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A Sample of My Writing
September 7th, 2009 (05:58 pm)
current mood: contemplative
current mood: contemplative
I'm not sure I have much to say about this piece. I wrote this somewhere back around April or May and have attempted revising it, and finally just ripped it apart and started over.
I figured I'd try posting it here. If anyone reads it, I hope you like it.
Fathers are supposed to convey a sense of warmth and security for their children. They are supposed to teach them things and play games with them.
My father taught me things and oh yes, he played games with me, but not the things most fathers would want to teach their children nor play the kinds of games most fathers would want to play with their children. I was taught that fathers cannot be trusted or depended upon. I learned that fathers are out for their own agenda to make themselves look good, and that their daughter’s thoughts and feelings do not matter. I learned slowly, that I was nothing to him.
If he came to see me for dinner, he’d pick me up, but not without an argument most times with my mother. I’d wind up sitting on the couch, watching T.V. until they stopped and my mother called me to go to dinner with “my dad.” We’d usually head to McDonald’s. Not because it was fun for us, but because it was cheap for him. We’d stand in line, and he’d usually complain.
“So much for “fast” food,” he’d often say, eliciting chuckles from others in line.
We’d sit down at a table, and the game of twenty questions would begin.
“How was your week?”
“Fine,” I’d reply around a mouthful of fries, or a chicken nugget.
“Did you do anything exciting?”
“No.”
It would go on like this until he’d give up on me and we’d eat in silence and after dinner, he’d take me home. I’d kiss him goodnight and run inside to watch T.V. and most times he’d leave quietly, but sometimes he and my mother would fight again.
The weekends he picked me up to take me back to his house were oftentimes uneventful. We’d arrive at his house, he’d help me take my suitcase upstairs to “my room”, he’d ask if I was OK, and then he’d do his famous magic trick… he’d disappear. I’d unpack and sometimes I’d watch the black and white set in my room, or I’d go downstairs and watch T.V. in the “family room.” Some family. A father who can’t stand being in the same room as his daughter, and a stepmother who I just couldn’t accept, because she was trying to take my mom’s place.
My only friends while I was at his house were his two yellow Labradors, Maggie and Annabelle, who we all called “Boo Boo,” and the girl across the street named Beth. Most times I hung around the dogs. I wasn’t allowed to walk both at the same time because my father felt that I was too small to be able to handle them. Which was funny since they were two of the most obedient dogs you’d ever see. So mostly I walked Annabelle because Maggie was more my stepmother’s dog and it was harder for me to accept Maggie. She was my stepmother’s “baby.”
There was a park not far from the house, and I went there a lot. Sometimes with one of the dogs, once in a while with Beth, but most often I went on my own. I’d sit on the swings for hours and stare out over the lake. Even on the coldest of winter days I’d go to the park. It was quiet and peaceful, and I could think there. I felt safe there. I never felt safe at my father’s house. Many times while sitting on the swings and looking at the water in the lake, I wondered why I was there.
What was the point? My father never spent any time with me. I could be doing the same things at home, and I wouldn’t feel like I was wasting my time there. Weren’t we supposed to be doing something, my father and I? Why did he spend all his time in the basement? Why wasn’t I good enough that he couldn’t come upstairs and play games with me or take me places or spend time with me?
It seemed as though it was more important to my father to save money than to spend time with me doing things. And he was not a comforting type of man. I remember one Halloween he took me to a Haunted House because I wanted to go. It looked like fun. I forgot how scared and sensitive I could be toward things like that. As we walked through the Haunted House I got more and more scared and started screaming and crying to the point that the people inside took off their masks to show me there was nothing to really be afraid of. What did my father do? He yelled at me and started ranting on and on about how he’d wasted $12.00 taking me to a place I should have known I couldn’t handle if I was just going to act like a baby and not act my age. The people inside the Haunted House had shown more care and compassion toward me than my own father.
The older I got, the more distant my father and I became, and the less frequently I saw him. When I was fourteen, he picked me up for a weekend.
We were halfway to his house when he piped up and said, “Gee Sara, guess what new addition we have to the family.”
“A dog?”
“No.”
“A cat?”
“No.”
Most fathers would stop their child at this point, and explain the situation. Not my father. No, he was content to continue letting me guess on and on and on until finally I guessed it.
