Sisters

They walked together for many years, carrying with them the burdens of their youth.  The emotional baggage that came along with living in a home rife with alcoholism and abuse, and they tucked it neatly into their packs saying that they would someday deal with the aftermath of it all.  They never did, not really, for the scars would run deep and they would affect every aspect of their lives, every reaction they would have and every decision that they would make.

It was the decisions that would cause them to drift apart, like leaves fallen in a creek bed, each drifting with the current of their choice, taking paths that would carry them in almost opposite directions.  One would make choices based on her belief that it was the right thing to do and the other because of a need to protect her heart.  Ultimately, the thing that they needed the most, what they needed to help them accept their past and deal with the burdens of their youth, would be the same thing that they turned away from.  That one thing, that little bit of knowledge and understanding that they needed would be nowhere around and they would have to walk alone, trying to figure out where to go and how to react to adversity absent the other.

The loneliness of it all and the feeling that they were not totally understood by anyone would always been there.  They had been each other’s support group through their youth and removing that from their own mix would be their downfall.  They didn’t have each other to rely on when things became tough, when they needed a friend and a sounding board, leaving their pain to burn inside, charring what was left of their hearts.  They still loved, but they didn’t feel loved.  They felt alone and abandoned, isolated from the world yet they were surrounded by people, none of which understood their pain, the charred remains of their hearts.

It would be years and take a death to reunite them.  The death of a woman they called “Mother”, and though their father had died many years prior, he could not keep his family together during life thus his inability to unite them in his death was apparent.  Their father was the biggest catalyst for the pain they kept tucked away in their packs, he was abusive and a drunk, but their mother, despite her inability to stop him kept it all a secret, or so she thought.  The town knew, the families of both of their parents knew, but still their mother kept it all a secret, like a coveted treasure.  The secrets were what kept them together as children and drove them apart as adults.  One of them wanting to pretend that it hadn’t happened at all, that there was no turmoil, she was comfortable there and it was safe.  The other one accepted it and tried to make it better for everyone, though it was impossible to do; but she never hid from it, never created a fantasy world.  She lived in the here and now, always striving to make it better, to correct the past and sometimes to her own detriment.

When their mother died they hadn’t spoken in the twenty years prior.  Both of them having gone through years of remaining in bad relationships, relationships that were absent of the other’s support.  One of them having stayed for her children, the other having stayed not for her children, but for her siblings; yet both of them having stayed because they didn’t want to be failures.  Because their mother had stayed, despite their father’s shortcomings and they had been taught to do so, to stay in relationships that were bad.  It wasn’t that one cared more than the other, because that wasn’t the case and it wasn’t that one needed more than the other, but the death of their mother had made the younger of the two realize just what she had given up and that there were words that needed to be said that hadn’t been, she could not allow that to continue to have another member of her family leave this world without her having said those words.

So it was that the younger one embarked on a journey, one that would fill her head with thoughts of rejections and her heart with fear.  She had always known where her siblings were, even though she kept it a secret from her husband for years, she had to, but she knew and she knew that this was the time.  That the demise of her marriage, the crumbling of her family, despite her attempts to keep it intact, taught her something important and she needed to make an attempt to correct the mistakes that she herself had made.  That lesson was simple in her mind; that families are not a fantasy, they are real and they all suffer some sort of dysfunction, no matter how hard you try to conceal it.  They are just as flawed as a blemish on a fine piece of furniture and covering the flaw with a vase of flowers does nothing to correct the flaw.

The journey would be hard and the ability to correct the past, or at least put it into perspective would not just be about her, but about the willingness of her siblings to accept her back.  She could do nothing more than try and so she mustered all of the courage inside of her.  Maybe, just maybe her mother, from her final resting place was guiding her; she had to believe this for it gave her courage and strength.  She needed those things for she had always been a frightened little girl.  The child that ran from her own shadow needed that courage more now than she ever had for there was no one to protect her from the past, her childhood or her failed marriage.

She stood there as the door opened, not sure what would happen and expecting anger.  The two of them stood there looking at each other in a quizzical manner; not sure what to say or do, lending the moment to an awkward silence wherein you expect to hear the sound of a missile having been dropped.  Eventually, the silence would be broken and they would begin to talk.  It was just a moment in time that seemed like an eternity, but it was a moment that would reunite them for all the right reasons.  They would agree that the past, the years that they had spent apart would be forgotten for they both knew they had a bond that ran deep within them.  They both knew that they needed each other; that their love had not died but rather left in their packs until they could open them again.  The leaves of their lives that had fallen on that creek bed so many years prior had eventually found their way back together to rest comfortably against the shore line, carried by the current of life.

