Since you've been gone...

Dear Daddy,

A year ago today you left this world.

It still feels like yesterday.

In some ways it is a little easier. In other ways it is still a very fresh and raw wound.

I still feel like every time I go to Mom's, you will be there, sitting in your chair. I still feel like every time Jack's cell phone rings, it will be you on the other end, asking him to come over and help you do something.

We went to Wakulla Beach the other day, and even though I tried my best to enjoy it, all I could see was the ghost of your memory, walking along the same stretch of shore. One of my first memories with you is there at that beach. I still remember, 31 years ago, you carrying me to the boat because I was terrified of the hundreds of fiddler crabs that scurried over the sand. I knew that in your arms I was safe. I longed for that sense of safety many times over the next few decades.

We had a volatile relationship for most of my life, but the last eight years was as close to perfect as we would ever get. I would give almost anything to have the chance to keep adding to those years.

I didn't realize you were telling me goodbye the last time you spoke to me while you were lucid. If I had known, I would have done so many things different. I would have said so much more. I would have hugged you. I take a small bit of comfort in the fact that the last words we spoke to each other were " I love you." I can count on both hands how many times you told me that once I was old enough to remember. Each time is etched in my mind so very clearly.

I didn't know it would be goodbye forever, Daddy.

I feel dead inside. Still. It is so hard to laugh and smile. Most of the time it's forced. The mention of your name still makes my throat close. Jack and Alex talk about you often. I just nod my head and pretend to smile. I don't have the heart to tell them it rips me to shreds each time.

I wish I could cry. I wish I could purge.

They say the body is 70% water.

I say my body is 70% tears that I have been unable to shed in 30 years. You taught me that to cry was to be weak. I know that is not true, but the training is so strong, so much a part of me, that I have never cried myself clean. Ever. I have had a life that requires many tears, and I have never been able to shed all of them. I have a few sets of strong shoulders that would let me cry on them..but I am unable to do so. I rather throw myself in front of a moving train than break down in front of someone. The sad part is, I can't do it in private either. I can cry sometimes...but never enough. If the day ever comes that the dam breaks...I am not sure I could recover.

A huge part of me is just gone. You took that with you...and I did not even know that you carried it with you.

I know now.

I still carry anger with me. Angry at the reason you died. Angry because the place you were at to heal did not take proper care of you in time. Angry because YOU SHOULD HAVE LIVED. You beat the goddamned cancer. It was GONE. Because of that terrible "rehab" facility you were in, the pneumonia was too far gone to save you. I am angry because you had that stupid DNR order...and the no artificial means order.  So we watched you dehydrate to death, while drowning at the same time. I am angry I could not be there every day, the way I wanted to be. I was there when you went in. I was there half of a day and an entire night later. I managed to get Jack up there to say goodbye. I am angry that you waited until the one time NO ONE WAS THERE to die. I am angry that you died alone. I am angry that Alex has to grow up with out you.

I am angry you died.

There, I finally said it.

I'M FUCKING ANGRY THAT YOU LEFT ME!

I'm angry you didn't take me with you.

But I love you. So much it hurts to breathe sometimes.I miss you so much. My life has not been the same. Every night for the last year, since the day you died, I have told you goodnight before I went to sleep. Every night I tell you I love you and miss you and would give just about anything to have you here in the flesh.

I am going to stop now. I think.

Not because I don't love you or miss you or wish that you were here in the flesh with me, but because my ritual that used to bring me comfort is actually helping to keep that wound raw and open.My heart has not let you really die yet. My mind knows it. My spirit knows that you are free now. My heart still refuses to accept it.

I'm scared that I will be stuck here in hell forever.

I want to be free. I need to not think about you constantly. I need to let you go. I know you can't fully rest with me the way I am...pulling you here...holding you here.You need to be fully free, as much as I do.

I have to wake up, and face reality. You are gone, You won't be back, not as you were. I have to realize that it's okay. You served your time. Like mine, in different ways, your "life sentence" sucked ass.  I am as angry that you escaped as I am that you are no longer here with me. With us. Because we all loved you intensely. I wish we knew just how intense before it was too late.

I don't know how to heal...so I have to wing it...just like I have always done.

I want you to know I will be okay. Eventually. I hope you were able to forgive me for all the stupid mistakes I made. I forgave you for yours.

I still would give just about anything to have you back, but I also know that you would hate that. You were ready, you were ready for years to get the hell out of this place.

Death is not hard for the dying. It's hell for the living.

The irony of the whole situation is that if you COULD speak to me, you would chew me out for feeling this way after all this time. Suck it up. Move on. Let it go.

I hear all the things you would say to me. I've never been very good at doing what I was told.

I love you Daddy. More than you could ever imagine. More than you ever knew. I wish I could have told you while you were still here. I just hope you heard all the times I've said it since you left.

I have to heal somehow. I don't want to talk to anyone anymore. I don't want to see anyone. I don't want to sleep...or wake.

I still have to live this life. I have to accept that you already lived yours.

You earned your freedom. I still have a few years left to serve.

