a break from cleaning - my dad died when i was 9...

My father was not what most people would call a good man.

He was a criminal, a felon, a convict...prone to violence with a moody disposition. He was a bad man to be on the wrong side of...he ran organized crime and not-so-organized crime. He was a fighter...he wore cowboy boots and carried knives and guns.

When I was a baby and a little girl, I didn't know these things. I only knew that he was my daddy and that I loved him, craved him, wanted him like I wanted no one else.

It was an often told story to me by my grandma that when my mom, at 16 & married to my dad, was pregnant with me, my dad spoke constantly of his coming son...his Jr. He absolutely-without-a-doubt knew that I would be a boy, his legacy. When my mom went into labor with me, and the family gathered, they waited anxiously for the phone call from the doctor (I love envisioning how different those times were, especially since my son's adoptive parents were in labor & delivery with me, and the father video recorded the whole messy affair). When the call finally came, my dad answered eagerly, and she tells me, he jumped into the air and let out a 'Whoooooo, a girl - JUST WHAT I WANTED A BABY GIRL!!!!', while clicking his cowboy boots together.

And I became, in those moments, exactly what he had wanted. He never treated me like I had disappointed him from my arrival into this world.

From as early as I can remember, even though they were both terrible parents who caused me trauma due to their abuse of each other and their inability to see how their actions were not just affecting them any longer, my father was the one with whom I bonded. When he was with me, he was my heart and soul. He truly understood me.

Also from as early as I can remember, he started telling me that he was going to die when he was 30. I remember calculating what this meant for me...how old I would be when he would be no more. I remember never doubting him...he was so convincing, I think because he was so convinced.

I witnessed terrible things at my father's hands. I suffered terrible things due to the neglect of both my father and my mother. And it was my father who, after a night so horrible that I have recounted it only two times in its entirety in my life, drove me through the rest of the night, across states, to my grandma's house with one paper grocery bag of belongings. He urged me out of his El Camino and onto her porch and he rang the bell. When she answered the door, he said to her..."If you don't take her, I'm giving her to the state. It's not right, what's happening to her there. Do you want her?"

Of course my grandma took me. And ultimately my sisters as well. And for so long, I waited for him to come back. There would be times when he would, times when I would get to spend time with him. And always, when I did, I felt as if I were spending time with the other part of me. Of course, I didn't feel that then...I didn't know how to articulate that feeling of 'connectedness' that I felt with him, how much I felt that he was the only person who truly 'got me', but all that I knew was that I ached for him in a way that left me broken.

I spent so much time trying to figure out what I had done to cause him to want to give me away. I had tried my best to be a good girl. I had learned to read early, learned the songs he wanted me to sing for his friends, learned to tie my shoes, learned to give my sisters their bottles and later their food...learned how to set my alarm and get myself up and off to school when no one came home to care for me - never telling anyone the horrors that were happening at home. I didn't understand why he could so easily toss me aside when I had tried as hard as I could.

My mom had always been the abuser - the beater, the berater, the hater, the one that I couldn't please. And so I had stopped hoping for her affection, her praise, her love. I knew that no matter how well I did anything, there would be something that I didn't do well enough and so I would get beaten for it. I hoped that it wouldn't be bad enough that I had to miss school - school was my respite, my happy place, and so when she beat me so bad that I couldn't go because they couldn't see the results, I was broken up about it.

But, he had been the rescuer. In a home life as twisted as ours, having someone who cared enough to beat the person who had left you beaten and bloodied made them your hero. And that had been him. Even though their relationship was tumultuous at best, abusive, and I witnessed horrors by him, I was never frightened *of* him...he was always the one who scooped me up and showed me love. He was the only place where I felt any gentleness, any love. And so even though I knew what he was capable of, I didn't flinch from his hands. He was my tamed lion. My protector.

As I grew older, our relationship grew more close. He would take me fishing, riding horses, to his job sites. He took me on long hauls in his semi-rig. The stops along the way...the huge lollipops...the pulling of the horn for women who raised their arms and pulled down on the interstate...the getting to stay up all night and listen to country music and talk on the CB radio...those were the moments when he was my dad and I was 'yes, the girl that he had always wanted'.