“A kid?”
“Yep.”
And then silence from both of us. Nothing comforting from him about how I was still his daughter, and how he still loved me, and I needn’t worry. No. Just silence in the car. Physically, we were only a few inches apart. Psychologically and emotionally we couldn’t have been farther apart from each other.
When we arrived at his house, my stepmother was sitting in the front yard with Annabelle and… him. My new baby brother. Nearly a year old, and I wanted to hate him so much. But how can you hate someone when it’s not really their fault? I looked around, and something wasn’t right.
“Where’s Maggie?” I asked, looking up at my father.
“We put her to sleep. She’s been too unstable in her personality, and we didn’t want to risk her around our son,” my “father” replied.
Maggie was dead? Sweet Maggie? I know I didn’t really accept her because she was my stepmother’s dog, but she didn’t deserve to die, and most certainly not because of the stupid baby! This was the beginning of the end of what little life I had at my father’s house.
We went inside, and I don’t remember if I brought my suitcase upstairs then or later, but I remember the shock and hurt I felt at the fact that when I went to put my suitcase into my room, I found a crib in it, and all kinds of baby things. The room I had stayed in when I was at that house since I was ten years old was no longer mine. Four years may not be much time to adults, but to a child, it can be as good as an eternity.
My new room was the tiny unconverted sewing room next door. Barely enough room for a bed, let alone me. I looked around in desolation. Bare walls, a small, twin bed, and to make everything worse, there was no window to look out of. I sat on that tiny bed, in that tiny, ugly room for a long time, staring at the closed door. I came to the realization then, that I did indeed hate my new little brother. I’d barely had a father before he came along, and he’d just ensured that I’d lost forever what little shred of the man I did have.
My father was never the sort of man to handle anything well outside of the realm of business, and his managing of me was no different. Instead of trying to make me feel a part of things, he continued to treat me as though I was an outsider, just a guest. He doted on his new son, and his wife. I sat quietly, sullen, watching him. I stopped staying overnight there after that weekend, but for the next seven or so years I still saw my father occasionally for dinner.
Unfortunately, nothing changed. We were still distant from each other, he still played 20 questions with me, and I still had no idea how to relate to him. One night after he and I had dinner together, I was around twenty-one years old now; we were getting ready to leave the restaurant and I took one final chance to reach out to him.
“You know, my graduation is next month,” I began.
“Mmhmm,” he replied.
“Well, I was wondering; I mean, well, I thought maybe you could come. You know, see me graduate,” I said.
My heart beat hard, and I knew the look on my face was too hopeful, too pathetic, and I could feel his rejection begin before he even said anything. Desperately, I tried again.
“If it’s Connie, she can come too! I know I can get another ticket.” Then I said more quietly, “Kyle could even come.”
I wasn’t happy with the idea, but if it meant my father would finally accept, then I’d deal with it. In the end though…
“Well,” he began. “I don’t know. I’m not sure it would be a good idea.”
‘Of course it wouldn’t,’ I thought. ‘It would mean you really cared.’
And then my father said the most absurd thing I have ever heard from him in my young life.
“You know Sara,” he said, with great confidence. “I’m really proud of myself. I’ve always been there for you.”
And without another word, he turned and strode out the door of the restaurant, leaving me standing in the lobby, flabbergasted.
‘He’d always been there for me?’ I thought. ‘When? When had he been there for me?’
Was it when I fell and scraped my knee and started crying and he’d yelled at me to stop and be a “big girl?” Was it when he’d bring me to his house and leave me on my own while he hid like a coward in the basement? Was it the year that he was supposed to take me for the weekend for Father’s Day and got mad at my mother because she requested – quite reasonably – that he have me home early Sunday afternoon because we were going to Bryn Mawr Country Club for dinner with my grandparents, so he yelled at my mother and decided that if he couldn’t bring me home when he felt like it, he just wouldn’t take me for the weekend at all? Or perhaps it was when he’d tell me all about how well his precious son was doing, but could never be bothered to tell me he was proud of me for something; anything. Oh, wait. I know what it was he was there for me for. He paid my child support checks, all the while complaining to me about it and telling me that my mother used those checks to buy her fur coats.
You were there for me father? Yeah, right. OK, you keep going on believing that. Yet I’m the one in therapy...
