She's Gone - A letter to my father

 

I never got to ask you why.

We talked about a lot of things near the end. The regret, the sadness, the guilt. But I never got to ask you why, or it just didn’t occur to me in the midst of other topics. I know you loved her so much. I know you loved her until the day you died. I know you regretted cheating on her. I know all these things because you told me. You told me that you married again as a last resort because you couldn’t be alone, she was your second choice. You told me you waited for years for her to come back. But you never told me why. You had a beautiful, intelligent, clever wife who loved you more than anything in the world. She gave you a beautiful home, and a daughter. Why were we not enough? Why were you more attracted to some other woman with another man’s child? I know her parents were brutal in trying to rope you into marriage. But for at least five years you carried on with her like we didn’t exist. Why? Why did you destroy our family? Why did you destroy my childhood? Why did you allow me to be put in a situation where I would be abused because I didn’t have our own home to be in? Why did you make me live with a woman who hated my very existence because I looked so much like my mother. A constant reminder to her that she would never have a child with you, something that would forever connect you to my mother.  For 50 years I’ve blamed my mother for leaving us and never really held you accountable. But you left us first. She just left what was left of us. How could I blame her for needing to preserve her own sanity? I have idolized you, and I’m sure she has wondered why. I wonder myself sometimes. You ruined my relationship with my own mother and I don’t even know how to repair that. I’ve grown up not wanting to be mothered by a mother who left me. I’m too old to go back to that now I suppose. I just get so angry over the outrageous stupidity of it all. You had no reason to leave, and so many reasons to stay. And yet I know that you knew all of this. I know your regret and guilt ate you up inside until it killed you. There is no comfort there at all for me, that would be cruel. Only sadness that we couldn’t be what we could have been. How I would have loved to have a family with the memories others have of vacations, dinners, holidays. I have so so few of them, I treasure every one, and as I get older they fade like the few old photos I have that end like a book with pages torn out after the 10^th chapter. And now, with no children of my own, no grandchildren, our story will just fade away entirely with no one to carry on after us. There was so much love there. How can two people love each other so much, and yet destroy that love at the same time? So many questions and no answers. You are gone now. I miss our talks. I miss your soft hands and warm hugs. I will be forever grateful for that last long phone call we had. Don’t worry, I still have not forgotten, “Don’t forget that your Daddy loves you.” 
Praying that one day we will see each other again and maybe God will give me greater understanding of all these whys.

Coldplayed

By now everyone on the social media planet is aware of the poor choices of two people who decided to cheat on their spouses and got caught snurgling at a Coldplay concert. My first reaction was pretty much like everyone else’s – BUSTED!!  LOL!!  Hahaha, etc.  Then the more I thought about it and saw how it was absolutely exploding everywhere from political ads to priests joking about it, to lawn decorations and advertising, I started to get really disgusted. Sure, it’s funny how they got caught and who they are (millionaire corporate types in high level roles), but funny really only ends there. The hard reality of this is that there are now two families destroyed by the STUPID decisions of two adults. Stupid not because they got caught and it was smeared all over every glowing screen, but that neither one of them had the sense to stop an affair before it started. That is stupid. Neither of them in their passion of cheating really truly down where it counts actually cared about what it would do to their families. Behind all the laughs, the memes, the drama, the press releases, are four children and two spouses having to deal with the fallout. Two families torn apart. This would all be horrible enough if they were caught in the lunchroom and outed that way, but heap onto this the public humiliation for these innocent family members to deal with. It makes you want to just throttle them both and ask them if it was really worth it, and how can two clearly otherwise intelligent people, be so utterly stupid.