I honestly always felt that my dad was the only person who understood me even though I guess I understand that he probably understood very little. But whether I wanted a horse, or a motorcycle, or a frilly dress and matching hat for Easter, he never batted an eye - he never questioned it. He never said - 'but you're a girl, you can't do that.', or 'but you're a tomboy, you really want That dress?'.

My dad was always happy to let me be who I was, and to teach me whatever he could. He was happy when I wanted to know what he knew. He taught me how to use tools and was happy when I would hammer and saw on my own pieces of wood, listening to music and singing to myself, while he worked in the garage. He taught me how to ride a motorcycle when I was 7 years old - bought me my own tiny little 50 cc dirt bike, taught me the brake and the gears in a huge field and then let me go crazy while he would build fences and work on trains. Also when I was seven, he started teaching me cards and pool and taking me to the pool hall with him for late-night poker games. The old man, Hoppie, who ran the games said something to him about it only one time - everyone was afraid of my dad and the 9 of his brothers who 'ran things' with him (he had 12 siblings!) and so it was a big deal for him to be ballsy enough to say something at all. My dad let him know that it was in his best interest to mind his own business and it was never mentioned again. I was - and loved being, as crazy as it sounds, but I didn't know any better - the 'bartender' for the games, and would pour the guys their drinks...half whiskey, half soda.

I would sit on his lap and he would point to me the cards that were important and give me pats on my leg when he was winning hands. Always, those nights, my grandma thought that I was spending with him at my other grandma's house baking pastries and playing with my cousins. If only she had known the kinds of activities that I was really being exposed to. It was also in my seventh year that my dad started really immersing himself in drugs. Cocaine had made a huge splash in our small town, and he being what he was, he was all up in it. I remember being 15 and learning what cocaine was and telling my grandma that my dad had done it in front of me copiously for the last 2 1/2 years of his life...the reconciling as I figured those things out.

But, I loved it...I loved nothing more than being with him the times that he would come for me. I loved going fishing with him before sunrise and sitting in the boat in total silence watching the sun come up over the water. I loved how proud he was that I could bait my own hook and dive off of the boat with absolutely no fear - I always remember wondering why he thought that I would be afraid of anything when I had already known the most physical pain that I could imagine at my mother's hands. I wonder now if he ever even thought about it, or considered that one had to do with the other. I loved that he was so proud of how great I was in school - in kindergarten I was getting praise but as I progressed, everyone knew that I was different, that I was smarter than the rest, and that I was destined for different things. He was proud of me for a variety of reasons, but my intelligence was number one. He would come to the awards ceremonies at my school every year - out of place from all the other dads in their suits in his Wrangler's and cowboy boots, and hoot & hollar, as my Grandma would say, at every trophy and award that I would get. He told everyone who would listen - and he wasn't the kind of person that people didn't listen to - about his daugther the genius.

For my 8th Christmas, not long before I was going to turn 9, he asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Like always, I named something really small and told him that he should get my little sisters something really great. My grandma also likes to tell those stories - how I would give my money and my gifts to my sisters and the other kids in school who didn't have much or who wanted/needed/threw fits for more attention...how I always just wanted things to be copasthetic and I thought that I could sacrifice my way to peace. But, that year, he wasn't having it. He sat me down and explained to me that it was our last Christmas together - that in case I didn't remember, he wasn't making it past 30, and he was going to be 30 in July, so he wouldn't be there to see Christmas for a nine year old me. So, he wanted me to tell him what I really wanted...what would be the one thing that would make me the most happy.

