Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable.

I’ve written before about how the day I became a mom I started seeing other people differently. I couldn’t help but see people through the lens of thinking about how their mothers see them. Instead of sitting next to a man at Starbucks and not thinking twice about him, I’d give him a real look and search in his face, his expressions, his gait… all the things that his mom might see when she looks at or thinks of him. Instead of just standing behind a teenage girl and being glad those years are way behind me, I’d look at her and think about how her mom use to do her hair but now probably worries about every choice she might make while she’s off exercising her independence and how she wishes she could protect her from all the things that she knows exist in the world around us that will ingrain in her that she isn’t good enough despite all the things she has done to try to make her immune to those messages.


But then…


I learned a long time ago not to be too quick to apply my own values to other people and assume they think the same, love the same, protect the same, or basically have the same onion of a brain with all the layers that I have. Maybe their concerns are a different sort that I haven’t and wouldn’t even consider just due to the nature of our life’s circumstances and experiences. Maybe they have an element to their personality that I don’t have, such as the ability to not worry about the future, the ability to trust that everything will work out no matter what they do, the ability to just know they’re doing the best job and not stress about what they’ll realize later they missed… maybe they’ll never even give thought to what they might have missed and assign it to the category of being a result of someone else’s choices or just the results of chance. Some of those capabilities would be nice to possess, while others, both on this list and not, I feel grateful I don’t have. While I may one day look back on my life and these years of raising children and realize that I made poor decisions that should have been made differently, I know for certain that I am intentional every day in the attempt to not be that person. I try to find solace in knowing I spend a lot of time in my own head wondering what’s going on in my loved ones’ heads. I wonder sometimes where that comes from; was I just born that way or did my own journey through childhood and adulthood create this result? I think it’s a mix of both, although I wouldn’t attempt to guess the ratio. I am empathetic and compassionate to a fault - or is that even possible? But, if I could, would I choose to be less of either of those things? I don’t think so. But do others who do happen to be less of these things wish they were more of those things? I don’t know.  As I said, I cannot assign my own values to other people nor presume to know their point of view.


I do know it hurts me sometimes to think of the suffering of others and even more so the lack of concern from people for whom those sufferings don’t affect… that apathy… it bothers me, because I know it hurts people.  I know this because the apathy of others to my own pain has hurt me. As a result, I feel others’ pain when the indifference of people who have the privilege of not having been dealt that particular hand means that their pain goes unacknowledged or insignificant enough to do anything about it; even worse is when they presume to know what it’s like and determine that it’s insignificant.  Maybe the worst yet is those who DO know from experience and choose to ignore. The fact of the matter is that every single individual born has to live their entire life inside their own existence, and it is entirely unfair to have one person’s circumstances deemed less important than the circumstances of someone else. It is unfair for people who can choose to make life better for someone else to instead choose to make life better only for themselves. And it leaves a mark far beyond that moment.


Many of the people in my past feel like ghosts to me whether they’re alive today or not. Others feel as real to me and as constant to me as they did in my most nostalgic moments.  For some reason, when I wrote that last sentence, I had to stop; a heavy wave of emotion and tears came over me. Lifelong sadness and loneliness that I keep pushed down deep rose up and pushed its way up to the surface of my chest, up my throat, and out of my mouth and out of my eyes. This happens sometimes, and, when it does, I feel a bottleneck inside where more has risen than what I can get out of my mouth and eyes fast enough.  It’s been a while since I last wrote, and I think it’s because I haven’t wanted to feel the feelings I feel when I write about certain things that weigh on me. And now, there’s a bottleneck.


In a few hours, it is Father’s Day. As I do every year, I will focus on the man that is my kids’ father. The one who grew up without his own dad who passed away when he was a baby, the one who had step-dads who aren’t in his life today, and the one who somehow, despite all of that, just knew how to be a great dad to his own kids, guided by nothing but love and a strong work ethic. He has his faults as we all do, but he is not a mirror image of any of the father figures in his own life or in mine.  He is something much, much better. I have seen men with the best examples of how to be a father not be the kind of dad my husband is. This makes me grateful beyond measure, because the one thing more than anything that I want is for my kids to grow up with not a single solitary moment of doubt about how much they’re loved, how much they matter, how much we dedicate every moment of every day to being for them what we didn’t have.