 

 

"The blood that runs through you is shared by those that have shared your life, your experiences.  They know your pain and your joys for they have also known them." (me 2013)

The Ritual

THE RITUAL

He held the glass containing the amber color liquid in the air examining its contents, it was ritualistic in nature and Sandy had seen him do it so many times before that there was an almost indignant familiarity to it.  It reminded her of her years in Catholic School, the Priest at Mass holding up the chalice as homage to Jesus Christ.  But the symbolism at church was so much different, it was reverent and wholesome and what Josh, her husband of over twenty years, was doing was simply destructive.

Josh was also anything but reverent and wholesome, and his consumption of amber color liquids of one sort or another had been going on for as long as she had known him.  At first she thought it to be a folly of youth, something that he would grow out of, that as they got older and had a family that he would slow down or stop the drinking.  It never happened, even though she had begged and pleaded with him on so many occasions that she had lost count early on in their relationship.  It was never one drink, or even two and it was always an everyday thing.  She often thought it normal; after all, her own father had been a drinker as was his family.  She grew up around people that drank too much, men and women alike and it was for that very reason she herself had drank very little in her lifetime. 

Sandy never truly understood the reasons that people drank so much, a social drink was fine in her mind but after that there was no real reason to continue and she had children, someone had to be responsible, able to care for them at night if they were ill.  Her children were her responsibility and she knew that too, for it became an unwritten rule around her house.  It was never openly addressed, it just was and she accepted it rather than to fight it.  Now, years later, she understood more than she had ever imagined.  Sandy knew by accepting things without fighting them that she had condoned them, she had allowed a certain amount of selfishness in her partner that she would never have allowed from herself.

What Sandy hadn’t known then was that she hurt the people she loved the most in allowing the drinking to continue at the level that it did, for she allowed not only selfishness, but also a form of isolationism in Josh.  He could hide from the world through the use of alcohol, and whatever else he was into at the time.  He didn’t have to face the world, nor his responsibility as a parent.  She knew now that her children were the ones that had suffered the most, just as she had as a child, with little interaction or involvement from their father her children would always long for that, feel like something was missing or that they were not good enough for him to spend time with them doing the things they enjoyed. 

Sandy sees that now and it hurts her, the fact that her children aren’t close to Josh makes her sad, but not nearly as sad as how it all ended, for it didn’t need to be like that.  There were a lot of years vested in the relationship, a lot of years of trying to make Josh happy, but in the end she knew that she would never be able to do that.  Josh’s happiness was his to own and not her responsibility to create.  But, as they say; “It is always darkest before the dawn.”, and that was clearly the case in Sandy’s life and through Josh’s actions.

The darkness arrived one night early in the spring time, when things should have been getting brighter and lusher, but the darkness was overwhelming and it nearly caused Josh to lose his life.  Things had been strained for some time, months and months of push and pull, broken promises and outright lies.  He said he would stop the drinking, taking the pills that he had been consuming and Josh had assured Sandy he could do it on his own.  That didn’t happen and Josh thought that Sandy didn’t see him drinking in the middle of the day or at night but she had and it hurt her to know that the alcohol that he was so ritualistic about was more important to him than she was.  It was the first spring that she wouldn’t feel refreshed, that she wouldn’t look forward to daylight savings time ending and the blossoming of the flowers in her garden.

That spring things were as dark as they had ever been for it was then that Josh overdosed on prescription pain medications and alcohol, that he was hospitalized and nearly died.  Sandy remembered how angry she was at him for what he had done, for his own self-destructive acts and the destruction of her family.  So many pills in such a short time and clinging to life as he laid in the hospital bed, unaware of his surroundings, the names of his children or where he was.  He laid there restrained to the bed in a diaper; unable to control his own bodily functions and she thought maybe if only he could see himself now, maybe then he would understand.  But Sandy knew, she knew in her heart that even that wouldn’t change him, what he had done, for he would do like he had always done and find a way to make excuses, to blame his actions or choices on someone else or some external force.  That was just Josh and that was what he had always done, every time he lost a job or a friend it was because of some other reason, he was never responsible for his own actions.  And those loses would just be another reason to be angry, to drown the anger at the bottom of a bottle.  This spring was so different from all the ones that Sandy had looked forward to in the past for there was heaviness in the air that only comes with a deep winter freeze.

