Tag: mother

The Good Father.

A sauce packet detonates, exploding like a BBQ firework as it’s thrown against the wall. Wrappers and stray chunks of food litter the tables and floor. They yell over one another, louder and louder, a positive feedback loop that can only end in the rupturing of eardrums. One kid walks across the seat cushions right in front of me, from one booth to the other, like the floor is fucking lava.

As I’m mopping up a large drink one of the kids spilled, just beneath another litter-filled table, one member of this gaggle of giggling idiots darts by at Mach 10. In the process of doing so, he catches the leg of his shorts on the mop handle, almost de-pantsing himself in the process.

I bark, “Hey!,” and after stopping a moment to apologize and catch a breath, the jacked-up poster-child for pro-choice just picks up where he left off.

Where are the parents, you ask?

Probably at home, their negligent fathers still convinced their pull-out game is strong despite evidence to the contrary, so both them and the wives consequently busy making more unsocialized crotch-goblins they’re not prepared to care for.

No matter, they’ll just send their little sociopaths to the local fast food joint, where a 45-year-old, childless bachelor with bleeding ears and rising blood pressure will be forced to clean up after them and carefully bottle up his rage so he doesn’t go ape-shit on the little spidermonkeys.

I should’ve been a fucking librarian.

After wheeling the mop bucket into the corner, I take a deep breath, averting eye contact with anyone, and approach the door at the front of the building. Slipping out, I proceed to smoke a cigarette and reconsider my life choices.

A few puffs in, a girl walking down the sidewalk turns her head towards me, makes an “o” face, smiles, and laughs in apparent lunacy. Even given the tell-tale signs, it takes a moment for me to realize who this is, as I’m not accustomed to seeing her in anything other than her fast food costume.

It’s Psycho.

A pretty girl of perhaps seventeen years of age, she’s been a coworker of mine for the last two months or so. She’s prone to dramatic outbursts of energy which marijuana either serves to quell or exacerbate, depending on the day. As she walks up to me, I ask her why on earth she’d elect to come here on her day off, and she doesn’t hesitate to tell me that she’d much rather be here than home.

Then she bears all. Cliff’s Notes of her life story comes rushing out in firehouse fashion.

She tells me how her father and step father have both raped her. How her step-father would frequently do so when she took a shower. How her father would hold her and her nearly half a dozen siblings at gunpoint when any of them left the house. She explained how he’d walk behind her, keeping the handgun under his shirt, pointed at her back.

One day, she finally called the cops on him, and that’s how she escaped that fucked up circumstance and the state of South Carolina and came to live with her mother and her mother’s wife here in Ohio. Her mother who, while not physically abusive, at the very least, isn’t much of a mother, either. Her wife? Evidently a total bitch.

I know she’s not lying about any if this, and so it blows me away how she tells me all of it so casually, without teeth clenching, devoid of teared-up eyes. She just says it matter of factly. As if to say, hey, this is just what happens, isn’t life crazy?

It fucking breaks my heart. I feel myself crumbling inside.

It’s no wonder she has issues with men. It’s no wonder she gravitated towards that negligent and selfish bitch, May, who takes delight in lying and excuses her habit of constantly cheating on her girlfriends and obsolving herself of guilt by referencing her “abandonment issues” and other psychological glitches.

Shitty relationships is all Psycho has ever seen, ever known, and the familiar provides comfort, which is a more reliable source of psychological security than the risk of the unfamiliar, however much higher the odds of attaining happiness might be.

I was again reminded how some parents just shouldn’t be parents, which immediately brought my mind back to the circus of amphatamine-fueled midgets occupying the dining room on the other side of the window to my back.

Had my assumptions been too harsh?

When I was a teenager, I suddenly reexperienced — as opposed to simply remembered — something that had occurred earlier in my youth. This kind of thing had happened before, but this particular instance was different.

I was at my friend’s house, in the bedroom he shared with his four other siblings. It was a rare instance in which they were left alone, unsupervised by their strict parents, and apparently all the energy they’d been forced to repress had built up a surplus so that when they were finally alone for a brief period, it all exploded.

