I'd been reading a lot of books recently, and they all had a common theme throughout them: There was the first one I mentioned, 'Models'. Then there was 'No More Mr. Nice Guy'. Then 'Healing the Shame That Binds You'. Then 'Man, Interrupted'. That theme is that they all specifically address and are aimed at helping men that had an abusive, unavailable, or otherwise completely absent father.
I've been doing a mental inventory of all the traumas and pains in my life, and attempting to assign weight to them in order to gauge their significance in which ones need healing the most. The list is somewhat long, and while I'm (currently) unwilling to go over the entire list both for reasons of shame and brevity, the gist of it is that the one issue with my childhood that dwarfed all the others by orders of magnitude is the complete absence of my father. My father cheated on his wife with my Mom, who then gave birth to me and raised me by herself several states away, completely nowhere near my biological Dad. Part of me, a large part, is convinced that if I had a father in my life growing up, I'd wouldn't be the ineffectual and frustrated man I am today.
Growing up, I never knew my Dad at all. If not for the existence of pictures of him my Mom owned, I wouldn't even know what he looked like. Still, I have to say I think I was a very optimistic child, for I remember vividly, throughout elementary school, holding onto the firm belief that my Dad was only temporarily separated from me, and that he'd one day reenter my life and guide me as his son. I suppose it wasn't a completely outlandish belief at the time, for I was also often frequently away from my Mom, who worked days and so I'd often be spending the entire day by myself, and if Mom was away for long stretches of time, what was to say Dad wasn't just away for an even longer stretch of time? It goes without saying that my fantasy never became reality.
There were men in my life, my Mom's boyfriends, though 3 existed, one existed in my pre-memory childhood, but the two I do remember are the definition of worthless men. The first was an drug addict, very violent and angry for reasons I wasn't able to comprehend at the time, and fought viciously with my Mom. He got sent to jail eventually for possession of cocaine I believe, but I'm not willing to fact check that with my Mom at this moment. This man was no father figure, obviously.
The second boyfriend, the lazy and desperate moocher that stayed in my life for 15+ years now. He was the ornament in the house, I'd frequently forget his existence. He was known for being an idiot with a high tolerance for pain, a fact he was glad to demonstrate over and over and over again as my Mom's emotional instability would cause her to pick fights with him and then beat his ass, then call the police, who'd then come over and drag the bloodied and beaten boyfriend away who hadn't put up a fight, who would then be released without charges, and then come crawling back to my mom, to repeat this pattern, nearly every week, for more than a decade. The sounds of fighting became a very reliable background noise, ready to keep me awake nearly every night, and nothing I said or did could stop it once started. It'd be like jumping onto a primed grenade.
This man eventually fathered my half-blood sister. And while I love my sister dearly, I have to say she's gotten the shit end of two awful gene pools.
I have to say that even though I'd personally known this boyfriend for 15+ years now, I never once cared for him, at all, not as a replacement father figure, step family member, friend, or acquaintance. He eventually did leave my mom, to hook up with a woman who was impossibly even more idiotic than he was, but how their life together is progressing right now, I couldn't care less.
The only man I considered a replacement father figure was my "Uncle" who had married into my family through my Aunt. He was a proud and strong handyman. Good with machines, hardworking, an honest person with a complex that made him want to be of use to others and help them. He innately sympathized with my plight of having to live with my bitch of a mother, willing to call her out on her shit when she acted up in his presence. He frequently promised to take me out fishing, or bowling, or any other kinds of trips, but to my memory he only ever followed through on these promises once or twice, much to my enormous disappointment. When we did have the chance to hang out, I would meekly follow him around, for no particular reason, perhaps trying to absorb his manly experience through proximity. I always felt like a hanger-on and a wannabe son, but I guess I couldn't help myself, I wanted to master what it was that made me respect him so much, and by extension become respectable myself. All in all, he wasn't in my life enough to alter the course of my imminently failurebound maturance, but the little bit of time he did spend with me, I cherished it.
He died this year, on March 28, seven days after my 27th birthday, of lung cancer. I had the immense displeasure of, over the course of several months, watching the strong and proud man I knew waste away to a confused and frail skeleton, a shadow of himself, and then die in pain and indignity. Even at his bed, watching him being unable to do even the simplest of tasks as he lost his grip on life, I was unable to cry. When he died, I got the first phone call notifying me of what had happened, I was still unable to cry. Even now, I can't find it in me to cry, and I don't think I will again for anything else, for I feel if I wasn't able to cry for this one man I so genuinely cared about, it'd be disrespectful towards him. Unforgivably disrespectful.
This is just another thing I'd like to place down into words here. I have a great deal of emotional baggage, but it was only recently that I grasped the literalness of the phrase. "Baggage", you're carrying it, it's heavy and it's eating my mental and emotional energies just to hold it, so much so that it paralyzes my ability to think or feel or do things. Obviously just holding onto it isn't going to make it less heavy, I have to place it down and leave it behind me, and only then will my energies be freed up again to be used how I want them to be used. So this post is me putting it down, just one bag out of many, to hopefully be free of all of it, someday.