, after some heartfelt discussions with my mom decided that the best thing to do would be to let these friends go. To let these friends … go … on whatever path they chose because they had made it obvious the straighter and narrower path was never going to be on their map. So this day was to be dad’s last “hoorah” with these “men”. He was going to go out and do whatever it is they would go out and do and then at the end of the day he was going to explain things to them and then, as I said … let them go.
He left midmorning I believe. Mom laid me down for a nap because she was having a particularly hard day with cramping, one of the many things, good and bad, I have inherited from her. He asked if he should stay and (smiling) take care of the house and the baby so mom could rest. She sent him on, relieved this day had finally come and that just by being herself, he had seen the errors of his ways and was making a true honest effort to change. Though, truly, I do believe she was apprehensive. It was not even noon and she could tell these “men” had been drinking. I am sure it was only beer though. Country men are beer-drinking men when they are out for a good time. They save the whiskey for the bad times, the lonely times … until, of course, they become alcoholics and then any time is the right time.
It was getting on towards suppertime, which in the south is the evening meal. The term dinner is used for lunch here; And only then if it is a special lunch or at a special place like church. You may have lunch on Monday but it is Always dinner on Sunday (smiling). Mom was beginning to worry. She wanted to trust and believe Billy. That he was sincere in his wanting to turn over this new leaf but feared that perhaps the beer and talk and whatever else goes on between these “good ole boys” may have swayed him back to the wilder side.
She was feeding me when the knock came on the door. The policeman told her to please hurry he did not know how much time there was left. I know I was with her. I do not know if I went into the room … cubicle with her. I thought for years that they had her waiting outside in the waiting room and never allowed her in to speak to him. Recently I found out this is not true. She did get to speak to him and tell him all the things a wife, friend, lover would want to say. At least I hope she did. I think I would torment myself for years thinking of more I could have said. More I could have done.
He lived for approximately ninety minutes—either ninety minutes after arriving to the hospital or ninety minutes after the bullet ripped its path through my daddy’s heart. The damage was extensive. There was nothing that could be done except to make him as comfortable as possible while allowing him to stay aware. He wanted to be aware. To speak, to know, to share what he could while he still had this time. As I said, I just recently found out that mom had the chance to speak to him and to love him before he died. She said he loved me so much. That he thought the sun and moon rose and set around me.
The story goes … my dad and his friends had been out target shooting with pistols. That my dad’s gun was too small for his holster and upon getting out of the car at the Speedway which I believe used to be an old time gas station/grocery type place, his gun fell out of the holster, hit some part of the car or car door, and went off shooting him in the chest. The investigation was rushed according to mom. I have had questions but the files are gone. I do not know the trajectory of the bullet. I do not know if my dad was standing sitting lying down when this happened. I know very little and have yet to figure out a way to find out more.
I see him, lying there beside the car on the ---well I do not know the name for that kind of asphalt cement pavement that has the gravel mixed in. It is odd to me that I always see him on the driver’s side. Have I been told sometime past that after the target shooting he drove his friends car? Or am I only seeing it this way because perhaps he was on the driver’s side when it happened and not getting out of the car at all? Am I suspicious? I will always be. And perhaps for me this is like Vietnam or the JFK assassination. An obsession. Second-guessing all I have been told. Reenacting something I could never actually have seen. Making the outcome different in my heart and mind though when reality has its grips on me I know he is dead. I know he is dead. I know he is dead. I do not know this man I love. I do not know this man. I have no memory of him. He named me and I will never find out why he chose Carla. He held me. And I will never know what he smelled like. Da-Da was my first ‘word’. Was this just the physical growth of language or was it because in my infancy I wanted him? Called out to be with him?
Of course there are things I know that he never got a chance to. What it feels like to become 30 … 28 for that matter. I don’t know. Can you love a man you never knew simply because you know of the love he had for you? I weep for him. I weep for Mom. I weep for me. I blame him for every bad relationship I have had and still am constantly looking for a man who is like this idealized picture I have of him; comparing them to this ghost. I have spent weeks of my life wondering what I would have been had he lived. Even had he only lived long enough to give me a sibling? To give someone else to my mother to care for so she did not spend so much of my younger years spoiling me beyond reason, need, and rational thought … that too is a story for another day.
I have many tangents I could run on to now. I could speak of how I have gone to his grave to feel close, to speak, only to have my voice crack in the middle of “Hi, Daddy”, and not be able to say any more. Or I could tell of the time I heard him walking and saw him at my grandmother’s house, my first real believable ghost, when I was around 12. I could tell about the funeral and how I am told that I was running/waddling from guest to guest saying, “My daddy is sleeping” and then going up to the coffin and telling him it was time to “wake up, Daddy”. That must have torn my mother’s heart out I am sure. But it is nigh on 6:00pm and I have been rambling on for well over an hour. It is time for me to be still, I think, to catch my breath, so to speak.
This journey, God willing, will continue …
.::.Namaste.::.
10:36 AM
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