They were running around like lunatics. The youngest, a boy, climbed atop the toy chest, wrapped a blanket around him and lifted a flashlight high into the air with one hand, pretending to be the Statue of Liberty, and began singing the Star-Spangled Banner at high volume.

Given I knew what was coming, this must have happened before. I dropped to my belly, scooted beneath one of the bunk beds, and awaited the inevitable. I didn’t have to wait long until the door burst open and in came the father with his belt.

For all I knew, maybe it was the same with these kids. Maybe their parents were as insanely violent as my friends father was, and now that they were unsupervised, the volcano of energy erupted.

When the cat is away, the mice will play.

Maybe I just don’t understand because, unlike them, I had loving and present parents. It’s true that my mother and I had serious issues up until maybe my mid-30s, but it’s clear as day to me how lucky I was — how lucky I am — and certainly in a relative sense.

Many boys have fathers that are abusive, negligent, or altogether absent. I can say without hesitation that my father is and has always been my favorite fucking human being ever. I could never hope to express how much I love the man.

So yeah, I’m lucky, so maybe I’m just being ignorant given my different, personal, historical context and I really shouldn’t be mad at those untamed circus monkey children that invaded our fast food dining room.

Later, I was talking with Brian, another maintenance guy, back in the stock room. In the midst of conversation, he tells me he thinks I’d make a good father. This is a strange coincidence, as I’ve told him nothing about what occurred that day or the shit that had been going on in my head as a consequence.

My immediate response was that he shouldn’t say that.

I tell him that I’ve finally settled into the thought of being alone, and that it probably suited me best. I need my alone time, and that never went iver well on the rare occasion I had a girlfriend — it sure as hell wouldn’t make me suitable for a wife and kids, and at 45, I’d dodged all that thus far.

Come August, I’d be quitting this job, hopefully landing in a better-paying one, and moving into a trailer close to my family where I’d likely live alone until I die. I was good with that.

Maybe I’d get a cat, that was it.

I calmed a bit and thanked him, and confessed I’d been told that before, but it always perplexed me. Plus, I’m not sure I’d want to bring a kid into this world, particularly given it’s trajectory, at least as I see it.

He tells me that this mentality is part of the reason I’d make a good father.

Then he jokingly says this conversation almost seems like a flashback sequence. That we’ll both be looking back on this moment sometime in the future and laugh at my reservations.

“Oh fuck no,” I tell him. “Please, please don’t say that.”

I’ll settle for a cat. I’m just fine with a cat.

Of Drive & Direction & Fucking Philadelphia (2/1/21 Dream).

“Sometimes
I feel the fear of
Uncertainty stinging clear
And I, I can’t help but ask myself
How much I’ll let the fear
Take the wheel and steer.”
— Incubus, Drive.

2/1/21

It felt as if it had been one of those busy dreams filled with activity I couldn’t remember. At some point I looked out the window of what seemed to be the second floor of my parent’s house and peered out at the various cars parked in the driveway turnaround, covered in snow from what I recall, none of which were my own — and then it hit me. A kind of terror crept up from inside me.

It was my car. I couldn’t remember where I’d left my car, and this localized amnesia bothered me to an extreme degree.

I asked my mother, who was nearby, where it was. She said it was parked outside of some building in Philadelphia. Confused, and apparently assuming I could rely on someone to take me there, I told her I needed a detailed map of how to get home from there. In response, my mother says nothing, just hands me a piece of paper and a pen, never providing me any directions at all.

On the ride there, with her and I both passengers, I think, I’m speaking to my mother about something, and though I don’t remember the subject I do recall that I was cussing wildly, being domineering, putting my foot down, talking over her, not even letting her get in a word edgewise, yelling at her at one point to “just get over it,” speaking to her in a manner that even I felt at the time to be cruel and unjustified.

I could feel her pain as I said these things, spoke this way to her, just as I assume I would in real life. I felt deeply, incredibly guilty for expressing all these rage-fuelled things to her — but for some reason stubbornly persisted in doing so.

It bothers me that I’ve now had another dream that seems to suggest that on some level my anger towards my mother remains. I like to think all that bullshit is behind us, water under the bridge, that I’ve forgiven her for treating me the way she did when I was a kid and that I’m grateful for all that help her and dad have given me, particularly in the last few years.

