Three Year Old Me
The beginning is obscure.
I know very little about who they were before me, individually or in relationship to one another. I’m special in the commonality of this, I'm one of many. Legions of humans don’t really know what grew one or both of their parents.
The relationship between the masculine and feminine bears wide spread wounded-ness, unresolved pain, and countless forms of division. Nests that foster the growth of shame, the element that hides people from even themselves. Creation of disconnection in core relationships.
As above so below, look at the self relationship.
I suppose this is part of why I tell my stories.
Why I let my kids see me, I know truth to be love.
My parents have only ever avoided, lied, and amplified their bullshit when inquiry from me has presented itself, and then made me wrong for it.
I know my father less.
He has consistently hid from the experience of fatherhood through relentlessly present shame based obscurity. Like a mythical creature out there living a life I am left only to imagine.
The comedic thing being, my adoration for obscurity. Perhaps the pursuit of father is part of that equation. I know that at least in part, my affinity comes from the familiar incubated nature of it, it’s what I’ve known, the shadow of secrecy and judgment producing mythical obscurity.
I deeply value the safety of the shadow, but I’m learning that it need accompany honesty for any measure of art or respect to be in it.
Early 80’s my father became a familial hero for coming out, despite the house of Mormonism that had raised him. I get why, it’s a courageous bit of authenticity to embody the truth of individual sexuality in a deeply religious community. It’s mythical kind of brave. This substantially courageous thing has held sustainable admiration and worship from his family for over 40 years. I’m not trying to invalidate the beauty in this, but I am saying it’s been confusing for my inner child to process, for the same 40 plus years I’ve witnessed him do a lot of hiding. If coming out is the gig what is even happening?
I am learning about human fallibility.
He wasn’t known to me, his daughter, dis-interested in fatherhood and unwilling to own that as truth. Sexually out, emotionally hidden. He came out and left most of fatherhood behind him, and yet still maintains their worship, every challenge made into some form of sexual-hate. It was never that, that piece was only ever love and admiration.
I’m coming out of the closet of long held shame that isn’t mine, healing loudly and bringing my love of obscurity with me but leaving his shame inside.
I have minimal recollection of this sculptured little girl, three year old me, the felt sense of her is increasing as I integrate into my young self and process what couldn’t be previously.
I spent approximately 14 days a year with my father, he filled his bi-yearly trips to Utah with more than parental visitation, which meant I spent time during those visitation weeks at R’s house, one half of a gay coupledom my father friended in my early childhood. R was an artist who favored clay his medium and found me a muse long enough to turn little Audrey into a permanent fixture of art and energetic truth.
Little me huddled up on a floor pillow, holding a childhood element of strong recollection; a worn soft baby blanket with yarn ties that served as self soothers as I ran the threads through my fingers and feathered my face with the same. Rarely not accompanied by a thumb pressed firmly into the roof of my mouth, fracturing and refracting it’s frame. The essence of fear and sadness captured in clay.
I asked my father for the sculpture sometime in my 20’s, it had been in his possession since just after it’s creation. He wasn’t done with it I guess, he said no, but a few years later relinquished it to me in gift form.
I’ve often wondered if he ever saw that three year old the way I feel her, perhaps the truth motivating his resistance to my possession of it.
Based on history I can suspect I’ll never truly know.
It matters less and less these days, if he sees me now or at the tender age of three.
Because, I do.
I see little Audrey, she is inside every father wound ceremony I hold at my alter of meditative medicine, a sculpture the conduit of healing.
He was a classic Disneyland dad, though we never experienced the actual illusion of Disney fantasy together. I was his twice a year vacation to Utah, holiday centered around the 4th of July and Christmas. Where and when we mostly spent time with his family and friends. On occasion we’d sit fireside in the basement of my grandmother's house for a board game or two. We’d sometimes talk in the car shifting from one brothers house to a sister or a friends. Distractions and parties the pulse for our illusory relationship. He’d bring gifts and we would do fun things, and then, he’d leave and I’d comb my mind for any small knowing of him I had discovered in a weeks time.
I actually once lived with my father and his long term partner,
once.
Literally for the first and only time in my life, lasting only a few months time.
It was during a full blown teenage crisis in which I was attempting to resolve a pregnancy that ended in volatile miscarriage, produced in relationship to a violent criminal boyfriend of mine. These few months changed our relationship for life, felt and known, though the light of owned truth would not shine for 20 more years.
During those few months I discovered that most people called him by a name I had not known him by, I can’t say I was surprised. When and where I’d curiously sit on white couches made for Whoopie Goldberg’s wedding now housed in my father’s mirror obsessed living room, an intoxication with fame and appearance I could not fully understand, nonetheless the truth of what he valued unfolding. Where I became a file girl in Virgin Record’s LA accounting department, a place to watch over me close to his employ, where I also slept in the private office of his boss on a red leather couch while I listened to music and numbers exchanged. Where I learned to drive through LA’s luxurious neighborhoods in my father’s beloved mustang. But also where and when a few days a week I uncovered myself fully in an isolated frenzy of writing and sun kissed floating in the pool, nourished by the pranic inhale of jasmine and bougainvillea, my own isolated and lonely paradise as many days of the week that I could talk him into trusting me, to just be.
