Health, Personal Power, and the Black Hole

First:

Marriage

Years later they find themselves talking
about chances, moments when their lives
might have swerved off
for the smallest reason.
What if
I hadn’t phoned, he says, that morning?
( Read more... )

And in the morning
I also knew it was you, but I just
answered the phone
the way anyone
answers a phone when it starts to ring,
not thinking you have a choice.

Lawrence Raab

There's something I haven't been telling you. I've been busy this week -- it's been a lovely, lovely week and I've worked hard so my body's remuscled all over. I've biked to the rubber-leg point (I've never been there before-- felt like my thighs are sheathed in fire, felt bowling balls in my calves, or weak, but never before like my bones bent ever-so-gently like stiff rubber with each pedal push. My commute home is a half-hour of uphill) and loved it. I've carried one or two cubic yards of soil up a very steep slope in buckets, dodging old shrubs and keeping my balance. I've helped disassemble, move, and rebuild two lock-block retaining walls (I've never used lock blocks before, they're easy enough that a retarded kindergardener could put them together).

I've ditched my bus pass, and may buy some more bus tickets, but not right now. So, all my commuting will be more-or-less on the bike. I want it to snow so I have an excuse to get snow tires for my baby. She's in the shop right now after a gear-shift exploded; when she comes home I'm going to take my auxillary bike apart down to the frame and put it back together to learn how. Whee!

I've been snowed on. I've watched Angus start to grow into himself, to begin to feel the personal power that we all have over ourselves and our actions but never seem to know about for the longest time. He's just beginning to be confident in his own decisions, to challenge the world around him when he knows he should, and it's beautiful. I've been looking forward to this since I hooked up with him. Perhaps because of the exercise I've felt re-empowered myself. I've discovered all sorts of cousins, bought a gift that would have had me shaking in my shoes to contemplate two years ago, and begun to win a fight with bronchitis.

I've learned that my dad is dead.

Realise I haven't seen my dad since I was two or something. My rediscovered family includes a relatively eccentric bunch of people ('colourful characters' was a term invented for us). I'm breaking down into incoherency now because I have no idea how to say this, or what to say. My cousin told me the news, and it hurt like crazy for about two seconds, and now I don't know what I feel. I usually take my griefs and drag them away from the incident into the safe space of the future where I can mourn them and lick any wounds they inflict. I don't know if I'm sad or if I'm just... I don't know. I have to tell mom, but she's sick right now and I want to tell her face to face. I don't know if she'll care or not. I don't, you see, know anything.

My dad has always been a black hole. There have been a couple stories from mom, now a couple contradictory stories from my newly discovered and quite eccentric uncle, and a few stories from my cousin from when she was small. I have a couple of pictures of him (I could get a picture of him from when he was older, one that's not twenty-seven years old!) and a necklace that used to be his and I saw the weddign ring that was his and mom's once but I think it's lost (I wanted to keep it so badly when I discovered it, and now who knows where it is?). Now there's no way of knowing what he was like. My family wants me to like them, they want to justify themselves to themselves -- on both sides -- and so the stories will come out the way all of our experiences come out, slanted as to other people's thoughts and feelings and even behaviours. I'll never know my dad, never see when he smiles or what his eyes look like when he does or when he particularly doesn't. I'll never know what kind of a hugger he is.

Apparently nudism runs in my family.

I think so does fear of abandonment. And so does abandonment. And so does abuse.

I have no regrets whatsoever about being raised by my mom. I may have some regrets about my step-dad, but more for my brothers' sake than for my own; I think I can heal from any wounds I received. Hell, I talk to Angus about financial stuff easily now -- the first time I talked to Chris about money I could barely speak I was crying so hard, it felt so shameful -- and I've tromped my abandonment stuff down to a couple of days per month.

I do have regrets about the information black-hole I have, about never being able to meet my father, about never having told him I loved him.

So.