Night Changes
It feels like my dad died a decade ago. I can barely remember what it was like before I was parenting a teenager. Did I used to willingly opt out of going out to public places? I used to have friends who I saw...regularly, right? And not via FaceTime?
I’m not entirely sure I know what I want to say right now. It feels like my dad died a decade ago. I can barely remember what it was like before I was parenting a teenager. Did I used to willingly opt out of going out to public places? I used to have friends who I saw...regularly, right? And not via FaceTime?
(I’m never on a desktop computer during waking hours, so Zoom doesn’t really click for me. Who has headphones on them at all times??)
I have read 1-3 chapters of several books. My brain inevitably refuses to retain information or get drawn into the story. I have reread the same 5 fanfics maybe 30 times in the past 3 months.
(Also, I think if there should be a UI setting on AO3 so if an author hasn’t posted something in C days/weeks/years, their name appears in a different font or color or something. Same for if they’ve written fewer than N fics in a given pairing or fandom. The pain of finding something good and then clicking through and realizing they only wrote two fics ever, the last of which was finished four years ago, is very real and not something I’m resourced enough to handle right now, for fuck’s sake.)
(Semi-related: is astolat ok? Is she just vibing and taking a break? I don’t think the internet could collectively handle it if the most popular fanfic writer retired or was harmed rn.)
Anyway, it’s coming up on Father’s Day. This would have been the six year anniversary of me cutting off contact with my parents. (Mom and I obviously worked through a lot of shit over the years, but I still needed something of a boundary reset with her for most of the first year.) This came about because I was in training to be a medical advocate for BARCC, and the second to last day was all about intimate partner violence in the morning and then all about incest and childhood sexual abuse in the afternoon.
Maybe it’s silly that I hadn’t put together that so much of what happened to me growing up wasn’t normal, but honestly I didn’t have the language for it. And then just, ta-da, in about 6 hours there it was. All the language, as if it was something that happened to other people. I remember asking the trainer if it was possible for a parent to do some of the things she was talking about by mistake or unintentionally, and her looking me in the eye and telling me that no, it’s on purpose, and adults know what they’re doing when they groom kids. I remember trying to just sit still and not draw attention to myself (which must not have worked very well because the woman next to me leaned over and asked me if I was okay). I remember deciding that when the training was done, I was going to walk through the door to the lobby, I was going to sit on a particular chair, and I was going to call my sponsor and then my husband. And then I was going to walk to the T stop and get on it and get home. And beyond that, the entire rest of my life was a complete blank. I had no idea how I was going to live with it. I just knew I didn’t have to know that yet.
Volunteering for BARCC was one of the best experiences of my life, and I fundraise for them every year on my birthday. I always say they gave me more than I could ever give them, and that remains true and always will. All of the Friday nights I spent with rape survivors in hospitals will never be able to balance out how profoundly my life changed in one afternoon.
The way I lived with it was by talking things over with people I trust, and then giving myself the gift of not having to lie and send my dad a Father’s Day card that weekend, or email, or god help me a phone call. And I didn’t have to field whatever reactions my mom would have to me cutting off my dad. And so that’s how I ended up celebrating Father’s Day by removing my father. I’m sure it was painful for him. I know me not talking to him anymore upset him and hurt his feelings, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the kind of thing that got easier for him to accept with time. But even years later looking back, I know I couldn’t have handled it better than that. Even now, if somehow I could talk to him again, I’m not sure I have it in me yet to be as compassionate and loving toward him as I would want him to be treated. Even knowing how it ends.
I talked with my uncle today and it’s a specific, perverse kind of sorrow to not be able to hold a funeral or memorial for someone that wasn’t particularly well-loved. I don’t think we need to really remember my father specifically so much as we need to be around each other, the people who knew him and had to deal with him over decades. There’s such an urge to try and explain, or justify, or somehow *make* people really feel the ache of what it was like to love someone who was maybe incapable of returning that love. The promise of even just getting to sit with people who have been through it...I don’t even know what it is that needs to come out, but it won’t come out any other way.
For a while (the years when I was working with therapists who specialized in DID, before I started testosterone and most of my parts up and integrated organically), there was a cave inside my chest behind my heart. Two women lived there, one who was silent and one who screamed all the time the way you and I breathe. At some point, both of them got trapped between two plates of glass, so thin that if you looked at it sideways it was like there wasn’t anything there at all. But if you walked around to face it, you could still see each of them, paralyzed.
There’s a similar feeling now, where I’m looking inside myself and I don’t see anything there, but I know there’s something. I can’t even feel it, I can just feel that there are feelings I can’t feel...if that makes any sense at all. Some day I will turn to the side and maybe finally be able to get a good look at what’s there, maybe even let it out. But right now mostly it’s just [gestures above] this.
I’m too cynical to hope for much, my response to almost everything in the news is “I’ll believe it when they actually do it”, and my day to day life remains pretty much unchanged. (Our kid had a birthday. We donated our tax return. Maybe at some point in the next couple months we’ll finally replace our extremely shitty broken screen door. My actual life problems and events are small.)
I hope that whenever you read this, you’re figuring out how to rest up and recharge yourself for the long haul. I hope you manage to change one small day-to-day thing permanently rather than trying to change many big things all at once. I hope you’re still washing your hands and properly wearing your mask (if you’re not going to cover your nose just take the damn thing off, but also for real cover your nose). I hope your shitty quarantine haircut is growing back out again decently.
Working nights remains awful, but when I’m going to bed in the mornings I get to hear the birds singing. Sincerely liking something small and free for 5 minutes at a time is maybe the only thing that’s carrying me through this in anything like decent shape.
Talk soon.