Month: August 2020

I’d never wailed before August 19, 2020. I suppose I never really considered it but after the mountains of pain, loss, regret, betrayal and heartbreak in my past, I just kind of assumed that I’d covered all the bases on crying. Wrong again. 

Arriving home from work on Wednesday night to find my daughter’s room cleared out… You know how you see people on tv who are in some desperate situation and then something terrible happens and they just stand there in shock while the building is falling around them and you just wanna yell at them “Snap the fuck out of it!” That’s how I felt standing in my daughter’s closet staring at the eight empty hangers that remained. Shock is like an out of body experience. Even as I remember it now, I see myself in the third person stumbling dumbly from the empty closet to my bedside in the living room where my knees gave out at the command to lie down and instead I found myself kneeling on the carpet squeezing myself in a hopeless embrace and wailing without tears at the top of my lungs. I doubled over, screaming questions I can’t remember, and while I could breathe fine, the hot breath of my sobs made me feel like I was suffocating so my body would shoot up and yell at the ceiling. Surprisingly, my manners still hold sway in deep agony because something would shame me for being disruptive to my neighbors (probably a result of my hospitality profession) and I would bring my cries back to the floor until suffocating again. And so I cried. 

To be fair, I had received a call a few hours earlier from her mother stating “[the kid and I] talked and she’s going to move back in with me.” I’m sure she thought that was a courtesy and not a kidnapping. I spent the last three hours of my shift desperate to get home in the vain hope that she was bluffing. She wasn’t. 

There’s nothing worse than the feeling of being powerless. Having your world ripped apart in the blink of an eye and being unable to do anything about it but nod and say “okay”, that is a feeling of which I am all too familiar. There is no healing from that. There is no forgetting. There is no replacement for the hopes and dreams that you spent years building up. 

I haven’t eaten anything in more than 48 hours (unless you count the Trolli gummi worms that were the last thing my daughter gave me). Been napping a lot. Doing a lot of wallowing but trying to avoid the self-pity. I’ve been cycling through the first three stages of grief like a broken clock but the anger is subsiding. 

My daughter is 16. She’s naive and highly-sensitive, but she is also and almost a woman. Which means I have to respect the decisions she makes as a woman. It’s easy for me to blame her mother. She’s manipulative and she’s kidnapped my daughter three times in the past, so number four is no surprise but honestly, I’m so over being mad at that woman. The most hurtful part of this loss is that my daughter made the decision this time. I’m not mad at her for it because what teenager hasn’t wanted to run away from home at some point? In most cases, there’s just nowhere for you to go that wouldn’t ship you right back. So I suppose the Kid was just taking advantage of the dysfunction in our “family” but I’m still hurt that she felt like that was her best option. Now she’s not talking to me, claiming she needs space. I still have no clue why she left. No idea where her head is at or what her heart is feeling. The sobering truth that I haven’t wanted to admit to myself is this:

Maybe she didn’t run away from home… she ran back home. 

And I have no idea where that leaves me… now I have to go to work and somehow coexist in a world that has no meaning to me. 

Love is a mystery to me. Some might say (though never to my face) it is a defect of my birth as a high-functioning sociopath. I might say it is the disillusionment with romance wrought by inflicting Walt Disney on a child’s tender, sleeve-sitting heart. Whatever the reason, I had to abandon my misunderstanding of love in order to forgive my most natural attractions for loving others. With my robotic personality, however, I could not function without some parameters by which to compute my behavioral patterns.

For this I turned to the Apostle Paul. Although I am not a biblical man, his second letter to the Corinthians checked all the appropriate boxes to explain why so many humans behaved irrationally towards their chosen partners. It was an exhausting list that seemed to box souls into a boundless battle for selfless reconciliation. Love is patient. Love is kind… It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It holds no records of wrongs… It always protects, always trusts, always hopes… All these things seemed foolish to me when applied towards character traits such as dishonesty, manipulation, aggression, narcissism, and a slew of other skills that would make for a great spy or an even better entanglement. Nevertheless, I needed a widely accepted framework and even my atheist friends called their bizarre compromises “love” same as everyone else so… point for Paul.

