An ode to the woman whose womb I escaped from...and the fact she never shoved me back in to ask for a refund....

It's been quite a number of days since my last entry....and while I wish I could say a ton of crap has happened or at the least some life altering event such as a unbelievable Lotto win or certain individuals being hit by a moving car or my boss giving every employee a paid vacation...sadly, alas, this isn't even close to the truth...which is I was too tired, too drained from last week to think of anything worth writing about Friday, and then Saturday came complete with ass numbing, crack of dawn car ride to BCS for the biological's supervised visit...and so it is that I am fitting this one in between work on my desk and now cold cups of coffee because the woman suffering from hot flashes hasn't figured out it's 68 in the office and there's this wonderful little pill called hormones...and believe me it helps....

Friday was blah, and then Saturday was...well if you have lived or visited Bryan-College Station you can understand the loss for words....at least this time I had my mamma with me and so it was that she and Maxx and I found ways to pass the time...from meeting with my attorney to lunch at this quaint little dive called the Feedbarn (don't knock it yet...best damn hamburgers for that town...although they have nothing on Langford's) complete with awkward run-ins with has been friends who were too humiliated to call you back because they thought they were better than you, yet you're the one who made it out, and driving around aimlessly through neighborhoods of my past...and ending with a wet, cold splash day at the park, me barefoot and Max bundled up...

And lets not forget the infamous blue pen that leaked out all over Mom's cashmere sweater..which led to her changing mid drive down Briarcrest into the only spare clothing in the car....a worn, blue jean shirt of Marcus'...it would have been funnier if it had been something like Shark's "Justin Bieber Girl" shirt or a Hooters shirt....understand even it this last part is for public viewing, I have the type of mom who would wet herself with laughter, and explode into giggles if this were the case....hell, she and I would probably find it so hilarious we'd have taken pictures...she is just cool like that....

See, these trips aren't even dreaded anymore because of the pointless reason behind them which for those of you who don't know is so my worthless ex can spend 6 hours lurking and watching like some anorexic meth addicted looking scarecrow from teh sidelines as my daughter is taken care of by his parents and college aged sister....the few times he chooses to interact its through the script or urging of his parents..probably the whole time wondering when the next time he can get high is, justiftying why he doesn't have a job and doesn't plan on getting one, and why he cannot if asked tell you a single fucking thing about his daughter...not about the person she is, who she likes, what she reads, her fears, her wants, her favorite fucking color for Christ's sake...which is pink by the way, and probably for punsihment for all my past sins because i loathe pink....

No,  its also become the bane of my existence because I have now for the past few months had to make the trek alone...and given my unstable and dysfunctional relationship wtih my father...well you can see why its difficult to find things to do in a town where I no lonher have roots..its difficult enough for a couple of  hours, try a whole 6!!!

Any way...there's this saying..a quotation from someone famous...I could tell you it a number of years ago, like say 10th grade before I began burning brains cells...and so I can only recall bits and pieces...but its something about never being able to go home again...

Well ain't that the truth.   It isn't just the fact that the town itself has spread eagled out to engulf acres upon acres of more land, chewing up the trees and spitting them back out in the form of restaurants, mini malls, gas stations, Costco's and Wal-Mart's. Which the town has a total of 5, count them 5!  I guess its one of those white small town mecca things...like the urbanites calling to Whole Foods or something...

Anyway....it's more than anything that every landmark I had a deeply rooted emotional investment with significance to the people and events in my life...well they aren't fucking recognizable, and I guess that's why I hate, loathe, wish to avoid this place at all costs...and then I begin to realize I am unrecognizable as well, and its this loss of identity and the failture to secure or find my identity in my present state that leaves a bitter taste on my tongue.

It starts with the childhood home I was born in that is now falling down around its foundation complete with wethering paint chips and buckling warped shutters...and descends even further with the house where my sister was born, and its tacky white painted stucco and torn fence with beer can strewn yard....

I drove past the hospital I was born with its moss colored grim stuck to the stucco and portico of  the building with its shabby faded sign...and I am reminded of the tiny onesie bearing "Born at St. Joseph's Hospital" on my Unger teddy bear tucked in Charlotte's toy box at home, and the matching one I have from her birth at the same hospital in her baby book and so it is my heart feels achey...and a little worn...

Then it was that we went past the park I wasted my parents money on my first wedding...which went from a pristine historical landmark to a seedy derelict vagrant and crack head filled stomping ground....is the irony lost on anyone who attended that wedding and watched silently from the sidelines as my joke of a  marriage deteriorated ? show of hands? that's what I thought...very much like art imitating life, buildings imitate life...
or parks in this case....

and so it was we proceeded to drive past my old house on Ashburn Ave...the house that would represent our demise as a family with two parents, and rebirth of our family with a mother who had found her voice, her place in the world and realizing it wasn't and didn't need to be next to the prick from her wedding pictures who decided that other prick came before his family....hell, we share DNA and I cannot deny he is my father, but that doesn't mean I have to claim him, feel sorry for him or make excuses because he sucked ass as a husband and even more later as a father...and all because he cannot commit to a wife, commit to a family because it would mean for one nano second puttign someone first besides himself..amazing my sister, one of the most brilliant and beautiful woman I have ever met inherited this trait and if she has any crippling flaw it is this..the inability to live in a world that does not revolve around her...thank god she's on the pill.....