There was a Radio Shack about two blocks from the apartment where my grandma was raising us...and I was *known* there! My love for things tech/gadget started early, and I had long been buying broken things at the thrift store where I worked for a quarter and taking them apart to put them back together. My grandma kept my hair short and permed to my ears, and the men who worked at Radio Shack called me 'little orphan angie'. I think, now, they felt sorry for me...they let me play with everything that came in, they would even open new stuff to let me tinker with it. Then, I thought they liked how smart I was with the stuff. Now, I realize that everyone in that too-small town knew my story and they probably felt a mixture of pity for me and fear of who my dad was. I would buy things with the extra money that I put away from my babysitting after I paid my tithes to the church (mandatory per my grandma) and gave my grandma the contribution for the house, and they would always give me a discount and let me know when new things that I would be excited for were going to be coming (remember when Radio Shack was the ultimate in technology?). Anyway, I knew that the new Tandy piece-it-yourself computers were going to be launching that holiday season - *sidenote, on Christmas & being Jewish...my family still celebrates the Roman holidays instead of the Jewish ones, the fear that my great-great grandfather had instilled about being Jewish keeping them held into Christianity in the Midwest*, and so I told him that that, a computer, was what I would want if I didn't have to think about how much something would cost.

And so, for Christmas that year, in lieu of the $75 in an envelope on the tree that I usually got, I indeed got my computer, and all of the coding books to go along with it. My dad watched on in awe as I hooked everything up, put it together and powered it on...and opened the book and started typing away. He was frustrated for me to learn that I would have to type in hours of code to generate my own games and programs, but I was enraptured with the glorious world of MS-DOS. Along with books, I had a new escape on the nights that I could not sleep...which at eight were already too many to count and my grandma had come to accept that my nightmares were too terrifying to force and so she let me have my night~world.

When I got the games up and running, and my dad was around, he would play with me for a while. He never understood why I didn't like the Atari better, but there was something I loved more about a game that I had created with all those lines of Commands and Functions. We were doing other things less...the fishing and hammering and sawing and card games had all pretty much ground to a halt. He had discovered Vegas and he was around even less, and flashier when he was. And then came the night that an argument when he and my mom both happened to be stopped by - the dual visit rare but the argument when both of them there not so rare - resulted in him pulling a gun and aiming it directly at her. When my grandma stepped between him and my mom, her daughter...and even though she recognized my mom's many faults, and often took my dad's side when it came to myself and my sisters, in that moment she was a mother...he didn't falter with it at all.

My dad loved my grandma, my mom's mom, more than he had loved anyone else ever. They were close, and there were many times that he would show up at our house in the early twilight hours and she would make him coffee and biscuits from scratch and he would pour out his heart about my sisters and I, and his frustration with my mother, and his life in general. His love for her, and the lengths that he would go to to get her the things that she needed for us, was something that intrinsically I knew about him from as early as I *knew* anything about relationships and the human condition. Because life had forced me to grow up quickly, because I had been an adult for almost as long as he had known me, he had never treated me like a child...he had never sent me from the room or edited his conversation when I was present, and so I knew more than I should. And this moment was heartbreaking for me...

It wasn't the first time that I had seen my dad wield a weapon. The summer before, he had come to take me out of school early, and had asked me if I knew where the man that my mom was seeing lived. When I told him yes, he asked me to tell him how to get there. When he pulled up in front of the man's house, he (the other guy) knew he was and most likely what he was there for, and to his credit he faced it head on, emerging onto the porch with a baseball bat in his hands. Unfortunately for him, the time of chains and batons - which my father and his brothers & sisters had at one time been known for - was long gone, and with the cocaine, a whole new kind of weapon had made its debut in my dad's life. My dad told me to stay in the car, which shielded me from nothing as he only walked five feet away, they exchanged words and my dad then drew his gun and shot the man and got back in the car and drove me away. He stopped at my favorite diner and tried to get me to get an ice-cream, and then he took me to the police station where his brother was the mayor...he gave me to my uncle and told him to get me to my grandma and then told him what he'd done. I'm not sure how they made that go away, what they had to do or say to that man and his family, but my dad came to see me in a week...bringing me a huge stuffed animal and taking me to Wal-Mart to 'pick out anything I wanted'. Because my grandma had been complaining about the phone in our house, I got a new phone, a cordless one, and refused anything else. It was the first time that I didn't know what to say to him, how to be.