Here's why.  Because society glamorizes cheating. In movies, on tv, in novels, in music, in every aspect of our entertainment, it is romanticized and glamorized to the point of rooting for the cheater becomes the expected response in many cases without even realizing it. Movies like The English Patient depict a passionate extramarital affair, shown as epic and tragic, overshadowing the morality of the betrayal.  In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett is married to different men, but all the while pining away for Ashley, while he returns his affections in subtle ways when married to Melanie. In The Titanic, Rose cheats on her fiancé with Jack, and we root for that relationship through the entire movie.  In music, songs like Me and Mrs Jones, If Loving You is Wrong I Don’t Want to Be Right, Saving All My Love For You, Lyin’ Eyes.... the list goes on and on. They ALL wrap the immorality of cheating in the silky satin of romance and somehow we fall in love with the song and sing it over and over, not realizing that we are only perpetuating normalization of cheating. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I freaking melt when Daryl Hall belts out Me and Mrs Jones, every single time. I know it’s wrong, and yet it’s a great song, and so well done.  Don’t get me started on TV shows – the list is long and endless. Millions tune in every day (does anyone actually “tune in” anymore? Hmmm...) – they watch every day something that contains themes and characters cheating on each other, and twisting us to root for the cheater, and have vague pity for the cheated, if that.

The world loves sin. It’s not a shock or a surprise. Infidelity is as old as dirt. While not married to God, Satan turned away from his Creator and chose evil. It is as old as recorded human storytelling. The Code of Hammurabi (~1750 BCE, Babylon), one of the first written legal codes where adultery laws were strict — women caught cheating could be executed (men had more leeway). Even then adultery was common enough to need regulation. And in the Bible, 2 Samuel 11: King David and Bathsheba, David has sex with Bathsheba (another man’s wife), then arranges her husband’s death. A clear and condemned act of adultery. 

So now what? We can’t change the world. We can’t change our fallen human nature, or those who use their free will without regard for those closest to them, or even for their own souls.

We need to live in this world, yet not be of it. We can support those in challenging situations with love and understanding, yet not accepting of sinful behavior. You know, don’t go on a double date with your buddy and his girlfriend, while his wife is home with their child. Avoid moral numbness by making excuses for the cheater – his wife is always with her girlfriends, she doesn’t pay him any attention anymore, she’s not fun like she used to be.  Engage art and culture critically, as an opportunity for moral reflection, and don’t allow it to suck you into the acceptance trap, but use it to build your understanding and resolve of what is wrong and know it when you see it.

All this to say – my heart is crushed for those left in the dust and debris of stupidity and bad choices. The children will suffer the most. Every child should have a stable home. And no one should ever have to see their mom on a jumbotron with her breasts in the hands of a man who isn’t their dad. It’s all so sad. This is our world. This is where we have to live. We don’t have to like all of it. Pray for the wounded. And for the stupid.

The soundtrack of my life

I have been thinking a lot lately about what music has meant to me though my life. Music is so instrumental (lovely pun, isn’t it?) in our lives as the canvas that our lives are painted on. Instantly a song or lyric or even a tv jingle can send us back to a day decades ago as if we never left. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the circumstances. In my case music is what helped me to survive a disrupted childhood. It was where I hid, where I felt safe, and where I poured out emotions and feelings I didn’t even understand and had no way of otherwise expressing. When you are 10 and your life goes sideways, you don’t really have the means of coping with the really crappy decisions adults have made around you, and so you dive head first into whatever you can find. In my case, it was music. So how do I chop this up? By time, buy artist, by location, by event? I think the most relatable approach for you might be to do this by artist or song.  Let’s go.

 America

Their albums “Holiday” and “History”, released in 1974/75 are the defining sound track of me being 10 years old. After my mother left us, I spent time between grandparent’s homes until my dad got us settled. I would spend hours and hours in the basement playing their music on my plastic record player (which I still own). Singing a song like “Lonely People” at 10 years old and crying for all the lonely people – including myself – was so deeply profound. A song like “Glad to See You” was so sweet “God, I’m glad to see you, I thought you left me far away” really hit a solid nerve with an abandoned little girl. The actual context of the songs didn’t matter to me. The fragments that fit into my own brokenness to fill the gaps left by a missing family and absent parents were more important.

