So yes, Dad passed away in the middle of July this year. I had somehow convinced him after years of nonsensical badgering to spit into a cup and partake of 23andme the site that can tell you about your ancestry and your DNA. Over the last four years of getting to know the man I called my father I learned a few truths about him and who he was that I didn’t know. We are a lot alike I found. We were/are both fixers in that we see someone in trouble and our instinct is to save them or we find a friend in need and want to fix them. When he found out his best friend of 50+ years had Cancer his first instinct was to jump into his car and drive two or three hours to be with him. When my “niece” who is technically not related to me but important just the same told me her dog needed immediate surgery my first instinct was to take out a loan for her and fix it all. In both of these cases what both of us wanted didn’t happen, due to circumstances beyond our control. And our hearts both sank, both feeling as if we had let that fixable person down. Not grasping the enormity of the situation or what part we really played. It hurts not to be able to fix and help. Both my Dad and I share a stress rash in the form of a welty skin condition that itches beyond belief and both he and I only responded to one type of medication for it. Both Dad and I have/had short fuses that once lit made for entertaining and dangerous outcomes. My Dad was a good man. He tried to do right by his son, spending thousands of dollars on treatments for my brother’s Cancer that my Mom would continue to pay after his death. He tried to do right by his wife and take care of her in her times of need that grew like weeds once my brother died. He got to know me, even for a few short years after my brother died and while my Mom struggled. We knew each other as people a little bit more and I like to think that was a blessing. He was adopted and knew about abandonment. He was funny and witty and flirty. All things I got from my father. He was smart and he was strong.

When I was growing up my truth is that I was in the shadows. My Mother tells me that my birth was hard and almost killed her. Her own mother was cruel to her and treated her poorly her whole life. She at 78 still carries a tremendous amount of bitterness for her own mother and I think as I write this now that this is a way for me to work through it, however partially so that I can eventually let it go. There are many forms of abuse and just because I seldom had bruises does not mean that I did not suffer as a lonely person in my childhood. There is nothing quite like being bullied in your own house but I was and this is my truth. I was not a great kid. I was a little shit sometimes and I lied, was bossy and pushy. But I was lonely and begging for acceptance at every turn. When I wrote my first poem at the age of 7 my mother asked me where I copied it from and told me that lying was wrong. I wrote it, it came from my brain to my hand to my pen to my paper. Why at 7 did I have to say that? When I was singing I had to prove to her that the teacher liked my voice. Behind my back she told everyone how proud she was of me, but she never told me. Not once. Ours was such a difficult relationship was it any wonder I married the first person who asked me despite his vicious hands and words? I married into abuse because it was what I knew and what I felt I was worth. She knew the whole time how he was treating me and often would ask me what I had done to deserve it? Where was the blame to be placed? Perhaps if I behaved better it wouldn’t have. She wouldn’t help me leave. She said it was not her place. She swore me to secrecy from my father as his reaction would have been decidedly different. I remember being a teenager in their house and being shoved up against a wall by my brother as my father passed behind him. My brother held a X-acto knife to my throat and laughed. I escaped and asked my father why he hadn’t helped me and he simply said “You must have done something, and you shouldnt have been in that hallway”.