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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