Growing Beyond My Father

My cousin's daughter is home from college and had her wisdom teeth pulled.  With some down time on her hands she's going through pictures and asked if I had any of my father.  My father is her mom's father's brother.  Follow that?  Good. 

I pull out the album of Nicky and bring it to her and sit there sipping my coffee while she goes through it.  She kept commenting as to how handsome my father was.  Yes very handsome was my reply.  This got me thinking, as usual, and so here I am again.

My father is one of the more colorful characters in our family.  I may have shared this before but it's hard to explain that he wasn't just that quirky, weird uncle.  This was a guy that shouldn't have been left alone with young children.  He was the guy you wouldn't leave your new wife around.  This was the guy you wouldn't trust with the pin to your ATM.  This was the guy you wouldn't trust to come home with the paycheck to pay the rent, bills, etc....  He may have made an intersting family member as long as it wasn't your father.

I remember he always had a woman in his life.  She was always beautiful, smart, busty, and  dependent on him.  My father was a satyr, a pervert, and obscene to the core.  He never knew what to do about having a daughter, so he didn't.  He only knew how to honor his mother, and to conquer every vagina he came in contact with.  I never felt safe around this man.....ever. 

Very hard to be connected to someone you couldn't trust ever.  When I was in high school and he would come and visit me at my uncle's house, they would write down his license plate number.  Why didn't they just tell me the truth?  I really would have stopped seeking him out and pretending he was someone I needed in my life.  People get way too caught up in the whole, well he  or she is your_____________ fill in significant relationship. 

So now that I am older I see the big hole that not knowing my father and not having a good male in my life has left.  When I was younger I wouldn't have known a good man if he was standing right in front of me.  I spent way too much time being thrilled because 'he liked me'.  I brain stopped there.  Really it did.  I didn't look to see if he was functional, on probation, literate, or stable.  I made every excuse for someone if he was interested in me.  After all I spent most of my life, childhood, alone. 

When I tell you that I've been winging it for years, I am NOT exaggerating.  Of course I gathered info about good men from literature and the movies. And of course, from music.  Oh if I could only meet a man that could write a lyric like Bob Seger or Bob Dylan, even Neil Young.  I thought to myself, I would be so happy.  I don't know what men like that are like to live with.  Who knows except those closest to them.

I have become the outspoken, confident, curious woman I am today in spite of the lack of positive male attention I got in my youth.  I hope to one day encounter a man that is balanced and sweet, stable and fun, amoung other things on my list.  A man that won't disappear when an ermegency arrises.  A man that won't give up at the first sign of my pms.  A man that won't come rushing in dreaming of a future together only to realize it's too much like work to actually be in a relationship.  What I have learned about men was actually from being friends with them and not in a sexual way.  I have learned over time that people gravitate toward one another for different reasons.

Sometimes the purpose is to work on a project, work or personally related.  Sometimes men are around because they won't steal my boyfriend and are easy to get along with.  Sometimes men are in my life because the heat between us was so explosive it would have been insane not to taste and explore it. 

I know that a lot of my life I had a very strong internal experience with myself.  I learned early on that I could count on me.  My therapist once told me that I had a very strong internal parent.  Good thing considering my actual parents acted more like children than I did. 

So Nicky although you never cared to learn what it was like to be my father....I am moving on past your bizarre legacy of coke induced orgies and small scams.  I am growing beyond your strange cryptic letter, your insistance that I always looked just like my mother, and that I would never amount to anything.  I am healing beyond the fact that you didn't want to be a part of my childhood, teen years, young adult life or even know my children.

I will one day experience....love, and value a good man.  I know this in my heart.  I know he lives and breathes somewhere and at night when he lays his head on his pillow he is reaching out to me, unknown still to his existance and kissing me good night.  I know there is a yin to my yang or yang to my yin....I can't ever remember which is which.  I know there is a man that may not love coffee in the morning but will understand and accept my bliss in my first sip.  I know there is someone that I will be able to love and trust, honor and defend, nuture and confide in.  I know he will be my friend, my lover, my sounding board.  He will know my craziness of my youth and admire my persistance in moving on.  I know I deserve this in spite of you Nicky.  That big hole you left in my life doesnt need to remain so.