It all ended abruptly in the living room during a phone call with my mother that I was invited to listen in on. It was clear he no longer wanted me there, though he wasn’t being straight about why. My mother reluctant as well they fought over the responsibility of me, both closeted in dishonesty.
Rejected and discarded by my own creators, the very next day he drove me to Vegas, where he put me on a bus back to Utah. I’ll never understand why I didn’t run away from it all into the abyss of runaway-ness, I could have at any one of the various stops the bus made. I can only say it was like I had consumed a paralytic and had energy only for a feral fetal curl on the bus bench, where Jewel’s pieces of me kept me company as I watched the landscape move quickly in contradiction to my slowly beating heavy, stuck and broken heart.
My adult relationship with my father looked a lot like my childhood one, I saw him once or twice a year, always centered around a holiday and organized by visits with his family, or when I’d drive out to Palm Springs over spring break, always the vacation daddy.
I particularly enjoyed the long drive through Joshua tree national park on my way to Palm Springs where he had retired, I liked the desert more than anything. The kids, my kids, would endlessly swim in the various pools around his country club residence, and sometimes we'd talk about hard things but never us. We’d watch the golfers from the back patio and sometimes hit a few balls. I'd struggle with his ongoing obsession with mirrors that forced me to look at my own reflection when he wasn't looking at his. I'd settle into a weeks long perplexion regarding his new-ish partner who reminded me of Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. And always the driving through luxurious neighborhoods with modern vibes. He’d grandfather my kids in the same way he fathered me for a few days. He tried to step up a few times, when I had babies and would come in for a few days of energetically expensive help and then disappear entirely for a while.
This is how it went along between us, until that one spring six years back. I was in the trenches of another rock bottom state, over accumulated and stuck in toxic relationship by way of a wounded masculine lens. Including lover-king, my core, my one. I was broken and lost and down and reactive and all the tender things when I decided to take a road trip with my daughters (then 16 and 12) for a vocational escape from reality, he was always good for that and God knows I needed it. This time his partner’s tolerance for me was limited, more specifically my vacation attitude and wounded behavior, he insisted my father ask us to leave. We were rejected and kicked out of their home for whatever it was I was being.
The beginning of the end as it where, the incident that led to the only REAL conversation we ever had, he would not lose another partner because of me. Fractured by truth into the sea of millions of estranged pieces.
For me this conflict was medicine, I finally had the light of truth in the shadow. Finally embodied in the truth of what we were to one another, it was relieving and revealing.
I was carrying a bag for him, a weight of responsibility for having influenced the loss of his core partner, something I somehow did as a wounded child and had done again more recently. For him, I was to blame for what was his. When I first saw with clarity the beast I had always suspected was there, I kind of freaked the fuck out on him, right then and there in the one and only real conversation we've ever had. Weeping and hemorrhaging, cracked completely open, I gave it back and called bullshit on his perception. Who he was in that core relationship (which might have shown in who he was as a father) was what destroyed his relationship, not me, I was a dying kid.
Turns out he didn’t much like the medicine of conflict nor the truth of my perception, outside of a few complex letters subsequentially exchanged, we haven’t spoken since. His threshold for my lived experience of him, his toxic family and narcissistic partners, is low.
He’s just as much a coward as hero.
In his hiding and resistance to who he has been to me, to the truth of our story, in his addiction to the illusion that allows him to not enter the shadows of himself less heroic and redeeming, he hides the entirety of him and fosters disconnection, it has always been his choosing.
He and his family have worked hard to force the holding of shame on to me. A f culture of gossip, drama, ignorance, lies, and blame motivates projection onto the black sheep nicely. None of whom have taken the time to look me in the eyes or communicate directly, my lived experiences with them upset the demons they embody religiously. I keep a safe distance, having unapologetic boundaries.
The last several Christmas’ have called me back into the father wound. It’s more than the memory of holidays past visiting with the facade of fatherhood, it’s his family, his brother specifically, the self appointed judge and speaker. Whom contacts my adult children in hopes that in his slandering of me they will break behind me their estrangement with my father. My uncle, my family, my father have all under appreciated and estimated the mother that raised them but also the kind of humans those adult kids have come into being.
I receive the gift that this invitation is to surrender what is not mine and return to self, a continued healing of the negligent abandonment of the father wound.
It’s one I continue to be grateful for.
I breathe into the root, the yang.
And into the right, the masculine body, in the practice of loving curiosity and openness to the energy of the wounding.
Where I discover myself as I discover him more fully.
And arrive at the ho’oponopono song for us all.
I’m ready to see this whole thing through.
I’m sorry,
I forgive you,
Thank you,
I love you.
It’s not an easy journey, but neither is the alternative.
We all have father wounds, many of us akin.
This is us, and our collective need for healing.
I love you so much.
Audrey