I’m sitting here putting my 2004 financial picture in order because I’m heading over to H&R tomorrow, and I’m reminded how much I love this stuff, handling money. But I’m also reminded of how piss poor my organization is, since I always wait until the week that I’m supposed to go in to prepare taxes to actually go through my bank statements, checkbook and credit card bills to organize everything and inevitably, nothing ever balances because I have no idea what all these vague purchases and deposits were. And all I can hear in my head is my dad saying, “You’re going to get audited.”
And then I’m reminded that this Saturday is my rich uncle’s 60th birthday, and my entire extended family will be here (all ninety of us), including my father. And how it’s been about a month since I last spoke to him, and how he will probably be ignoring me, with my cousins coming up to me asking me why I can’t be a more filial daughter since my poor old man looks so lonely getting drunk all by himself in the corner and harassing my baby cousins, as he’s known to do at large family gatherings. And it makes me tear up, amid my sea of bank statements and receipts, because it’s sad. But what has being compassionate ever gotten me with him? How far has digging deeper to find that lifeblood well of love gotten me with him?
I hung out with Urethra, her boyfriend and her visiting father a few weeks ago. We went to the House of Blues Gospel breakfast that featured an all-you-can-eat Southern brunch followed by live gospel music that put us all in not only a great mood, but gave us a need to dance in a way only Steve Martin from The Jerk could understand. The walk to House of Blues was about a mile each way, which we figured was to our benefit considering, again, it was an all-you-can-eat Southern brunch and Asians are the foremost experts in how to most efficiently (and gluttonously) attack a buffet. Walking there, I spent some time talking to Urethra’s dad, who was a pleasant fellow and an easy conversationalist with plenty to say about basketball, television and anything random this Gemini could switch subjects to. I concluded, Urethra has a nice dad. And I realized, even though it’s always been quite obvious, I do not have a nice dad.
It wasn’t until recently that I thought about, if my dad weren’t my dad, what would I think of him? This is a question I have never really wanted to delve into with the needed objective perspective, as I didn’t want to ruin the inherent love and need a daughter has for a father and frankly, I’m afraid of him. It’s one of those deep-seated fears cultivated in childhood that even adult perspective, distance and intelligence can’t quite shake. This one is rooted within the emotional muck deep inside a person that no logic or intellectualizing can quite force into more appropriate decorum. It belongs to that vulnerable little kid who exists within each and every one of us.
Last month, the therapist I went to see said, you can sit here and intellectualize and analyze and make a laundry list of grievances, but at the end of the day, you need to come to terms with that fact that plain and simple, you had a shitty father. I’m not saying he’s a bad person, but he was a father who was too busy putting his own issues on other people and taking care of himself to take care of you, and you got gyped. And plain and simple, that really…sucks. So once you’ve recognized and grieved for that loss, you pick yourself up and do all the things you ever wanted to do because now…you’re free. Because your life, your choices, are still in your hands.
And it all was too simple, but it finally seemed like something be done (overcome), probably because I’m finally in the right place to take this whole thing on.
My brother just happened to call right now, interrupting the post, and I was sitting here all stuffed up. I talked to my mom and told her I’m not going to the party on Saturday. I decided that while writing this post. Choices are just that easy and obligation ain’t worth shit. Obligation is an invisible force that doesn’t even exist, and being a slave to it at 26 is tantamount to being afraid of the dark or afraid of boogiemen under my bed. It’s laughable. I told my mom that I’m so sick of my dad’s act every time we’re around his family, of him appearing so tortured because he has a family that just torments him with their lack of love for him, or the flipside, of him being the generous, gregarious uncle that everyone just loves, who’s willing to big-brother everyone, willing to flash a hundred-dollar bill and buy cigars or expensive whine or an entire banquet meal, acting like he’s finally found people he likes because my mom, my brother and I are such a shithead, disappointing family. After 26 years? Yeah, eat it.
When I was young, I would often wish my father would die, or mentally prepare for his death, telling myself it that at the end of the day, it would be for the best. I would always feel horrifically guilty about it, and I thought maybe this was a product of how he would always tell me that he had a heart condition or that we were causing him life-threatening stress, but usually, I thought I was a malicious little shit who had the capacity to wish people dead. And I felt guilty about it my entire life, how someone supposedly so nice and kind could think life would be better off without her father.
I reread that IM between my mom and I last night and that part where she says getting conditional love is worse than no love because at least with no love, you don’t expect it, and it made me think about having a father–how having a father who was emotionally absent most times, often volatile and habitually emotionally and physically abusive is so much harder because you still have hope that one day, things will turn around and the love will come pouring forth; but if your father died, you would know that you no longer have a father, so you would mourn and move on. In hindsight, I don’t think I wanted him dead, specifically. I think I wanted the not knowing to end; I think I wanted to be able to move on in my life, instead of always being stuck in one place, being stuck in the same precarious emotional state, of wondering if–I change, things change, he changes–suddenly things will open up and I’ll have a paternal figure who loves and appreciates me. I was tired of the stress of thinking that I was the root of a slow miserable decline towards death anyway, because no one in my house seemed happy (trick mindfuck. We all die anyway). Dead father= no father. Easy to face. Live father who doesn’t know how to love you = maybe something will open up tomorrow. And then you start to hate the part of you that holds on to hope, the part of you that’s so STUPID and UGLY for believing in love and kindness, for clinging to despicable vulnerability.
Fuck that. Baggage whores are pussies.
If you can get away from the things on the outside, the things in your past, the people and things that claw out your faith in yourself, your purity of heart and your belief in the great love that connects everything in our universe, you give yourself the chance to be something special and powerful in this great big world.
So why not try?