Ventura Highway

The emotions brought by hearing the opening bars of this will be difficult to put into words. The hours and hours of sitting with my uncle while he taught himself how to play this – then the hours of hearing him and his best friend play this and sing on stages, at parties, in basements, in backyards, on street parties. This strikes me to the core with memories of abuse and love at the same time. He abused me. He ruined me. He destroyed my innocence. He took from me what can never be given back. And yet I loved him as a dear uncle, my big brother I never had, his talent leaving stars and tears in my eyes. How is it that we can be so broken by someone and yet still love them? Now he’s gone. We never spoke of it. But of course he knew that I knew. Something destroyed him, I don’t know what, perhaps it was our shared hidden history. The saddest part of it all in the end is that he left his faith and died, not in a state of grace. Did he ever confess his abuse? Did he at his last moments repent? I certainly hope so. And so I pray for his soul and for God’s mercy. And when I hear this song my heart breaks and soars at the same time. A shattered ship of history sailing into eternity.

 Steely Dan

For a few months Daddy and I stayed with his best friend in his bachelor condo. Steely Dan was a constant on the turntable at that time and will always remind me of being there. I had a little mattress on the floor in my dad’s room. It was in this room where he took me into his lap and asked me “Do you know what a divorce is?”.  I said “yes”.  “Mommy and I are getting a divorce.”  I curled into his chest and cried – for the first and only time over their divorce, he placed me in my little pallet on the floor, and I fell asleep. My life changed forever.

 Hall and Oates – 70s

She’s Gone couldn’t possibly have been a more relevant song for the two of us after my mom left. All the excellent early H&O music happened in the 70s. Daddy and I lived alone in a little rented house for awhile. He always called me his Paper Moon. A 10 year old little girl who was playing dress up one day with her grandmother’s Chantilly lace wedding veil, and the next scrubbing a bathtub and washing dishes. Telling my friends that I didn’t have a mother, because that was my reality. I listened to their music for hours and hours because that’s what he was listening to. We had our shared yet separate pain. His colored with regret. What a dumb man he was, to cheat on us the way he did. And yet I loved him beyond all words.

 Chicago / Eagles / Funk

Can you even imagine what it must have been like for a 10 year old little girl to have a really talented cover band rehearsing in her basement every night? I was in awe. I grew up with fantastic music around me all the time. Into my 20s and 30s I would go to hear the band play and dance non stop for hours. I would sing, dance, and SCREAM in my brain “REMEMBER THIS!!!!!!! YOU WILL NOT ALWAYS HAVE THIS IN YOUR LIFE!!!!!”   Because I knew that one day it would end – because good things always end at some point. I was right, of course. But I can still hear these songs in my head and feel myself dancing in front of the band on the dance floor like dancing in a dream of heaven. I had one particular dance partner who would tear it up with me. We really knew how to dance together.

 Hall and Oates – 90s

I was so freaking stupid in my 20s. So so so many bad decisions. H&O of the 90s – wow, it’s really too embarrassing to even write. I was pathetically needy and still very pretty – a very toxic combination. By the very grace of God I didn’t become pregnant and ruin my life. I would blast this on my cassette player in the car and scream down the road at speeds that should have killed me and anyone around me, trying to run from my past and my present, only to end up right back at home every time.

I suppose I could go on and on, but that would be boring even for me. These are the highlights. The major points in my life where music has made such an imprint on my life, like a tattoo on my soul, sometimes ugly and faded, sometimes beautifully colored. But there for always, like it or not.

We begin again.

 

They say that “journaling” is a healthy thing to do. I used to journal almost every night for many many years, going back to when I was in junior high, possibly before. I had so many journals! When I was in my 20s I got rid of them thinking I didn’t need to keep all that history lying around as I was entering a new phase in my life. Well that was dumb, and now later in life I do wish I could look back to when I was younger and remember things that I’ve forgotten. Oh well, such is life, as they say. We move on and start over. 

This time without a pen, because I can’t write as beautifully as I used to, and my hands are now more accustomed to a keyboard than a pen anyway. It’s sad because I really love the feel of the page and the pen, but when the hand shakes it just makes it frustrating. So anyway, I thought I would try this again and see what comes. Random thoughts, random reflections on the past, current events, and who knows what else. 

For what it’s worth – I thought I might start writing some of it down for whoever might care to listen. Before I forget all of it entirely.