Let Me Tell You About My Dad

Today is the birthday of the man my mom shacked up with when her husband abandoned us at a roach motel when I was about 12 years old.  For those who may not have been following along with my life story, her husband was not my father.  She married him when I was four.  She had two children from two different men and had two more with Chuck.

So, as I was explaining, Chuck got a transfer to Germany because he was in the Air Force.  He dumped us at a family member’s house, where we slept in the garage, and went ahead to Germany to find us a place to move into when we got there.  That was in October of  1982.  By March, he had still not found us a place, and we’d pretty much worn out our welcome where we were staying, so we moved into a seedy motel in Linda, California, also known as the meth capital of California.  That put me in the third school I would attend in sixth grade.  We lived there for a couple of months in absolute misery.  My mother cried a lot, drank a lot, and brought two different men back to the one-room unit (on separate but multiple occasions) and had sex with them after she thought we’d fallen asleep.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much helpless rage in my life as I did then.

Mike, the man in the picture above, had been a childhood friend of my mother’s.  He is the cousin of one of her best friends, and when he heard that we were living at the Rio Rancho, he invited us to live in his rec room, a large space added on to his garage.  So we did.  It was better than the Rio Rancho.

Cutting to the chase, Mom ultimately divorced Chuck and married Mike.  Mike had started out fun and nice, but he was going through a custody battle for his daughter, and his anger manifested in ugly ways.  Mom and Mike got into meth together.  They drank a lot, and this is when Bill came into our lives.  (You may recall that Bill was a tormentor of mine with his inappropriate attention and disgusting comments).

I was a good kid.  I got good grades.  I didn’t cut school.  I had always been Mommy’s helper.  I never got into trouble at school.  Even though I hung around with smokers and kids who used drugs and alcohol, I never did any of that stuff.  I went to church regularly, and I was pretty much what a lot of parents would have hoped their kid would be.

Mike was always accusing me of sneaking around.  We went on a camping trip once, and when I went over to use the pit toilet that was right across from our campsite, he stopped me and told my mom I was up to something.  I was twelve years old and he said, “When she gets pregnant, I’m not paying for it.”  On many occasions, he told me that I was a liar and he knew it.  According to him, I wasn’t really going to church; I was using it as an excuse to sneak off with my boyfriend.

As I began to wear 80’s style makeup, he’d tell me I looked like a raccoon or a hooker.  In truth, I did, but that was the style, then.  I wasn’t mature enough to realize that clothes can make a negative impression on some people.  And there are better ways to communicate with teenagers.

I think the worst part of all, was that there were multiple occasions in which my mom and Mike would get drunk, and they would start physically fighting.  They were about the same height and weight, and so it wasn’t him beating her, it was them wrestling and punching and pulling hair and being stupid.  My siblings and I would scream and cry and try to break it up.  One time, Mike pinned my mom to the floor, climbed onto her back and had his arm around her neck.  He threw the phone at me and told me to call the police because he was going to kill my mom.  Mom laughed and told me if I called the police, she’d kick my ass.

Chuck had been physically abusive to all of us except my sister, Audra, his biological daughter.  Mike hit the older of my two brothers a couple of times, but he did not beat them the way Chuck did on a daily basis.

And this is the hardest part of my story to get people to understand.  Even as ugly as things could be when I was a kid, there were some really wonderful moments with Mike.

One such moment was when we’d driven about five hours to get his daughter for a weekend visit, but her mother had been manipulating her, a small child, into believing that her daddy was a bad man.  (Yes, Mike could be mean to me and my siblings, but he’d NEVER EVER been mean to Angel.)  Angel refused to leave with us, and Mike was heartbroken.  But apparently, they had planned to take us all to Great America, the Bay Area amusement park, once we’d picked her up.  Despite his heartbreak, we went to the park along with his friend Terry, one of the few friends Mike had that I actually liked.  Terry was a nice man and was never rude or inappropriate, and inappropriate behavior from men was something I’d pretty much come to expect.

Once in the park, Mike and Terry wanted to go on all the scary rides.  My mom won’t go on scary rides, and my siblings were little.  So Mike and Terry split off and went their own way, and invited me to go along.  We had an absolute blast.  Riding “The Edge,” which was brand new at the time, will always be a treasured memory.