This second time seeing my dad with a gun in his hand was a whole new kind of terrifying - both because I knew that he had the courage or the don't-give-a-fuck to use it, and because I knew that as much as he loved my grandma he hated my mom and the drugs that he was on were consuming him, fueling him, by then. He wasn't the same dad that he had always been. In a short period of time, things had changed more than I knew how to acclimate to. Now, I see that he was rushing towards what he saw as his coming end...he was going to have it even if he had to create it. But in the wake of his self-destruction was the ruins of my idolization of him.

I knew what could happen when and if he pulled the trigger. And seeing it aimed at my grandma was freaking me the fuck out. And somehow, I still believed that in there was my daddy, the man who had always wanted me, his little baby girl, and a part of me wanted him to recognize me in all of the mess that was swirling around me...and so, I screamed out to him and ran towards his outstretched arm. I wanted him to put it down, maybe walk away, but I definitely wanted this tension and conflict and fear to be over, this looming feeling of terror and chaos. But, he never dropped his arm, and even more shockingly, he grabbed me and pulled me close to him and then put the gun at my head. And he used me to terrorize my mother, he asked her why she would cry while he did that when she was the one who had beaten me and left me bloody all those times, who had whored around and left me uncared for in the apartment that he paid for, alone to feed his two younger daughters.

I remember only getting incredibly calm in those moments. Feeling and hearing everything, and being so afraid, but locking in to my grandmother's face and getting so insanely calm, not allowing myself to cry at all...knowing how much he hated tears. And I remember that my grandma stopped crying and became calm as well, as she stared into my face. And she started talking to my dad like nothing at all was wrong, like it was any other time that he was there, and she was maybe at any second going to put some coffee on and start to make some biscuits. And when my mom started to speak, my grandma made her shut up and then told her to get out of her house, told her that she was making everything worse. And it seemed that this was the stance that my dad wanted her to take, once this happened the tension started to ease, and he let my mom leave. And he got hysterical, explaining to my grandma why he did what he did, but not letting go of me, and telling her how he had fucked up my life, how he had probably fucked it up the minute that I was created, that there was too much that I had seen and known and felt and experienced already, and probably the best thing that he could ever do was end it now, stop the hurt right there, and keep me from ever having to hurt again.

Somehow, my grandma talked him down that night. She told him that there was no telling what kind of spiral this would send my mom into and so she was taking us away for a while, and she hurriedly packed us some things and put us in the car and we drove away into the night, leaving my dad crying on the sofa with his gun sitting on the coffee table in front of him.
After that night, things weren't ever the same. I still loved my dad very much - that's the thing about our parents, we never stop loving them, or wanting them to love us, or approve of us, or be proud of us. But, I was finally scared of him, of what he had become. My grandma kept trying to impress on me to remember all the time before and not this, because this wasn't him, this was something and someone else completely, and so I have lived my life trying to do just that.

That summer, on July 25th, my dad had his 30th birthday. On August 8th, my grandma woke me from an incredibly intense dream of his death with tears in her eyes and I said to her, 'He's dead, isn't he?'. He had had a terrible accident on what is ironically called 'Dead Man's Curve' and been ejected from the sunroof of his car. He was going so fast, and was so not sober, that the damage done to his skull and brain was massive and he suffered brain death along with various other extreme injuries. His passenger was ejected from the car and hit a tree and suffered a broken neck. Fortunately, the passenger lived and no other cars were involved.
They kept him on machines for 6 days but finally let him go.

Just like he had always told me he would, my dad left this world when he was 30 & I was 9.

My mom has continued to play the role of the abuser, I just haven't had a rescuer and so I have forced myself to be my own. I worked hard in school and even though we were poor, and everyone knew the story of my family the criminals, and my mom the loose-piece who danced topless on tables in the bars when she was drunk, which was often, and who slept with my friend's married father's, and who was married and divorced more times than I could count on one hand by the time I was in high school, I believed that the world was mine and that I could go anywhere I wanted to and be anything I wanted to and do anything I wanted to.