But, here lately, I have been noting through the peripheral of my sub conscience that Father’s Day is approaching, and I’ve been allowing myself to think about what that day could be for me under different circumstances. I think about the many others (there are so many of you) who also focus on what Father’s Day means for their kids, ignoring their own needs that weren’t and aren’t met, stuffing their feelings deep inside and covering it with all the reasons they have to be grateful for other things so that they can make flowers grow from the rot below. I am covered in flowers. It looks like a magnificent garden from a distance, I’m sure. But sometimes that rot in the ground beneath the garden quakes and out from the cracks comes the sense of loss I have felt my entire life, out comes the pain I have felt from the indifference of others who don’t love me like I love. I grew up knowing every single day of my life that I was not loved the way I love. I’m 45 years old now, so that’s a lot of days.


I tell myself I am well-adjusted and don’t need those things and that I have filled in those spaces with other things that make everything ok. And I truly don’t need those things. But I want them. When my feelings rise to the surface, I go sit by myself in the dark so no one sees my red, blotchy face, and no one hears my uneven breaths or my now-stuffy nose. I don’t want to feel pity from anyone. I don’t want someone to stroke my arm. I don’t want to be reminded of all the wonderful things in my life - I know those things well and I can give a longer list of them than anyone else can give me. It’s not a ungrateful thing, it’s a worthiness thing. I just have to acknowledge what I push down and cover up and shrug off… that I want a dad to celebrate tomorrow that loved me from day one and did everything he could both tangibly and intangibly to make sure I knew that. I want a parent who walked around with their heart outside their body every day since the day I was born like I did when mine were born. I want to be that important to someone, that worthy, that special, that indispensable. But I’m not. And that’s not something you can just become one day. You either are from the beginning or else you feel the void of it until the end.


When I look at this picture and the few others I have from a time when my dad was still a part of my life before the next 17 years that he wasn’t, I see a ghost of someone that I wish I knew now in the way I knew then. The way I knew him then was without knowledge of 17 years of separation that were to come from ages 5-22 and without the 8 years of reconnecting from ages 22-30 that ended in me being angry that I lost him before I’d had the conversations with him I was waiting to have until he reached his senior years and would be ready to speak on things from the mature perspective that I needed. He died too soon and from something preventable… bad choices, bad habits, a predisposition… it’s hard to find the right words to sum it up. But I was angry, because I felt he owed it to me to have conversations with me I needed to have when he finally realized I’m very perceptive and hyper sensitive to bullshit. I knew he wouldn’t realize it anytime soon; he would get exasperated with me when I didn’t accept his words as genuine and refused to concede that I saw through his words. I was willing to wait, because what choice did I have? But then he just died. And so in my mind I focused on my brother’s pain instead of my own. I felt it was my brother who deserved that consideration, not me.


The man in this picture with me was practically a kid himself, just 17 years old when I was conceived. I found out the first time I talked to him at age 22 that I was born on his birthday. No one had ever told me that before and I didn’t remember knowing when I was little and he was still around.  In an odd way, it gives me a sense of a connection with him now. He’s been gone for over 15 years, having died a few months before Jose and I got married. He left me the gift of a brother who looks so much like me that I have always had to force myself not to stare at him. I spent my life searching for my face in the people on my mom’s side, and I never saw it short of a small similarity here or there. When I saw my dad for the first time at age 22, he was walking towards me. I hadn’t been sure I’d know how to tell who he was if there would be other men around, but the second I saw him and he saw me, we instantly recognized each other. I was staring at the male version of my own forehead, my own eyes, my own nose, my own cheekbones, my own mouth, my own body frame. We were very different people in mind and heart, in perspective and character. But he was funny, and I’ve been told I’m funny. So there was that. And he had a son whose voice I had heard when he was a baby when my step mother - my baby brother’s mommy who passed away before I ever had the chance to meet her, asked for me when someone at my house picked up the phone when I was around the age of 9 and handed it to me, telling me it was my best friend Cirila.  As I started chattering away and became quickly confused by the voice on the other end who clearly was not Cirila, and before I even understood her words telling me who she was and passing the phone to my dad, I heard my baby brother’s voice in the background. I remember very well the feelings I had in that moment: shock, fear, happiness - that he actually might love and think about me maybe, jealousy… yes, jealousy. Because they got to know my baby brother and I didn’t. Because my baby brother got to know my dad and I didn’t. But the next thing I knew, the phone was taken from me… someone had seen or heard my confusion. I never spoke to any of them again until the day when I was 22 years old I dialed the number for information and asked to be connected to the man who was responsible for my existence. It was amazing how easy it was to reach him. I remember the shock of it. All the stress and anxiety and courage it took for me to finally make that call with sweaty hands and within minutes his voice was on the other end of the line. I remember wondering if I should have tried sooner? But there was the fear… I never would have been so brave even though I had searched the faces of every stranger I’d seen growing up, always wondering if I might run into him and if we’d recognize each other. In my imagination, he would smile and hug me and say he’d been looking for me every day since the last time he saw me. He would say he never stopped loving me.


