I always hear you say it, very rarely but always I hear it and always constrained, tight in your throat, fear gripping it back despite you casually letting it go, that you love... me..
Silly, simple, stupid, small… me..
But I want you to clearly understand that loving someone and making them feel loved, are two very different things.
The pain that I daily feel, that was given to me from you and your emotionally immature mother, my egotistical and prideful grandmother, this gift, the generational gift of turmoil and fight, a gift like flowers in my lungs... although they are a beautiful bouquet, like the poetry I write, they are overgrown, pain-filled, and leave me constantly gasping for air.
I was made to believe that at the age of 10, the age of my youngest son, that I was a terrible person, when I was merely just a child. My feelings were not allowed in your space. Not my grandmothers and certainly nowhere else while i was growing.
Your feelings mattered more. Your mother's mattered more.
I was merely a child. Your child. A child who now overwaters plants, shares my food and hugs til the other person lets go, because I never know when to stop giving. Learning from everyone's mistakes has made me lean more towards the polar opposite end of where you all were and are.
I give of things. I give of my heart. I give my whole energy when listening. I have become an enthusiast for giving.
I want you to feel the weight of who I am and the woman I've become and I want you to accept it for all it is. Whether it be your shattered view of me or everything as plain as day.
I was never ready for what I went through, for what I continued to go through and what I still feel day to day, the pain of it all cracking my steadiness, I was never ready but I was brave... and I believe your God listens to brave and takes it as the greatest sign of strength from a child.
You and I are more alike than we'd care to admit, and whenever I feel pure rage, I know that's the part of me that you begin from. I am my father's daughter. I am my grandmother's granddaughter.
But a child weaned on poison considers harm to be pure comfort. I've heard it said that those who never grew up being fed love on a silver spoon, learn to lick it off knives.
You need to know that I ached to be enough.
You need to know that I ached to be loved the same way I love.
I still crave the summers as a kid, and the black cherry soda because it was the only kind you'd buy us while grandma would only ever buy that disgusting apple soda.
I still crave the large bucket spins on the kitchen floor, my body small enough to fit in it while it spun, the wide grins and being in the moment thinking everything was getting better, it wasn't, it never did… I still crave summer, but the problem with that is, I crave summer from 20 years ago, and nothing could satisfy that melancholic, nostalgic and faded craving.
Those moments barely lasted and life went on, it was never the same but my life went on.
It's one of the coldest truths, that you have stopped hugging me, and i never ever say it out loud, but to be embarrassingly clear, I have stopped hugging you as well.
My dad is a pretty good man I believe, but I can certainly see it much more, when I compare him to his own dad. His own dad was like an open wound, who married another open wound, and raised my dad and his siblings in chaos.
I personally think my father is unbearably lonely. And has been since his girlfriend ended her life behind a locked door and my dad couldn't get in to stop it from happening…. And my dad never knew how to cope, went on with life, met my chaotic mom, we were born, my baby sister died at 6 months old, my moms rights were taken away, then my dad and grandma raised most of us… and he never healed from his own pain, emptiness and loneliness. I strongly believe he is overwhelmingly lonely. There is a quiet echo that i can sense around him that follows heavily behind him. It's loud to me and very clear to me but a bit weird to bring it up. Loneliness, loss, grief, the weight dragging like a prison ball chained to his ankles and wrists…. I'd hate to think that as his very own children, we added to that burden.
I look at him and say my words in my head but anytime I get the urge to vocalize anything, hoping the right words will fall out and that those words will align my father and I so we won't have to work so hard to translate what each other has to say.
He's angry as well... and I think it exacerbates his deep loneliness.
He was raised with an angry man in his house. Many angry men around him…. if you are raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house….. and we both find him even when he's not there. Yelling at us in our minds. Telling us why we are not enough. Or why we are too much. We both know what that's like.
I've always been overwhelmed about my family. And they are my family, they are his too, we are all family and I love them but we are all just terribly naive and ignorant people, to each other. I have never felt at home in life. Because of the walls we put up in between each others feelings.
I have always needed and still need a father. I have always needed and still need a mother. I will always be in need of some older, wiser being to cry to. I have always attempted to talk to God, but the sky has consistently been overwhelmingly empty. So of course I'm angry.
I know you feel frustrated and overwhelmed over my emotions that just remind you of my mother who never loved you the way she should have. But of course I feel big feelings. Can’t you see why? Of course I refuse to let things go. Can you not see why?
Do you have any idea how many times I was feeling and hurting and someone should have helped me? I was just a child. A child in need, forced to live, forced to listen and never be heard.
I have always felt that my father had two contradictory, colliding and chaotic sides to him: sometimes stern and ragefully passive, sometimes gentle and fun. It's a mix that's embraced him and stuck with him over the years. Despite moments when he seemed overbearingly tough, I also knew he was capable of great kindness. And he is.
We are both an excessive mess of quiet and decent intentions gone very wrong. We have tentatively struck matches on ourselves to keep others warm, and now the whole damn world is on fire. We try with all our energy to put it out, we try with such might. But the forest is in a blaze and the cracked dam holding back our selfish rage and personal hells break through, and the waters of our sorrow pours free, drowning all in sight. Our hearts are broken and we end up sending a tsunami upon everyone to prove it.
Sometimes I just wish the adults who were in my life growing up who put their pain above mine would've made it easier on me and said I never mattered. That I was a heavy burden. Not worth listening to.
At the same time I truly wanted, at least my dad, to simply say that I am not as forgettable as his silence and neglect still to this very day makes me feel.
I constantly write, I write because I know nobody listens. Especially not him. And some nights I feel so close to finally figuring it all out. Oh so close to some golden and sudden epiphany that would make all this suffering make much more sense.
I, as a tortured poet in my own right, I end up writing about my fixations, thoughts, feelings, experiences, beliefs, things that effortlessly excite or haunt me. Things I can't forget. Stories I carry in my very body, soul and bones, just aching to be scraped off and released. Softly felt and lovingly eased.
Father, you need to know, just because you love me, it doesn't mean I've ever felt loved by you. And I know what it's supposed to feel like, as I've been blessed to feel it from many people in my walk in life, and not just my gentle husband.
-Aubs
April 12, 2024
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