I had the grades to graduate after my Sophomore year but I stayed and took Advanced classes and some classes at the Jr. college in my town. I was in National Honor Society and Drama and the talk of the school, and at standardized test time, I got the highest score ever scored by anyone at my high school in over a decade. I was accepted into a Summer Program for the health sciences at a major university for which there was over 500 applicants and only 79 people accepted, and I got the scholarships needed to spend the summer there. While there, I did work on a Science test of the local bodies of water that had political reach and I came to be familiar with my local State representative. The next year, my Senior year, I was chosen to be a Page at the House of Representatives and was also given financial aid for the time there. While there, I came to know a lot of the Representatives personally because I had the kind of fun and funny personality that people were drawn to, and there was also a Bill passed about me on the Floor - put to vote and everything...one of the funniest stories of my life still to this day.

There was a local journalist who had taken my photo when I was five years old and a cheerleader with a local super-jock football player who was breaking all kinds of records and seemed poised for an NFL career. When I started accomplishing things, he remembered me - I think because of who my family was which was probably why he had taken my photo with the football player and run it in the paper anyway - and he started following my scholastic achievements. He would come to my school and take my picture and write stories in the local paper for each of my new things done...the Health Sciences Program, the scholarships, the House of Representative. He called our Representative to ask him if he had a comment about my tenure as a page for the story that he was doing and the Rep told him this story - 'She became a joy to everyone that had personal contact with her through the days on the Floor. She made us all laugh and smile. She is smart and witty and funny, but more than that, she is fearless. Most of the other kids were kind of taken aback with everything, but she seemed as if she had been here her whole life, she never broke stride...let me tell you what kind of girl she is. We pay the Pages with checks from the H.O.R, and apparently, she hadn't been cashing hers. Well, she happened to go to a local mall and find a dress that she wanted to buy for prom, but she needed to cash some of her checks. So, she came back here to the cashier's office in the House to do so, but the cashier refused to cash them for her because she wasn't an actual employee of the House. So, Angie comes up to my office and tells my secretary that she's my Page and she needs to see me, so I have my secretary send her in. And she comes in and tells me this. And I ask her what she wants me to do. And she says, straight faced, "your my Representative, Represent me. Go down there and vouch for me, tell her to cash these checks. I need to have a dress that no one else is going to have and this is the one." And so I did...I got up and went down to the cashier with her and had her cash the checks. She was sincerely grateful but also triumphant as the cashier handed over the money, which you could tell she didn't want to do...I'm sure it was hard being shown up by an intern from High School. But, that's the kind of person Angie is...not afraid to at least ask for what she thinks she deserves in this life, and that in and of itself will get her far. I told her before she left that as charming as she is, she should consider politics, I'm sure she'd be a natural.'

My grandma was more proud of that story than any other, she must have bought at least ten copies of that paper and clipped it out. But the final moment of pride for her came when I graduated - with honors, and in honor of her, choosing to say the prayer to bless our class at the start of our new lives in lieu of speaking. My graduation came with a commendation from the Governor of our State for my accomplishments, my GPA and my grades in Science. It came to be that because of extra-credit questions and assignments in Physics, Advanced Physics and Advanced Chemistry Classes, I graduated with above 100% in Chemistry and Physics. These days, it's not uncommon to have a higher-than-100% average due to the change in grading scales, but back then it was still on a 90-100 for A, so above 100 was unheard of, and the journalist did a story on that as well. He came the day that they handed out all of the Letters and awards in our school and took pictures of me surrounded by my Letters, awards and my Commendation from the Governor with the State Seal. It was a great accomplishment, coming from a family that didn't graduate from high school much, and I felt good...but I had done what I had always known I would. I had always known that my smarts and education would be my way out.