And then there was my baby brother now a 14 year old boy. He wouldn’t remember that phone call that our dad and his mom had made to me all those years ago. He probably didn’t know that I’d heard his voice and thought about him every single day since. He lost his mom when he was a little boy. That made me so sad. We had both suffered losses, but he lost his mommy. When I had my own kids later, this fact made my heart ache even more.


During those years of reconnection with my Dad, I got to meet (again) that whole side of the family and realized that I’d had another loss that I hadn’t fully grasped - the loss of people that I believed — and know now, especially with the years that have passed since - would have filled me with the kind of love and acceptance that I longed for growing up. It’s not that I wasn’t loved by mom’s side of the family; it’s just that there were so many conditions on a lot of that love… which you could argue means it wasn’t really love at all but instead some other sort of shallow affection.  But the love I have from my dad’s side of the family is real and has substance. My dad might not have been a great human being when I was born and I don’t blame my mom for leaving him, but the rest of the family was wonderful, and I hadn’t known that they’d missed me all those years. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was special enough to be loved and missed by people; surely, I'd assumed, they’d forgotten about me 10 minutes after my mom left with me and took us 1,000 miles north.  It took me quite a few years to believe that they cared about me as much as they said they did. I think a part of me waited for them to forget about me… that they’d be curious at first and then grow tired of me. The best thing that ever happened was when my Aunt Brenda took me by the hand via a group text with my aunts and cousins and pulled me into the fold. I’ve been there ever since, finally realizing that no one was going to forget about me, and, there, I was free to express my love for them too without fear of them throwing it away.  These are many of the seeds that became flowers in the garden that covers my sadness like a soft bandage.


During all of those years when my Dad was not in my life, I grew up wondering if he thought of me or if he’d been glad to have been rid of the responsibility. I carried on in the life I had without him in it and did my best to be a good kid, do well in school, stay out of trouble. My mom had remarried and had 2 more kids, and from the outside looking in, I’m sure it seemed like a story of redemption for her.  But, eventually, I began to experience terrible things that I knew in my very cells had to be kept secret lest I make someone else’s life complicated and uncomfortable. It would be a domino affect, and I dare not knock that first domino over.


For many reasons that I won’t write about here, I developed a convincing poker face that prevents many people from knowing what lies beneath. It’s my armor, my protection from showing my vulnerabilities that others might not understand or might take advantage of. At one time it was so I could survive. Now it is critical in ensuring that I’m able to maintain some control in my life - control I never had growing up and maybe control that I don’t even need now but still cling to… I’m working on this.  But part of that lack of control I had growing up was all the years I spent overcompensating so others could be more comfortable; anything less resulted in me feeling guilty for their discomfort. I was trained to do this by people who let me know in no uncertain terms that it was expected of me… people that “loved” me but not really… not the way I love.  During these years, I thought about my Dad and wondered if his violent tendencies towards my mother could be any worse than the private torment I had to endure and felt trapped inside. The things that were a part of my world now included the constant shifting of focus away from the bad behavior of others and placing it squarely on my shoulders to carry on without a fuss so everyone else could pretend nothing had happened. Years later, I would realize the extent to which this was true…. a few more years would pass and, with more age and wisdom, I’d realize it was even worse than I’d realized previously. Some people are capable of turning a blind eye to almost anything as long as it means they can live in their fantasy world where everything is idealistic and those that don’t conform are just causing trouble - I was and have actually been made to feel sorry for hurting other people’s feelings who had harmed me.  As I sit here typing these words, I am reminded that it took me until I was over 40 years old to finally take a stand and say, “No. I will not be your doormat, and I do not have to pretend, and I am worthy of more than what you are either willing or capable of being, and I will not spend another day of my life making yours easier for you by pretending that the images in my head that I have to live with don’t matter. To me, it’s unacceptable that I could never have a relationship with a man that has a beard because it makes my skin crawl to feel it on my skin. Since drawing boundaries that have continued to be violated repeatedly, I have been told that I’m selfish for not taking certain secrets to my grave. True story.


