My Story...

 Drowning in the abysmal dark of self-made and self-imposed prisons, I searched emotionally blind for light and truth… anything that I could stand on to lift me higher. I needed something to give me the direction to cope with what I did not even know was  having such a broad effect on my day-to-day life: the loss of my fatherhood, and my first child, to an undesired and unanticipated abortion.

  Flash back:

 It seemed to me that I’d had things taken away from me my whole life: My father, through divorce; my innocence, having grown up on the real mean streets of New York; and then after having been abandoned for a time as a young teen, I crashed and burned the rest of my youth.  Now as a young adult someone had taken even my child from me. I felt I had nothing left. Nothing left to give.

  For years I needed answers to questions that were too painful to ask and too painful to resolve. But whether I was hauling on a daily bottle of booze, or hauling my stoned, drunken-self up off the floor, or putting something in my nose, or putting spin on my very own brand of religion, I always came up short of answers. The only control in my life then was the easily circumvented government control on the drugs and alcohol that I found myself beginning to quietly and frequently abuse. I was in a frightening time in my life and was oblivious to the real monsters waging battle inside my head.

  Trying to make things in my life have meaning was numbing. Seeking to be comforted, needing something or someone to hold on to, and needing to be held, I entered into  numerous relationships which quickly failed, and years later, two marriages that were doomed from the start. I never abused the women in my life, or my children… I was already consciously and subconsciously abusing myself. I eventually even lost fatherhood with my now adult children, who alienated from me as teenagers, when I sought to divorce their hopeless drug dependant alcoholic mother.

  I have had as many as ten jobs in a year in my worst of times. Though possessing an excellent and professional work-ethic, I never seemed to be able to remain challenged and focused on the future. To many who knew me, all the civil-service type jobs I held in my best of times, (i.e.: police officer; firefighter; emt; etc.,) were a death-wish. I hung from gliders, flew and jumped from airplanes, drove very fast cars, battled face to face with bad guys, rented my martial art skills to guard people, bounced bars, worked in secret places,  volunteered for danger, ran into burning buildings, cut people out of crashed and burning vehicles, and worked in the most hazardous electrical, chemical and industrial environments I could find, as if I were some five foot-seven inch tall bullet-proof ready-Freddie adrenalin junkie chasing his own tail. My whole life had slowly become an Evel Knievel extreme long-jump gone very, very, bad.

  Hitting rock bottom each time, I would desperately try to re-invent myself. Every time I was faced with a chunk of the puzzle-past that I was avoiding, I would re-create something to fill the gap, blurring myself from the hidden truth.  I was unknowingly hiding myself and my past from others, never fully understanding who or what I was running from. If someone got too close to me, inside, I would unconsciously steer away and reinforce my self-made reality. One lie chasing another, and always in the background, the memory of my dear mother’s encouraging voice booming in from the past like a Swiss yodel: “what are you, retarded, retarded, retarded? You're never going to amount to anything, anything, anything!”

Flash forward:

 Coming to terms with reality is never easy, and there is always a price to pay. The cost of my own path to discovery is immeasurable in terms of lives and loves I have lost, lives forever changed, and opportunities both encountered and lost, and missed… entirely unexplored.

Twenty-five years later I slowly began to heal. I finally understood why the end of the year was always such a terrible time for me both emotionally and psychologically. The profound sadness that unknowingly and unerringly consumed me, (worse at that time of year,) was not to be alleviated by the later presence of my living children, who were the first rays of hope in my life of having done something right. While always outwardly trying to be cheerful during the holidays, inwardly I always sank abysmally to crush-depth, always full of plastic smiles for all to see.

The connection that I finally made was remembering that my son was aborted 15 December of 1976. I never had closure. I named him Charles, in 2005, when he  would have been 29. I still regret my lost fatherhood.

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