Still, as this dream reveals, some stubborn part of me clearly can’t let go, even after all these years. Vice grip on that too-old anger remains strong.

Then there’s the matter of the car. In my dreams, cars generally mean one of two things, at least as far as I can tell: they either reference my body or they reference my motivation or “drive” in life. Cars breaking down, smoking under the hood, getting flats or losing tires completely — these are recurring symbols in my dream life. Clearly, I have motivation issues, and these issues almost always come down to my anxiety. I don’t need dream recall to know that, but my dreams clearly feel that its necessary to hammer it in anyway.

So in this dream, I’ve yet again lost my car — lost my drive, in other words. And I needed to get my drive back in order to get “home,” which may suggest I need motivation in order to get where I want to be in life, either internally or externally.

The external has been on my mind quite a bit for some time, though this may also reference the internal. A day or two before this dream, I awoke from another busy dream I can’t remember where I was in charge of people, helping and directing them as some kind of authority. That was my sense, anyway. What amazed me was how I still felt for a short time after I awoke, the mood or state of being that carried over into my waking life like some kind of dream residue.

I felt like I had a stable, sturdy, independent, confident place within me — I wasn’t in this chaotic, raging storm state of flux that has become my psychological baseline. I had some ground within me to stand on that no one could take away. It was a weird yet awesome and beautiful feeling, and it was weird because it was so foreign to me. Its like I didn’t know what I was missing until I had it, albeit transiently, and only then could I see my former state, to which I promptly returned, for the chaotic, hellishly unstable state that it was. Given it was a recent dream, it may have been related.

To get back to my current dream, however, there is the matter of my car being parked outside a building in Philadelphia. As for what Philedelphia means, it beats the hell out of me. I’ve never been there, so far as I can recall, nor can I imagine why my unconscious would elect my car to be there — not my actual truck, mind you, but evidently the cursed car I previously owned.

My drive resides in a foreign place? Maybe thats the general message.

In the dream, I had to rely on others to get my drive back, however — as well as rely on my mother specifically for directions on how to get “home.” In other words, that dreaded dependence on others, always. And while the dream ended with me being a passenger, and presumably me hitching a ride back to my “drive,” I still had no bloody idea how to get “home” once I got it.

I find it curious what my mother did when I asked her for detailed directions on how to get home (after I apparently selfishly assumed they would drive me back to my car, which also bothered me): she handed me a pen and a blank piece of paper, yet said nothing. Gave me no sense of direction whatsoever, let alone the detailed directions I’d asked for.

It reminds me of another dream I had years ago. I hope I’m remembering it correctly. The relevant part of it involved this room in which there was this incredibly complex machine, one in the style of a Rube Goldberg machine. These kinds of machines are unnecessary complex contraptions that rely on chain reactions to do an incredibly simple task.

In the dream, I was using it in the vaguest way — to “find the answer.” In the end, the machine, from what I recall, spat out a plush puppy dog and a pen. Inside the plush dog, I found a small pad of paper. Or maybe it spat out the small pad of paper and the plush dog contained the pen. In either case, the result was the same as asking my mother for detailed directions in the current dream.

The message in the not-a-message, the answer in the not-an-answer? Its up to me. The answer lies within.

After this old dream, while still in that twilight state of consciousness, I asked the dark of my mind what the answer was. I saw my parents driveway from much the same perspective that I did in this current dream, only it was filled with black triangles. One triangle became prominent, and within it, it contained a spiral. Then a voice said, “The answer lies within.”

Evidently my mother communicated the same message: the answer lies within.

Figure it out for yourself.

So I’m just supposed to wing it? Not even my unconscious can provide a direction for me in life? That’s my answer — that’s still my answer, after all these fucking years?

I know I’m stuck in life. I know I don’t know how to get un-stuck. And I want to be independent, to make my way home, wherever that is — to make a home — but I’m still stuck here, lost and frustrated.

I don’t know what the fuck to do.

I know this is pathetic. And that I don’t want to be pathetic. And that its pathetic that I don’t know how to not be pathetic.

The answer lies within, I guess.