Photo by Jacqueline Arevalo.
It’s really bad when music can’t fix it. I apologize in advance for bothering you with this … I’m just missing my Dad is all.
You see, I didn’t grow up with my real father. Instead I was “blessed” with a stepfather who hated me and my full brother because we were light, bright, damn-near smart as whips and not his.
He was a smart man, my stepfather, and so he did everything possible to destroy us–or make us destroy ourselves–from the inside. But he would win if this message were to end up about him. No, it is the other man my mother loved for whom my heart twists, wrenches and folds in upon itself tonight.
I learned too, as she did, that it is indeed possible to love two men with your whole heart, but there is always only one for whom you were intended and only the richly blessed fully remove the veil and see the truth.
My mother was surprised by her love for my real father. Loving my stepfather made sense; he was Jefferson High School’s biggest, baddest football star. A built-in protector for the uncrowned beauty queen from the tiny town in Texas who’d known rape and physical abuse from her own stepfather.
We share now, though she died in 2003, despising the men our mothers’ married of their own free will, though I suspect each was actually trapped by an unwanted pregnancy.
Whatever the story, it is Gentle Ben whose arms and guidance I crave as I deal with the emotional fallout from a riotously successful USA Projects meeting. The meeting not only went well; they paired me with one of their Artist Relations Specialist stars, and she was as delighted with me as I was to have even one moment of her time.
I hung up from the call realizing that something they read or heard about me, or something I wrote, made them say, “this one we give our best Specialist.”
I’m actually kind of frightened by her presence on my team as it is also heartening me to make sure that everyone else I select is battling for me to hit home plate and score a phenomenal three-run hitter.
Yet what I really want is Sting’s song about his father the shipbuilder from The Soul Cages and damnit, I can’t remember the title.
My father was a Marine who loved the sea, and early he knew writing was his true vocation. As I read an article from Adjunct Rebellion which describes exactly how and why I was a casualty of the academic wars (the corporatization of higher education), I see anew the injustice of my stepfather teaching me the sea captain’s poem, a poem I loved instinctively at five years old, the illusion that I was my stepfather’s child cracking everywhere at the seams.
As fame and true success advance down my pike, I wish for my real father and mother to talk to, though both are dead now and my mother’s people have rejected me with the stern resolution of Southerners hell-bent on making an errant daughter find the paternal half of her true family. I quake before the task, convinced I need the strong arm and hands of another white man to claim the true pater who fathered me.
Perhaps that is why I write to you this late night, and pray for the solace I know I will find in my PSC’s eyes the morrow that comes. For he knew and loved my full brother, with whom I quarreled and then allowed to die alone, without me or the knowledge I furtively held of our true parentage.
My stepfather tried his best to damn every sieve that might leak the truth, but I know someone out there has a conscience that no amount of money or guilt will keep silent.
Tonight I am finally honest in the tears I shed for a father I did not know, not as fathers should be privileged to know daughters, and banish all psychiatrists who say my fancy is “schizo-affective psychosis.”
I trust the one who sees beneath it all and says, conclusively, “You have it in you.”
So, Dr. Rick, were you in fact the young medico who trained under my mother at Parmelee Avenue Elementary all of those years I desperately tried to avoid suicide and my beloved’s arms in Philadelphia? And if so, how long are we going to let the devil think he can win this game?
Love and blessings,
Dr. Ni