So this is me, trying to let you go, Daddy.

My love for you will never fade, but you deserve to be truly free. Your memory will never die.  The anguish has to go though. So today, on this terrible and beautiful anniversary of your timely and untimely death, I am going to work on setting us both free. I can't talk to you anymore, not for a while at least. Until it is not so raw, not so fresh.

So this is the last time I am going to call out to you..where ever you are. I ask you to give back that part of me that you took. I ask you to help me let you go.

I love you so much, Daddy.

Enjoy your rest. I'll see you when I fall asleep for the final time. Save me a seat next to you...

Goodbye Daddy.

I love you.

(The first two videos were two of his favorite songs...the rest...are from my "Oh my god I am dying" playlist.)

Thoughts on loving and being loved... Part One.

I had a different post planned for today, a simple update of how the week has gone, and how I have been really busy yet totally not busy all at the same time, but I read something that changed all that.

A couple of weeks ago my beautiful friend Luna from A Strange and Curious Girl shared with me the work of  life coach Hannah Marcotti. Luna shared a 30 day workshop with me as a gift, and each day I have been working through the prompts. It has been enlightening and enjoyable. Today, Hannah shared a blog post called A Love Addict is Not Born, and it really resonated with me. Go ahead and click that link to go read the post and come back. I will wait....

Interesting stuff, eh?

I related to that post very much.

I have had a lifelong issue with love. Being loved, loving, the concept of love. All of it. I do not feel that I grew up in a loving home. We had a lovely house, built from the ground up by my parents, family, and friends of the family. I miss that house very much. My parents raised me the best way they knew how. They went out of their way to buy me things when they could. They both worked hard to make sure our needs were met, and to afford a few "wants" along the way. I lived in a beautiful house, with a good amount of stuff, I was sent on yearly vacations around the country to visit relatives...but I do not feel like I had a "loving" home.

 

My father,whom I miss so very much, was a hard man. He lived a hard life from a young age. He was abandoned by his parents on the front porch of their house when he was ten years old. His uncle cared for him for a little while, and then he was placed into a Boy's Home, and I am not sure if he stayed at that one place or if he went to more than one "home" before he became old enough to join the Air Force. He was married 7 or 8 times before he met and married my Mother, and he stayed married to her until his death..34 years. He had issues with love. He was not shown love or shown enough love, in the right way, as a child and as a young man. I am not sure of all the details of his marriages, or the how and whys of why he got married and divorced so much. There is so much about him that I do not know, because he was not an open man. He did not like to talk about his past. I was a teenager before I found out I had two more half brothers that died when they were children. My half sister told me, not my father. He and my Mother had a tumultuous relationship. As I said, he was a hard man. He used to tell us that "This was a dictatorship, not a democracy," meaning he ruled the roost and no one else had any say. He yelled all the time. He was angry all the time. He was a hard man, who did not know how to love or be loved, until much later in life.

My Mother had a hard life growing up too. Her stepfather beat the hell out of her for breathing wrong, for years, until she finally left home as a teen to live with her grandparents. She was married twice before she married my father. I know very little about those marriages. I just know that they had their problems and the marriages were ended. She did her best, but she, too, has issues with loving and being loved. She was more openly loving than my father, but it was still...different that what was needed.

I was an only child for my mother, and the youngest for my father. My half siblings were grown and almost grown by the time I came along, so I had no real relationship with them, and I do not have a relationship with them now. I have nieces and nephews, even great nieces and nephews, that I have never even met. They had no relationship with my father, and my only sister resented me to no end, so of course I had no relationship with them.

Because I was the only child in the home, I was lonely most of the time. There was only one child in our remote neighborhood, and she was a few years younger than me. She moved away after a few years and I was even lonelier. Because of the way my parents were, I felt the only time I got any attention is when I screwed up and did something bad. As other people who have gone through this will tell you, bad attention is still attention. I started doing many stupid things just so I could feel like my parents knew I existed. My Dad worked all the time, and once I went to school my mom went back to work. From the time I was 12, I was getting myself off to school, taking care of most of the house cleaning, and even starting and later cooking dinner, because they did not get home until after 6 in the evenings. I felt invisible. So to get their attention, I acted out. I caused a lot of problems with my antics. I ran away from home at the age of 15 because I felt so unloved, and so at odds with my father especially. I got into the car wreck that almost killed me during the time I ran away. My parents asked me if I wanted to come home while I was still in the hospital, or did I want to go elsewhere. I went home, and while I healed, both of my parents were amazing. I even went into therapy after that, but even though I poured my heart out to the therapist, and loved her, my father decided I was "pulling the wool over her eyes" and making them look bad. So he stopped me from going after a month or so, maybe two. I was devastated. After I healed, things went back to the way they always were, and I started doing more stupid things. Finally my father told me I either had to live by his rules, or move out. I moved out at the age of 16, with someone I never should have been with. I was so desperate to be loved, that I would do anything, with anyone, to get it, even though I knew in the back of my mind that what I was getting was NOT real love. The only good thing to come from those relationships are my two teens. But, because I was so busy chasing "love," I had my kids taken away from me, which only made it that much worse. I held a lot of animosity towards both my parents for many years. Blaming them for how my life turned out. Later, I shifted most of the blame on to myself, where it belonged, but they still have a part in the blame too, because of the way they did things.

