Step 6…apple don’t fall far from the TREE

In April/March, I spent two+ weeks in Ohio. My dad was scheduled for lung cancer surgery.
They planned to remove the cancerous portion of his left lung. Well it was a journey to say the least.
Fifteen years ago my dad had a portion of his right lung removed and is a cancer survivor. This cancer was not the same cancer…has not spread to different organs. (He also has stage 2 prostate cancer and a nodule in his saliva gland…all different cancers.)

ANNY way I arrived on a Saturday for a Monday surgery … after one week of canceling, retesting and frustration… we go see the surgeon who gives the ok for surgery the very next day. A Tuesday …. After10 days …of ambiguity.

ANNNYway
My dad and I rode to the hospital with that silence …death… silence between us. We said I love you more
in that week than in my entire life. He hands me a piece of paper asking that I call his friend and let her know how the surgery goes. His friend…. My father has had numerous women all of my life: sometimes many sometimes one or two…but always….ALWAYS extra. My parents divorced when I was two years old, because my dad was a young disrespectful womanizer. He remarried within a year and has been married to my stepmother for 45 years. He has never been monogamous.
The issue here is…..
This friend he wants me to call.
Is, he’d say:
the great love of his life.
The woman who made him feel his best self…
The woman that he felt privileged to be with.
In the past he’d drink too much and have loose lips, he’d admit to me that he had oral sex with her…(a big thing for a black man of his generation and background)…
He’d gush that they would go out of town for the weekend… “sometimes her treat”…he said it with awe in his voice and a far away look in his eye… (Now out of town to my father was 30 min up the road)
He’d brag that she was a professional woman.
A younger woman about 15 years his junior. …
This woman was also in a long-term committed relationship with an older man.(unavailable)

Years later…20 years or so since I’ve known of her existence
he is handing me this slip of paper with her phone number on it…and tells me to “call her”

…. I do… I almost forgot…I pulled into a vacant parking lot…secret…. She was pleasant.. articulate….I was impressed…she asked about my stepmother in a respectful way. I liked her. I liked that she respected my dads marriage and that on some level cares deeply for my father.

I can imagine myself in her shoes. Being or having a special friend that accessing in emergency situations is denied…that you lovingly worry and wonder but you have no moral right… to know or be connected to.

The advantage no one ever speaks of in affairs is the freedom to become more of who you dreamed you are…no one talks about being a more honest self in your dishonesty.

I think I understand.

If I lived alone, my father and his friend could come visit as a couple… I would not tell…I would not laugh behind my stepmothers back…I’d understand how it is possible to have deep feelings for multiple people without disrespecting any of them… without the lessening of anyone’s character or some fatal flaw …just different.

If you think it’s not right… maybe it’s not right that we have this “only you” expectation…we buy into monogamy because it responds to our jagged sense of competition and need for validation…our fear that we are not enough.
We use a boundless term like love to engage with limited beings…. I guess we can limit our love to the being…our conditioned practicality…or traditional religiosity lacking spiritual peripheral.

Nevertheless, some of us dream of far away lands that allow us to experience ourselves with a broaden border…that allow us to connect …engage… lovingly on the samedifferent with onemoremany people.