It’s not surprising when I look back that one of the recurring nightmares I had from the time I was a kid all through my teenage years and once in a while into my 20’s was of me walking quickly in the dark down the street towards the house my family lived in. I have the sense that someone is behind me and getting closer, and I’m picking up the pace feeling like I can’t find my breath. I get closer and closer to my front porch and become aware that the person behind me has a large knife. I am in a straight-up panic to make it inside in time before the person behind me stabs me. The porch light comes on, and I think I just might make it inside, but no one lets me in. I am banging on the thick, heavy door with both fists as hard as I can, and I only see faces looking out at me from the window at the top of the door. I am screaming but nothing is coming out. I sense the person right behind me and anticipate the knife plunging into my back right as I wake up in a full sweat and gasp for air, finally realizing that I couldn’t breathe in my dream because I’d been holding my breath in real life. If I had this dream once, I had it 1,000 times. It felt just as real every single time. It took me moving far away and physically separating myself to finally be able to mentally and emotionally separate myself years later from what had torn me apart for so long. Still, though, I continued to feel it was my responsibility to keep the secrets that so many who should have helped me already knew so that I wouldn’t disrupt others’ happiness. And that festered in me and weighed me down more and more as the years passed.


I said I look at people around me like their mom might look at them, but I realize - because I cannot apply my own values to other people - that I’m actually looking at them like I would if they were mine.  I’m looking at them like I wish someone would look at me, I suppose.  No man has ever looked at me the way my Dad looked at me when we reconnected when I was 22 years of age… full of amazement, gratitude, love, and pride and even some regret, I believe, at what he’d lost, and that’s another seed that turned into flower. I hold that memory close because I don’t have a lot of that sort.  Other boys and men in my life made me question whether I had any value at all for what’s inside my mind and heart or if I just had one use. They caused me to wonder if boys and men in general had any capacity for genuine love, integrity, morality, and trustworthiness. If not for a handful of truly good men like my Uncle Jerry, I would have grown up convinced of it.  But the women in my life were often just as bad because so many of them were complicit.  It took me many, many years to sort out what constitutes evidence of actual love and that I don’t have to DO anything to be deserving of it.


My Aunt Bev is one who is not a ghost to me. She is and has always been as good and as real and constant as my most nostalgic memories of her and so many flowers in my garden are there because of her. She is one of the shining stars from my childhood, the reason I do have some good memories too. From the night I slept next to her on the floor of the living room when I was 3 or 4 years old so she wouldn’t forget to take me to school with her like she’d promised, to the days of lying out on a blanket in the sun with her while we listened to her portable radio and wore big sunglasses, to the hours we would spend playing games with cards and dice while drinking sweet tea, to the summers I would spend at her and Uncle Jerry’s watching movies, loving her homemade chicken fingers, cutting her hair for her, and the hours and hours we would spend talking while she doodled out her name in bubble letters and painted her nails… all of this without me ever feeling for a second like she was hanging out with an annoying kid but that she genuinely enjoyed being around me.  When things were really, really hard for me, those memories and experiences reminded me that I was lovable and that there was good in the world and that the world was waiting for me to get through those tough years and find even more good and more love.


I can’t say that this is the part where I say, “And then everything was perfect.” No one can say that. There was more and more disappointment and hard stuff to come, but there was also a lot of self-discovery and beauty too… lots more flowers. The older I get, the more I realize and appreciate my need to care for myself. If I say I value myself, then I must act that way. I must insist that others might have to get a little uncomfortable if it means that I can finally find some semblance of comfort. It’s not about getting over something - I’m not persistently wallowing in anything; it’s about understanding that others’ discomfort is not my fault. The fault lies with the individuals who did the things that caused it all to begin with. I am within my full rights to create distance where I need to in order to finally let the broken pieces of my heart heal without it constantly being reinjured. I am entitled to a life without the constant reminder of toxic and painful experiences. I am deserving of inviting all the most loving relationships to come in and have the closest seats even if it means that others that previously occupied that space get moved further back. I must send some people out of the building altogether, and I have.


In Oprah's book The Path Made Clear, there are words contributed by Brené Brown that resonate with my feelings on being a parent, and they are: “Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable. You will learn this from my words and my actions; the lessons on love are in how I treat you and how I treat myself.”  I cannot say that anyone would have written those words to me, but I can say that I feel these for my kids. I know Jose feels them for our kids. And I know now that there are a tremendous number of wonderful mothers AND fathers out there that feel the same. I’m grateful to be among them, to have the awareness that I do even if I didn’t receive that - actually, especially because I didn’t receive it.


And now, with these words out of my head and off of my heart, I will look outward and focus on the man who is the best father to my kids that I could have asked for and celebrate him on Father’s Day.


With Love…

#ThePathMadeClear #OprahWinfrey #BrenéBrown #abandonment #flowergarden #nostalgia #healingabrokenheart #selfcare #motherhood #childabuserecovery

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