And so it was this sad, sad little house that at one time bore the holes punched in doors, and walls echoing the screams and cries of a cowering woman with a little bit of paint, love, painful back breaking sweat and not just from the day laborers but us as well and badass pansy wallpaper like the pansies in the newly blossoming flowerbeds and state of the art appliances didn't just go from drab to fab....it went from broken to whole....with the few months it took my mother to find that voice which she used to scream at the top of her lungs that she was still standing, to start living life for her, for us, for something better than what he left us with...well all it took was a sledge hammer in the hands of someone opressed for that many years, and the possibilities are endless.....except for that goddamn door. 

This door was to the master bath, and for 8 years bore a hole on the lower half of the door that was the exact size and shape of my father's work boots....result of a night of anger over some trivial and no doubt on purpose argument so he could exert his feelings of inadequacy on my mother's face, the furniture, hell the dishes which dwindled to some hodge podge set....that night for whatever reason she tried to get away...and so it was that my sister and I, so used to the lullabies of domestic violence, were disturbed by this fight enough to wake up. And he became so filled with rage, so furious his children would see this side of him (of course discounting the fact we heard it for months, years through the closed doors)....well he came after her while she held us. And thus a mass exodus to the bathroom occurred, and that motherfucker because I cannot describe a man who is that much of a piece of shit with any other noun or pronoun or obscenity to tell you the truth that would be such a coward, so scared of being less of  man even with a 57 inch neck to make his own children cower..well he attempted to get her through the door......

We spent the night curled up in the tub of my parents bathroom with my mother guarding the door, and so it was that the fucking door was the one thing my mother wouldn't let the contractor replace....she swore it was to stay at all costs as a reminder as to how bad it could get, and how bad we weren't going to let it get....fuck, it was her way of making us stronger, to suck up the hardships and stomach it. Deal with it. To not ever ever let anyone take you back there. To choose to go back there.

Kind of a AA chip for an alcoholic or a picture of a fat chick for a recovering over eater....whatever you pick to compare...it was that....and so much more...

Even the day we stood on the porch and said good-bye to the house, touching its newly fresh paint, and lovingly staring at the vast 1 acre lot complete with Rockwell type children's fort and playground, the foundation hadn't changed, that door was still there...

and maybe it was such that when we sat there Saturday staring at the cracked paint, the splintered boards, the fence long gone, the trees dying, the brick wall torn down, and the pansies ripped from their beds....maybe it was as we sat crying in vain, that we realized that as much as we have changed, as much as we have been made over again and again, our foundations are the same...

And not in a bad way....maybe that bruised and sore woman is there to remind herself how bad it can be...much like that door we all bear holes...they are different shapes, different sizes..and they are caused by different things...but we can paint, we can patch, we can redecorate and it isn't trying to escape...

None of these homes, these places are a way for us to escape what we were, are, am....they're just reminders of what was once before, what was, what has been, what will be....so philosophical I can sound comparing my life, my trials and tribulations to that of a bunch of home renovations....but that is in essence what we were, are, sitting there in the cold blistering wind, rain pouring down, peering through the windshield wipers at a an existence that seemed so fucking long ago..but not long ago for those memories, equally good and equally bad to come flowing back...

From lazy summer days picking dewberries from the bushes in the back part of the lot, zooming around on the riding lawnmower...shoving my sister from the top of the fort, cats with pants (whole another story involving the sweetest tabby on Earth and my sister's baby doll clothes), 6 Doberman puppies galloping around the yard.....the crack in the door way at night as we watched silently to make sure our mother was ok...the woman whose husband didn't give a shit about her car being fixed and so it was that in flash flood water she loaded her kids in a Red Flier wagon complete with heavy raincoats and galoshes and pulled us all the way to school....to bra's on the outside of sweaters at Pizza Hut, late Friday nights on the couch with cheese dip, Christmas trees people were too lazy to take down turning them into Easter trees,  piano music trickling out the window in the breeze on a beautiful spring day.....

 A fact I cringe to share, and rarely do unless I'm paying you $150 a session to pour out and analyze my soul or my mom who holds me hand when I retell it, admit it...just as she did Saturday....but as I stare at that house I am reminded that from the day my father left until my mother married John I slept in her room, either in bed with her or on the floor in a sleeping bag because I couldn't sleep in a quiet house. I couldn't fall asleep because of there was no screaming, no fist pounding on tabletops, walls, flesh....and so it was I was a smooth, bitchy, bad ass cunt at school, and came home to the confines of those four walls to cower like a baby from a past I know is my foundation...but it isn't what fills the rooms of who I am....

What I am trying to say in this weak and tepid attempt at a metaphor is that for me these places, these poignant reminders of where I come from, my roots if you will, may change, may be painted a different color, may be knocked down and rebuilt....but the foundation is still there....I am still here....that little cowering girl is still there, but Saturday she chose to hold her mother's hand, and rather than runaway from her past, she embraces it. She cries, she laughs, she rolls with the punches....

She realizes that its life, and something tells me I have one hell of a life left in me if I can still be here standing, cracks and all.....I cannot tell you what kind of house I will be, what kind of structure...I shatter like glass, I can crumble like bricks, I can catch fire and combust like wood.....hell, I could be some crazy odd looking house with naked hippy fairy statues in the garden, and wind chimes on the porch which when the wind blows sounds like the tinkling of a piano of a beautiful spring day....and I don't mow the grass for weeks on end, and I never, never have matching furniture....But I am still standing, and that's all the matters..


And so it was with a maudlin heart I picked up Charlotte, and as we drove back I glanced into the rear view mirror and prayed that I was building a foundation strong enough to help her stand...like my mother built for me....