Black Oak's Daughter

I’ve been going through boxes of papers and mementos that were stored in the junk room that I called my office. I’m trying to get through all the crap that I’ve kept, most of it for no apparent reason, in an effort to move my home office into the bigger bedroom with only the things that are important. Like a desk, and a my computers. Maybe a file cabinet. You know: office stuff. They might fit now that I’m filling a trash can every weekend with shredded papers and other assorted crap not worthy of donating.

I wrote about what I found on this archaeological dig through that room last week. The more I think about my premarital counseling, the more I give credit to that minister that tried his best to talk us out of it. We thought he was SO WRONG. Go figure. We were both so busy defending the relationship that we both dreamed we had, that we didn’t take time to look at the reality. Preacherman was right. I’d go tell him that if I remembered his name or what church he was with.

I also found another of minime’s report cards. Fourth grade this time. She still couldn’t finish things on time or pay attention, but she did get straight “+” grades (that’s the best grade in that grading system). She hasn’t changed much. She’s still smart as hell but only applies herself when it’s necessary or interesting. She’s 23 now. She’s applied herself to finding a job. It was necessary, and as things turn out, it looks like she’s found an interesting one too. I hope it’s a good experience for her.

Going through these boxes though, it was inevitable. I was bound to find some things that remind me personally of where I’ve been, what I’ve come out of, and how strong I’ve become because of it.

The second box that I tore into yesterday brought that home a little bit. I found a poem that I wrote when I was 14. I was a freshman in high school. It wasn’t the local public high school that all my friends went to. Mom decided that I’d be better off at a relatively small private Christian school that was a mile walk and then 3 city bus routes from home. I spent 90 minutes commuting each way. I was the only kid from my neighborhood there and to top that off, I wasn’t good at letting new people into my life either. It was too painful to lose them so I didn’t risk it. Losing people sucked, and I’d had enough of it. Mom thought that my going there would be good for me, but for that first year, it just made me feel more alone than I already felt.

I wrote these three pages of verse addressed to my dad. He’d been dead for 7 years when I wrote it. My mom had faced her own life and death illness enough times by then that I had pulled in. I pushed her away because I couldn’t handle losing her. I hated the man that had moved into our house to be with her because he wasn’t my dad. My brothers were too deep into drugs and booze for them to care about me either. I literally had no one but me. At least it felt that way.

I remember sitting on my bedroom floor, writing that poem, crying my eyes out. It listed all of the reasons that I missed him, in every painful detail. It questioned why he left me. Every thought that a confused, frightened little girl that’s missing her daddy could have is on those three pages. Looking back now, I can see that little girl that I was inside. My life stopped seven years earlier, on the day I found my dad lying on the floor, near death. All those years later I was still that little girl, waiting for her daddy to come home and hug her neck and kiss mom and bring back the joy and laughter that we had when he was around. I hadn’t accepted his being gone. I hadn’t grieved his loss. I was really, really truly emotionally stuck at that one moment in time that happened 7 years earlier. I was the original emo teen, but I had good reason. That whole first year of high school REALLY sucked.
It got better the next year. There was a counselor at the school that was brave enough to take a risk with me. I will be forever grateful for him. It was him that actually helped me accept the reality that daddy wasn’t coming home. It was him that caught me and held me as I literally broke down and collapsed to the ground when that moment of reality hit. It was him that encouraged me, after that pain started to subside, to make a friend or two. Eventually I did.

That was the year that Pat came into my life. We were two lost souls just trying to get through it, and somehow, the Creator in His wisdom, put us together. We were inseparable. BFF’s. We hung out as much as we could at school, and talked on the phone all evening after school. Her family’s apartment burned down and she lived with us for a couple of years. We got to the point of knowing what each other was thinking and finishing each other’s sentences. There were a couple of guys along the way that almost managed to tear us apart, but through it all, our friendship remains. She’s Godmother to my daughter and more than 25 year’s later, she’s the friend that drove 500 miles to be with me through cancer surgery.

See, it got better Well, not the cancer surgery part, that sucked, but you get my drift.

Going through everything that I’ve been through in the last few years has been hard, but I’ve never felt as alone as I did when I wrote that poem. I’m grateful for that. Twenty five + years later, through my shitty marriage and divorce, through back surgery, through cancer and that surgery too, there have been so many people around me that have completely overwhelmed me with love. I’ve never been alone like that little teenaged girl again. It’s been the complete opposite end of the scale that I was at that year in high school.

I feel like life has come full circle. I still have worries, I still have work to do, but through all that I never forget how truly blessed I am. That poem reminded me of that.

It reminded me how much my father is still with me too. I’ll write about that soon.

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