I understand now that they both did the best they knew how, and as an adult who has been through many bad relationships, I understand that marriages are hard work, and the baggage each person brings to the relationship can influence that marriage in untold ways, both seen and unseen. Now I understand that they did not and could not show love in a healthy way because they had no clue how to give it. They never received it. So they loved me the best way they knew how, and I realize that. I love them both very much, and the last 8 or 9 years have been some of the best years I have had with my parents. Although they took my children away from me ( which is one part a good thing and one part a bad thing ) having the kids changed them both for the better. For many years my eldest daughter was the sun and moon to my father. She taught him many things about healthy loving. There were times I was jealous of her, because she got what I so desperately wanted from my parents. Real, visible, healthy love. They were the same way with my son, whom they took when he was five. After that happened, I pretty much stopped caring about anything for a long time. I would do anything to try to feel better, even to the point of almost dying from my recklessness. I did not care. I wanted anything that would fill that terrible gaping void in my soul.

Because of their actions, and my own, I had no clue what healthy love was. I did not know how to get it, or how to give it. I did not even know what it looked like. Dysfunction was the theme of my life, and I made a lot of wrong choices while trying to find healthy love.

Then I met Jack. We had our 9th anniversary on April 4th. Everything changed when I entered into a relationship with him. He was a few years older than me, had a great job, a vehicle, and parents who loved him and helped him when he needed it, even when he made stupid mistakes. ( That changed later but that is a different story that is not mine to tell. ) At the time, I was not speaking to my parents much, we had a falling out not to long before. Jack's father was like my second father. He loved me, and supported me and stood up for me when I needed it most. He will always have a special place in my heart for that. He helped me to understand my parent's side of things, even while validating what I felt. Still, it was not until after Alex was born that real healing began between my parents and myself. I had something in Jack that I had never had before. He truly loved me, and supported me. That is not to say the last 9 years have all been smooth sailing. Two of the last nine years were very shaky, and we actually split up twice. Once for a weekend and once for a day and a half. A lot of that was my fault. He is a very loving person and requires a lot of love. He has had his fair share of bad relationships too. He waited until later in his life to have a child, and he wanted Alex with all of his heart. He is an excellent father, a PRESENT father, not just bodily, but mentally and emotionally as well. That is something my older two kids never had, aside from my father. Due to having them at such an early age, their birth fathers were not ready to have a child, or  be in a child's life, and while that is sad, it was better for the kids.

 My father was the stable father they needed, and my mother was the stable mother they needed. While the hurt of having them taken away from me, and the continued hurt of not having them living with me is still there, I AM grateful to both of my parents for providing the kids with a stable and mostly loving home. They are teens now, and everyone knows that is a volatile period in anyone's life, but for the most part, they are well taken care of. There are some things I do not agree with in the way things are going, but I am unable to do anything about it. So I make sure they both know I love them and will do everything I can to help them if they need it.

Back to my relationship with Jack...he is wonderful. He is gruff and "rough around the edges" to other people, but he is so different at home. He takes care of us, he worries about us, and he always puts us above himself. He is very loving, inwardly and outwardly, and he is not afraid to let the world know how much he loves and cares for us. The issues we have had are mostly my fault, and it is because I had NO clue how to be in a good and functional relationship. I did not know how to be in a relationship where the man was not a drunk or a drug user. I did not know how to be in a relationship where I was not being cheated on, or cheating myself. I did not know how to be in a relationship where I was not being hit or abused. I did not know how to be loved. I did not know how to love. I am much better about it now, but I am still having to work on it. I am so used to keeping people at arms length, so I will not be hurt. It took me many years to realize that by being that way, I was hurting Jack. I was causing this huge rift, not because he was abusive or a terrible husband and father, but simply because I had no idea how to be loved.

Come back tomorrow for part two and find out what I have learned, and how it has changed every single relationship I have.

*I want to add this is not a post bashing my parents. None of us are perfect, and I love my parents very much.  They did the best they knew how, and they helped shape me into who I am today, with both the good and bad things. While their methods were not always the greatest, I appreciate the lessons in life. Part two will talk about that.*

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Another injury NaBloWriMo Day 22

Long story short, I broke my toe last night on a piece of wood in the dark. Snapped my next to the last toe on my left foot, fell down and scraped myself up pretty bad. Everything is sore, and I went to the ER for my toe today. They wrapped it ( which I  had already done ) and sent me home with a Rx for pain killers. Nothing to be done but deal with it until it heals.

This is really getting old. One bad thing after another. It is hard to take.

Just when things get easier, something bad happens to mess it all up. I am  discouraged and unhappy.

I know you are all getting tired of my bitching about something, but that seems to be all I have to talk about for right now. I hope that changes soon.

That is all for today. I hope you are all having a better start to your week than I am .