The days turned to weeks and every day, despite her anger and embarrassment, Sandy trekked the twenty-five miles each way to the hospital.  She sat there in that hospital room with Josh quietly, for she couldn’t talk to him, she didn’t know what to say and even if she did, she knew he couldn’t understand or absorb any of it.  He was someplace far away from reality, in a world that was only available to those in Josh’s state of mental incapacity, where reality was twisted and things aren’t real.  Every once in a while he would speak, for the most part the words were unintelligible, but when Sandy could understand the words that Josh spoke it was as if she was listening to a character from “Alice In Wonderland”, and Josh was clearly the “Mad Hatter”.  For he insisted that he had been in a log cabin in the woods hanging out with a heavy metal band smoking crack.  Obviously he hadn’t gone anywhere, he was in restraints and besides, Sandy doubted that a heavy metal band would hang out with a guy that was in diapers.  It was then that Sandy knew that her life, or at least the one that she had created in her mind, the one that was safe and perfect, was nothing more than one huge lie and it was one that she could no longer live in.

Sandy left the hospital that day and as she walked out into the open air outside the building it hit her, the heat and the sunshine, they were there and it was her spring.  The cold dampness that she had felt that morning as she entered the building to sit by Josh was gone; the sweater that she had worn to keep her warm was suddenly as oppressive as the relationship that she had stayed in for her family.  Sandy knew in that instant that there would be a change, things would be different in her life; and she knew that it didn’t matter anymore if Josh wanted to change his own life.  Sandy knew that she had to change her life that she had to make the choice to live without the burden of alcoholism in it.  If Josh could not change himself neither could she, but she could be free of carrying his burdens of hiding his secrets from the world and allowing him to make excuses.  There would be an ultimatum, a time limit and if Josh did come out of this he would have to rise to the challenge.  If he didn’t, that was alright too, for Sandy knew and understood now that which for so many years she had not.

“Life is not to be lived in the shadows, for the shadows you cast are forever evolving, changing positions. The things which we try to conceal within the shadows will soon be uncovered as the sunshine resurfaces in your life.” (me 2013)

 

She was just a child, a little girl moving between the age of toddler and little girl.  Her long curly hair falling down her back like the wings of an angel, she had always moved through life with a curiosity and yet a sense of shyness, looking towards her father with both a request for approval and protection.  He had always been there, loving and caring for her, nurturing her curiosity and encouraging her to move from the shadows of the shyness by offering her a safety net, a place in his arms that she could run to and find solace.

It was a day, just another day when things changed for her, things that would forever shift the balance of her life and land her in the middle of something that no child should ever have to experience.  An argument between her parents ended with her sitting in the back of a car, looking out at her daddy as she pulled away, tears streaming down her face.  The day that changed her future, his future and pulled them apart, added distance to each of their lives.  He couldn’t run after her, protect her that day for the damage had already been done and he knew that the argument was only the beginning of what they were both about to endure.

One battle after another, one fight into the next he would struggle to see the little one, be forced to watch her grow from a distance.  Some days he would see her try to smile, and some days there would be tears hidden behind a face bent on being emotionless and yet he tried to find a way to show the little one the same safety she had felt years earlier.  He had never failed her, given up on her or stopped hoping for a time when she would again trust him not to leave her.  He knew he couldn’t explain his absence to her, that she was too young to understand it all, that if he did it would only serve to hurt her more and that was the last thing that he wanted for the one thing that was the most precious to him, to have his little girl with the angel wing hair to hurt more, to feel pain.  It was after all, his job as her daddy to protect her from all of this, from being hurt or feeling pain.

It was that need to protect his little girl that gave him the courage to do for her the most painful thing that he had ever done, to end the battle for his child and let her live in peace.  In doing so he knew that he would never have peace himself, that he would forever miss her, her smile and her laugh, he knew that his heart would have a void that could never be filled and yet he had hope.  It was a hope that someday the world would be set upright again and that she would find her way back to him, her heart filled with the love he had given her through the years before she was taken.  That she would understand and forgive him and that he would be able to sit with her, look into her eyes and see himself through her memories.

He still waits for that day to come, silently sometimes and deep in thought.  He gazes at her picture daily, talks to her, and even though he knows she cannot hear the words he hopes that she feels them in her heart, someplace deep within her.  He looks around him, everywhere, hoping that every dark haired girl is her, that a hand will reach out and touch his shoulder saying the words he longs to hear……..”Dad, its me.”

 

“The love of a parent for a child is circular in nature, never ending.  It cannot be broken or altered by distance or adversity and lives within the bond of the circle.” (me 2013)