***This is the journaling I did when my bio-dad died...These writings were during the month of December 2011. At the time I barely had a job, I was in the aftermath of a failed bankruptcy, days away from foreclosure on my townhouse and living with a God blessing of a friend in her spare bedroom.
“I'm water I will flow. This is the way I will go. When you
do it you will know that I am water I will flow.”
~Stephanie Monique
I've been basically
saying that since I arrived in Michigan at 11:35 pm November 30th, 2011. I
received a phone call from my stepmother, earlier one evening. She told me
that my father was in the hospital. That he was bleeding from his colon (she
used greater detail but that's the gist of what she had to say to me) and then
she asked me what I thought, or to say something and the only thing I could do
and the only thing I had to say was I cried and then asked her if she would
send me the money to get up to Michigan.
For pretty much the week prior to this phone call I'd been
processing forgiving my father. I thought the time had come to do so. To the
best of my knowledge he'd quit drinking, and I'd started to open the lines of
communication between us. See, when I had my last full blown manic episode or
rather right before it, I finally got to a point where I had an understanding
that I could no longer carry on conversations with my father while he was
drinking.
Our relationship was toxic. Each conversation turned into an
epic battle, and the wounds on my psyche were too great to continue. He felt
like I was doing it because I was trying to punish him in some way. But for me,
it was healthier. I carried a lot of anger about his drinking into that manic
episode and it manifested into a full blown wish for him to die.
I said it and I wrote it in an email to my boss. And I was
embarrassed and basically humiliated by how much I exposed and spilled that
anger out through action and words during that manic episode. Part of the
reason I continued my decision to stop talking to my father after my episode
had passed was that embarrassment, but mostly because our conversations were so
fucking dysfunctional while he was drinking and my action during mania made me
realize that it was just painful to continue.
So over the last 4 years our conversations have been 3rd
party. And that worked for me. I was able to get to a place where I understood
I loved him, but I just really didn't like him very much especially when he was
drinking.
When he had
surgery earlier this year in February he called me, at the time I was still firm
in my decision. We spoke. He wasn't drinking according to the rules I'd set out
for our relationship. We talked until I could no longer agree to disagree with
him. It became painful once again. He'd always credited me with being his Superior daughter, while calling himself my inferior dad. I felt inferior anyway. He reminded me of
the time we spoke where I'd told him, he was the most functional alcoholic I
knew. I've come to realize now this was not true for me, my mother's way was less harmful to others. He took it as
a compliment. I'd called him an alcoholic.
So In August of this year just before my cousin got married he called me. I
was firm once again about my decision and had to hang up on him when he told me
he'd been drinking. He said he quit shortly after that conversation, and so by
the time he came for the wedding I agreed to go to dinner. Some things were
said during dinner, I can't be specific, and I took a mature approach and let
the comments pass. I've had a few conversations and what not, over the last few
months. And that brings us up to date.
So yesterday we had a
conversation about forgiveness. And that was a very good thing. And tonight he
passed away. Now, how do I feel? I am numb. I need to let go of my anger. I
need to be water and flow. And go and this is what I know.I don't know...we've
got lots of ice cream and junk food so comfort food is here...but I'm nausea
and not crying...and bouncing between being very angry and a need to let it
go...I got to have a forgiveness conversation with him the day before so that's
a good thing...but mostly and honestly, we had a dysfunctional
relationship...He was an alcoholic, and his drinking killed him...How am I
supposed to feel?
Does anybody need a 5 day long
funeral? Grrrr...These things are not me...I am not these things...Oh well...I
wanna write...Need to write...Wish I had something more to say than more of the
same old same old small amounts of dribble, droplets of water falling from my
mind...
I don't feel inspired like my
head being dunked in the undertow of life...Then again, I'm just doing and
being me...Oh well...Beginning, Middle...End...Circle, around and round...Over,
under, up, down, side to side... Burning pain, released and flowing in and out
of my thoughts like the path of a river, moving forward, moving down, my life
is utter chaos and calm...Is it bad that I felt the need to sing the 'Hey, Hey,
Hey, Goodbye' song at my father's grave?
5 days. I remained calm. I took every
compliment with gracious passive calm. I did not contradict one person when
they said something glowing in reference to this man. I was Gandhi like in my
lack of anger, and so fucking calm. But I am churning waters today.That was the
calm before the storm. And the storm has started to rage. The sky has darken to
the point of midnight black, when it should have been clear and sunny outside.
I'm a tornado building to the
point of destruction, and unfortunately, the place where this anger should go,
what deserves the brunt of it, is either me or him. And he's dead so what the
hell am I supposed to do with that?