It was not for me. It felt good because of how good my grandma felt about it, because of how proud she was to see me walk with the special color of ropes for NHS and other honors. I don't remember ever seeing her more happy than she was that day (even though I broke her spirit by insisting that I wear shorts and a tee-shirt under my robe!). It was nice to make her feel that her sacrifice had merited something...that giving up her middle age to raise another set of kids had been more beneficial than the first time had been.

It's been a long time, and a lot of struggle and mistakes and obstacles and hardship and lessons learned, since that time. I've lived a whole other life and become a whole new person - shaped by a whole new set of circumstances and situations - then I was when I left that town to further my education. I thought that I had learned so much, and that I knew so much, and that I was about something. I thought that I couldn't be told.

Some things were true - I was fearless. It has been both an asset and a detriment, but it is something that I'm grateful for because it got me here. If it hadn't been for my fearlessness, and my tenacity, I wouldn't have survived my childhood, much less the struggles that adulthoold and disease have brought. Everyone thought that I would go into the world and Be Something, Change Things...but I have been only my own worst enemy where that idea was concerned. I am learning that I have changed things, and I continue to do so, only I do it on a smaller scale then I imagined back then. My life, my story, it matters to people, it helps some people, but my reach is so short.

I wonder, a lot lately, who and how I would be if I had had my father to continue to be my rescuer. I think that maybe I think about this for several reasons - the dreams are back, it's been almost a year since I last spoke to my mother and she's reaching out again, but mostly, I think that I think about him because my son is getting to be the age that I was when he died. And it seems so young except that I remember how much I understood, how much I absorbed and put on myself, how much I questioned without ever saying a word. My son shares my dad's birthday, and in the circle of life he looks exactly like me - but I look exactly like my dad - so looking at him is like seeing a vision of my father reflected in his face. But, innocent, childness, perfect still.

I wonder how much damage I have done simply by trying to give him the best possible starting place that I could. The best parents, the best socio-economic status, the best everything that I never had. He lives in a mansion, in a gated community, and goes to a private school that costs more per year than my grandma raised my sisters and I on when I was young. He has every advantage, every benefit, every toy, a huge family who loves him immensely. And I wonder if he thinks - 'Why didn't she want me? Why didn't she keep me? Why wasn't I good enough to keep if I'm good enough to come and see?'. In essence, I wonder if he thinks to himself all of the things that I thought to myself at his age. And, I wonder if there's any way to save him the years in between then and now that I went searching for distraction, numbness, things to fill the void. I wonder if there's a way to really make someone "know" love. Because I know that it is still something that I feel so unfamiliar with, when I am honest.

I know that some things I know and some things I don't. That I have tried to come back to the middle...to find a balance between the longing and the floating adrift. I have tried to set myself right in a path that makes sense to me, to find my own spiritual peace, my own happiness even though I don't feel that I will ever truly know love the way that I envision it, my own place of 'good person, good friend'. But, I know that there is a lot that I regret and there is still a lot I hope for. I know that when I sit and give it thought, I still believe that the world is mine...that I can go anywhere and do anything, I'm just not so sure about how happy I'll be once I get there or once I'm doing it. I want to be happy, I just don't see too many people who ever get there...and it take so much energy to be strong, to be fearless, to keep healing yourself, to keep killing the you that has evolved and starting again, that happiness always seems to be just on the back burner and just a little out of grasp. And I know that sometimes I think that my dad was right, and maybe right then at 9 I had seen and felt and been exposed to too much bad already in the world...maybe that was the moment of truth for me. Maybe this is as good as it gets.

But, more than anything, I know that I keep trying. I know that as I live my 30th year, I want it to matter, I want my survival, my fight through these medical obstacles, my will to live, my tenacity, to be what I am known for. I do not want my son to think that I chose leaving him without someone who would be willing to come and rescue him. Or someone who could answer his questions or tell him the story of when he was a baby in the belly. I don't ever want him to think that I didn't understand how much he thought about me, and how much I was or wasn't willing to sacrifice my quest to forget so that he could have good things to remember. These things matter so much more than I could possibly have ever imagined.