[Enter: The Kid] Love is still a mystery to me. Whoever says “Oh, I didn’t understand love until I met my children” is full of shit. I didn’t understand love before and I understand it even less now. I’m not a woman so, granted, I can not speak from personal experience but I am 99.99% sure that giving birth is not fucking nirvana. No one suddenly reaches enlightenment when they become a parent; however, I can say from personal experience that the very first time I held my daughter, I felt a force erupt inside me that was deeper and stronger than the feeling of 1,000 butterflies in my stomach. I can’t say what it was, but I know it wasn’t the secrets of the universe. My theory is that the freak-out moment that most women get when they realize they’re pregnant creates an emotional bomb that they then spend xx amount of weeks filling with hormonal energy from all the anxiety, confusion, anger, frustration, curiosity and excitement of creating a life. The unborn baby is then primed with a DNA detonator triggered by the sperm donor. When the child touches its father for the first time, all that energy is immediately transferred in an explosion of paternal instincts. It’s simple science, folks. You think I spent all that time in after-school conferences with Ms Behrens because I was a disciplinary concern? No, clearly it was because she recognized my acute understanding of human biology. But I digress…

Paternal instincts are weird. If instincts are a survival guide, then it could be considered self-love in its purest form. But if that’s the case, why the hell does my existence suddenly depend on keeping this aimless sponge of a creature alive long enough to supplant me? The logic is flawed, but the effect is real. Paternal instincts exist against all reason, same as love, but I recognize the two as separate identities within the self. Some people have no parental instincts. Perhaps the mother did not experience enough self-loathing in her pregnancy to trigger an explosion of emotional energy transference after birth. Perhaps the parent has a hedonistic heart and is unable to deny his or her baser instincts. Or perhaps they embrace a more Darwinian parental philosophy, which, cards on the table, seems entirely appealing to me more often than I will ever admit. Fortunately for my spawn, my paternal instincts are to protect, inspire and encourage. Unfortunately for her, I don’t know how to do that and love her at the same time.

I know what you’re thinking. What the fuck, Q? Did you really just say that? Um, yes, what of it? I still love my kid, of course, but that experience often irritates the intentions of my paternal instincts. For example, you might say I am overprotective simply because I want to know exactly what my child is doing and with whom at all times. If I don’t know, then I am overcome with anxiety and apprehension until I can set eyes on her again. Now the parameters by which I am supposed to love say that it is okay for her to have freedom, and secrets, and privacy, and independence–my trust, basically. So I allow her these unearned graces, but I don’t like it, and according to the parameters by which I am supposed to love, that is also okay. My paternal instincts seek to pull her closer to myself, wanting to share my hobbies with her and vice-versa, so as to mutually inspire and encourage each other. But the Kid finds my hobbies to be arduous, time-consuming tasks, either too dull or too mentally-exhausting to ever be enjoyable. And I find her hobbies to be far too whimsical and chaotic to invest such large swathes of my time. Love says I should try anyway, and I do, and I fail, which Love says shouldn’t happen, but it does…not…compute.

So yea, like I said, I don’t know how to love this Kid and follow my paternal instincts at the same time. I must make a split-second decision on which path to follow at every junction of interaction. This method tends to work out in her favor 8 times out of 10 because I diverge down the Lane of Love. Flawed though the framework might be, it’s better than the game of pinball that is paternal instinct. Where do these balls even come from? Why do I feel like they’re attacking me? Where do they go once the game is over? Why does this stupid thing never go where the hell you want it to go? How come two seconds into the game you abandon all plans and frantically attempt to hit the ball on a hopeless prayer that it can bounce anywhere it wants just please, please, please don’t end up in the gutter?!

..Now I’ve ruined pinball for myself. And Love is still a mystery to me. This is not what I intended when I woke up to write this morning.

Lately I’ve been waking up every morning bored with life. I then live my days, blazed and confused, until I fall asleep bitter with boredom. Now I should be grateful given that excitement–for me–usually comes in the form of strife, stress or disappointment. Furthermore, I recognize that these unprecedented times are not just a plague on the physical health of our species, but also poisonous to the social contracts and constructs that provide us with peace of mind and a sense of personal utility. Nevertheless, I know my boredom is my own creation and when it explodes in a blaze of glorious pandemonium; that, too, will be my doing.

When I’m at work, if I had the time (or were disinclined to do my job like practically every one I come across in life), I could write paragraphs and parables about the antics and shenanigans–shenantics??–that go one every day. But by the time I make it home to my lazy-boy and lethargic daughter, my selective memory has already started phasing out the bad parts, leaving me with nothing but a bad feeling and nothing to say. You wouldn’t know it from reading anything I post, but I don’t like to broadcast my angry-blackmanness. The cynicism that drives my sociopathic detachment from the human species is, believe it or not, somewhat of a curiosity that rages against what I consider to be my good nature.

That being said, I decided that I need some sort of rating system for my days in lieu of journaling about the absurd tedium of hospitality. Suffice it to say that if I’m not out of patience by “lunch” (because I don’t actually get one of those) then it’s a pretty successful day. If I make it through a shift without being threatened, insulted or ignored, then you should probably wake me from my fantasy because I fell asleep. I only gave myself 30 minutes for catharsis and I’m already three minutes over so I guess we’ll have to think of a rating system tomorrow.