Painful...Toxic...Emotional battlefield...From
my cradle to his grave he hurt me more than any other person who has ever
walked the earth. Why? Because I did love him. You can only hurt people you
love If you didn't love them why bother right? He was a shitty father. Sperm
donor. If I'd cut off the emotional part of me, if I'd been able to cut him out
of my life, which I did to some degree, he wouldn't be able to hurt me anymore.
That was the theory anyway. I thought I had. I really believed that, because I
wasn't grieving the loss of him in my life. I swore I wouldn't. Although my
stepmother was nothing more than the knife he used, he managed to cut me from
the grave.
He wrote me out of his will. It's
not the fact that he left me nothing. It's that he once promised me he never
would. He said that he'd always love me. To a man who truly believed money was
everything, and a way to show his love of a person, well it's tantamount to
tipping a waitress a penny. I'm the waitress in the metaphor I thought he would
change his will so that what he would leave me would be distributed by my Step-Mother to me
as needed, but that he would provide for me. And that is basically what she said she would do in a round about non-compassionate way.
Because of that promise he made to me though, even while we were fighting at
the time, his breaking that promise is what hurt the most.
It basically was another way of
his saying to me, "I don't love you. I never did. I don't care what
happens to you after I'm dead. "I've been asked to remember the good
times/memories of this man. Our relationship was filled with so much pain, and
anger, I still haven't come up with one example of a really good
memory of the man. Tonight I thought of one. The first time I was arrested
after being diagnosed bipolar, I sat in jail for less than 2 hours and then
bailed myself out cuz I had my debit card on me, and $100.00 in my account,
which is what I needed to post my bail.
My father after I'd been in a
mental hospital handed me a check for $100.00 and told me he'd made the
situation go away. I owed a thank you to the judge a friend or golfing buddy of
his, as he was known to say from time to time, it's all about who you know and
he knew lots of important people.
There's one extremely good thing
about him not leaving me a penny, I still have no assets. I can now file
chapter 7, and afford to do so, and start to rebuild my credit in 7 years or
so. All of my financial nightmare up to this point will be wiped clean. In a
round about way, it's much better that he didn't leave me anything.
It's the good of this, as painful
as it was to hear and process. It was even a smart thing to do on his end,
because I was in a major ass hole. Whether he realized this or not, it was fated.
Divine design. And I can breathe and flow once again like the water running
down the river. Only took 24 hours to get there, not bad. I have a chance to
start over, finally.
*****
It's scary if I'm not in a safe place and for the first time in a long time I felt safe enough to explore it all. The good the bad, I made connections throughout my life that only being bipolar could show me. It's the way my mind works. Am I grateful for this gift/curse? Some days. That is until I'm sitting in a jail cell trying to figure out, not where I went wrong, but what is wrong. I did that from 11/21 until 12/15 ish of last year. Now for the new stuff.
I time traveled. Through my entire life. It took years. That's the way my brain processed the events. I was in jail for not 3 weeks, but years, eons. Everyone I knew was a fiction. The people who approached me in jail, pieces of the puzzle. The cosmic puzzle. The grand design.
Goddess once again, made me significant and nothing more than another prong in the grand plan. But that's my divine path. I needed to process the world once again. Only problem is, I'm one person. This is my perspective. There's nothing I can do about it. I cannot change the facts of me. So once I realized all this, even the events that lead up to my being arrested and housed in a jail cell for 3 weeks made sense, and not booked but actually lost in the Lane County system, well there was nothing else to do but wait.
The problem? My brain didn't shut down. It continued to process until the only option I wanted was death. Stay awake for over a week and let me know how you feel. The advantage to being in jail, I couldn't commit suicide. So I accepted this fate in which I processed not only my own timeline but the timelines of every story I'd ever heard about another human being.
I had eons to get it done and my mind traveled back to the beginning of time. It traveled forward in time but I really couldn't see that for what it was, like it was at the edge of my vision and if I caught sight of that particular truth I would die. So I turned a blind eye to what was really there.
All of the time travel perspective was reality for me, but a doctor would label it a visual and auditory hallucinations. Delusional thinking. Fiction. So Simone took control. She outlined a few books and was child-like in voice. It could take the rest of my life to write, edit, rewrite and publish the stories she told me while I sat in the in-between of my own life and death. I had nothing else to do but think. My mind the only thing not sitting in a prison. A real one for once. So it traveled and decided that I’m a storyteller, a bipolar human being, a smoker, a food lover, a roommate, a friend, a single black woman and on and on and on.
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