Bad Haiku XXXVI
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One year ago tonight I got a phone call from my sister telling me that my mother was dying. After I hung up I sat on the edge of the bed and cried. It is an indication of how much I am estranged from my family that I was surprised at my own tears. Some of those tears were out of anger.
I loved my mother very much, but as an adult I hardly knew her, and the reason was my stepfather.
I’d been happy when they got married. I was eleven years old, and was excited that I was going to have a father again. (My parents had a bitter divorce, and I hadn’t seen my Dad since I was six.)
When they returned from the honeymoon, though, it quickly became apparent that he loathed me and had been concealing it. From then until I left home my senior year of high school he made my life a nightmare. I was continually subject to an endless stream of personal insults, taunts, and draconian punishments for manufactured infractions.
A catalog of the attacks would take pages and serve only to make me depressed and pissed off. Some of the things I recall were possibly just the usual brain damage of adolescence, but many were unmistakably malevolent. His shouting “Wait! You forgot your purse!” out the front door as I climbed into a friend’s car to study at the library is difficult to dismiss as mere teenage paranoia.
Now let’s be clear on this: I was no angel. There were a lot of lines I crossed that I shouldn’t have. I was a teenager, and you all know what that means. And to be perfectly honest, I will also say that on a couple of occasions he interceded with my mom on my behalf, and on some pretty bad stuff, too. I had no explanation for them then, and have none to this day. They tended to muddy my thinking, probably because deep-down I still wanted him to like me.
But most of the time he treated me like something nasty he’d stepped in. Let’s just leave it at this: it damaged me. Physical abuse isn’t the only kind that leaves a mark.
After I had finally had enough and moved out (without having a place to go; I spent much of my early adulthood homeless) I became persona non grata, possibly because I indulged in a bit of childish revenge the day I left: I shot his beloved rain gauge to pieces with a pellet gun. I heard from others in the family that he flew into a rage at the mere mention of my name, the implication of which was that if I were around, mom would suffer for it. So I was not allowed to visit my own mother.
We stayed in touch by telephone over the years, but I generally had to wait for her to call me, since if he answered the phone it would get bad. I got used to it after a while, and sort of thought of myself as an orphan. I moved to Los Angeles, and heard from her once or twice a year, and that was that. A few times when I really got in trouble I risked calling her.
Eventually I ended up moving back to San Antonio (yes, the trouble got that awful), and I managed to visit her a few times when he was out of town. One wall of the house had pictures of all the kids and grandkids on it. Except me. That hurt.
She actually came to my wedding, and even made up with my real father (who was to die of a brain tumor two weeks later). She stayed in my life a bit more after that, especially after my daughter was born. She saw her granddaughter perhaps ten times in three years. Then we moved to Las Vegas because that was where I found work.
So a lot of what I felt when I heard she was dying was rage at all the lost time. I was mad because I didn’t really know her. I was mad because my daughter, now six, was losing the only grandparent she’d ever known, even if she was a virtual stranger. I was mad at him for causing this.
On the plane back to San Antonio, I rehearsed over and over how I was going to handle the situation. My sister had warned me that he was, of course, at the hospital. If he made a scene I was going to tell him firmly but calmly to shut the fuck up and get out of my way so I could see my mother.
I walked into the waiting room, ready for just about anything except what actually happened. He saw me, stood up, came up to me and asked me to forgive him. He said that he had been wrong and wanted to make amends.
I was stunned. I looked at him.
He was a broken man. This wasn’t the ogre of my youth. This was a man that was losing the woman that he loved and doing everything in his power to deny it. He was afraid of what was happening.
In a flash what came back to me wasn’t what he had done, but the bad things in my life that I had done, a couple of which were major-league bad. And it seemed to me that the many times I was an asshole were mostly because of my fears and weaknesses. I almost never set out to be a prick. It just sort of happened because I wasn’t strong.
So I said “I forgive you.” And I did.
My mother rallied for a few months after that, but finally succumbed. She spoke with her granddaughter over the phone a couple of nights before she died. I know the reconciliation had been very important to her.
I have stayed in touch with my stepfather since, although the ongoing soap opera of my own hellish life the last six months has made me withdraw into myself. (Just a couple of months after my mom died, I got laid off and was subsequently forced to move cross-country, with all the fun that that entails.) I should probably call him soon and see how he’s doing.
Anyway, there’s no big moral to this story or anything. Maybe that it’s possible to forgive someone, even if you still have strong feelings about the things that were done to you. I’m only human, of course, and all that old shit still hurts, but I care about the guy and hope he’s okay instead of hating him. Which has got to mean something, right?