Other things that he did that didn’t seem to fit in with the anger and what felt like hate a lot of the time, were things like:

• when Chuck came back from Germany to visit, Mike went on a hunting trip so that Chuck could stay at the house with us to visit.
• Mike built a divider into that rec room in the back of the house and finished it so that I could have my own room.
• for my 14th birthday, a clown showed up at our door with balloons.  I never found out who sent them until I was in my 30’s.  It had been Mike.
• I was in marching band.  I got a small allowance for mowing the lawn.  I’d save my allowance so that I’d have spending money when we went on band trips because I never asked for anything.  But some mornings when I’d be leaving my bedroom to go to school early for a band trip, there’d be an envelope on my door with five to ten dollars for me to take with me.

Those are a few, but they were frequent enough that I once made him a little yellow pillow with lace fringe that I embroidered “I love you,” on.  He still has it displayed over his bed.

When you grow up abused, you don’t recognize it as not normal.

My parents finally got clean right before I turned 17.  My mom and I had been fighting about something stupid, and she wasn’t speaking to me at all.  I had begun having panic attacks when it was time to go home from school.  One day, I had written her a letter telling her how much I loved her and that I was sorry that we were fighting and nothing was more important to me than to have my mom back, so I didn’t care about the thing she didn’t want to do for me (she wouldn’t sign the permission form for me to be in band again).  I left the letter on her bedroom door.  After a day or two, I asked her if she read it.  She said that she hadn’t, because she already knew that it would say, “if you just let me do what I want, it’ll all be ok.”  I tried to tell her that that’s not what it said, but she told me she didn’t want to hear it.  I went to my room and sobbed.

A few nights later, I came out of my room in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, which was next door to my parents’ room.  As I got there, my mom stepped out of her room and stood in front of me.  She wrapped her arms around me and told me that she was sorry.  I was groggy, so I just said, “It’s ok, Mama.”  She said, “No, it’s not.”

I later found out that this is when my parents had decided to kick the meth.  I didn’t even know they were using drugs at that time.  I thought all their problems were from alcohol.  A few years later, after I’d gotten married at 18, and Dave and I bought a house less than a mile from my parents, my mom and Mike were having problems.  My mom was cheating on him with one of two men who could have been my biological father.

Mike showed up at my house, one day, and told me and my (now late) ex-husband what was going on.  He asked me to help him write a letter to my mom because he’d never been good at reading or writing.  So I helped him.  To this day, I don’t know if she knows it was me, but I know she knew someone helped him.  She told my sister.

After I’d written the letter for him, he looked at me and said, “I judged you based on the teenager I had been.  You didn’t deserve that.  I’m sorry.”

Talk is cheap.  But he has been my dad ever since.  He and my mom worked out the issues they were having at the time, and he has become the Dad I always hoped to have.  He was there when I got married.  He was there to tell me of Dave’s death.  He was wounded when his own mother died and his dad neglected to include my siblings and me in the list of surviving family members.

In the picture above, he is sitting in my niece’s (the cutie too his left) preschool class, being what he was clearly born to be: Papa.  Together, my parents have 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.  My dad lives for their visits.  One of my favorite examples of his awesomeness happened when my sister, Audra’s oldest daughter was only about three or four.  She loved coming to visit because there was a swing in the front yard, and Papa would push her as long as she wanted.  On one such visit, it was raining so, of course, they couldn’t go outside.  Hannah begged, “Fwing me, Papa!”  I was there and melting with the preciousness of it all.  But Papa couldn’t stand it.  He went out in the rain, took the swing down, and hung it in the garage!  Then he fwung Hannah all afternoon.

One of the things that these past few years of my life have demonstrated to me is that just because our dreams don’t necessarily come true as we imagined them, doesn’t mean they don’t come true.  I dreamed of being “daddy’s little girl,” as a child.  That will never happen, but I don’t think I could love my dad any more if he were genetically my father.  He loves me.  He loves Drew.  He embraces my Spirit Children.

Happy Birthday to my dad, Mike.  I couldn’t love you more if I tried.

---

 

Please don’t judge my parents from what you’ve read in this entry.  We’ve all got our histories, and those histories cause us to do stupid things.  Both of my parents have acknowledged their failings and have apologized for what I always refer to as “The Ugly Times.”  I wouldn’t trade my family for anything.