Yore, Yesterday, and Now

Time is passing slowly,  the doors which were opened after almost half a century have occasioned  fresh air to blow through the place of memories.

With the fresh air and the bright light of the sun on that place, healing has happened.

I am recalling how difficult my own reunion with my daughter's father was. Just below the surface of the forgiveness of everything, was a raging fire of resentment for the way everything came to pass.

When the resentment resurfaced, my emotions were in charge, and I struggled to function - let alone - maintain a sense of disidentification from the teenager who is now at the other end of her life.

 I did not want my daughter to get to know her father and come to be good friends with him.

At the same time, I did not want them to  get to know each other without me.

Also, at the same time, I was elated that my daughter could actually and finally meet the father whose genes she inherited, as well as many physical features.

In a blind attempt to bridge the gap between then and now,  experiencing the full  enjoyment of their meeting each other was clouded by the dust which had settled on the memories of yore.

Fortunately, for the sake of the event, I also was filled with a natural sense of delightful relief that this long held secret dream of connecting was becoming really real.

Since that week, almost a year ago now, I have done some extensive reflection on why it was that I held the man in my heart as an undying love.

This goes deeper than the undeniable fact that we share a beautiful daughter's origins.

I have come to see how much he was like my own father - a charismatic, handsome, aloof, and charming musician. Whether he actually slept with other women will always be an unknown, but he sure was good at socializing without my mother, with his musical band of minstrels.

My father also was seriously an alcoholic. Life of the party and a master at throwing good parties, the drinking finally took its toll and he headed for his life saving bottoms out crash. By then he was in his 70's.

He was a spiritual man, Mason, and a guide for my brothers and I into the source of the power of the Mystery. I can recall those moments vividly to this day.

In my relationships, I feel comfortable with addicted men. Perhaps my daughter's father was such. I sure spent my weekends in wild abandon at the end of my teens. I have forgotten most of the details of those couple three years.

While I may not remember details, but I can say even today, that my love for that man was the one and only time I loved with everything I had to give.

I do remember my feelings when I was finally pulling myself together and beginning to establish some boundaries and a sense of self worth. It was then realized I was pregnant for my daughter and went numb emotionally.

I felt he and I had gone our separate ways. We had a conversation or two around the  "what if I got pregnant?" He flat out had decided I would get an abortion which, at the time, meant a needle in a back room somewhere. He was sure he wasn't going to marry me - or ever get married.

We had  just drifted apart. I had been replaced and was doing my darnedest to replace him. (Those were the days before the feminine revolution).

I was confused and paralyzed. My mother was angry and hysterical over what I had "done to her". My father was silent, seething with anger under his silence. They asked me who the father was and I lied.

They never asked me what I wanted to do about my pregnancy. They simply whisked me off to an aunt - which is the way it was done then.

However, at my aunt's there was an uncle and two cousins who were  resentful of my being there -justifiably so, given the mindset of the times.

So, arrangements were made for me to stay with a rich woman, a famous water color artist, and take care of her bed-ridden mother and clean her house.

Later, I entered a home for unwed mothers for the duration of the pregnancy.

Every day from when I first I left home to go to my aunt's, I wrote a letter to my daughter's father, then threw it away. It would be to no avail. He had made up his mind who he was and where he was going and I would be an unwelcome intrusion.

 Slowly, I stopped writing the letters and focused more on the  blessing of the growth in my womb and my delight in anticipating the moment I could hold her in my arms.

When that moment arrived, I thought of him again, really feeling he would be delighted as well. I remember feeling the loneliness of regret- a small cloud of realizing the next steps surrounding the elation of being a mother holding the most beautiful daughter ever to be born.

 When it was time to fill out the birth certificate, I am sure I wrote his name as the father. I spent hours deliberating whether or not to leave it blank.

Later, back home and engaged to another, this man who I have held dearly in my hear,  he photographer as well,  offered to take pictures at my wedding. The groom was adamantly opposed so that didn't happen.

I saw him in a car park in Singapore while there en route to Australia some years later. I had run into his mother a couple of  months earlier. She told me he was in Singapore, and gave me his address. I did not get to  talk to him in Singapore.

For  almost a half of century, his energy has been living in my heart, occasionally showing up in my reveries with some illusion or another.

But, now that it has been almost a year, since I met him as a real person today and not a half century old illusion, it has become possible to be real about this whole thing.

Like my father, he is aloof and emotionally unavailable. I sensed that he was almost paralyzed by his own overwhelming emotions  accompanying this meeting of this child - now a beautiful woman - of our love.  He was graciously present, while at the same time keeping his emotional distance at all costs - at times bringing up a woman friend as a reminder of the present day - or mentioning his recently departed wife of forty years.

We both were in the whirlwind of yesterday and today all spiraling  and bringing chaos to the chronological pattern of it all.

Maybe he has the same affliction as my father. Maybe he controls his great emotional passion with some form of self-medication. I do not dare to venture into the actual facts, nor do I need to.

What is important is that I come to grips with my own addiction, my own comfort zone, with those who have acquired a self-medicating habit, whether it be drinking or puffin' the magic dragon.

At the moment, I'd rather be alone than dancing with my father's likeness.

Dancing is supposed to be a joyful ritual, not a pain filled sense of being alone in the arms of a ghost  on a crowded dance floor.

The door is open now, fresh air blowing in and carrying oblivious dust away. With the light of the sun, exposing the heart of the matter, a healthy perspective is now possible.

Then was then. Now is now.

When is a time you have had the privilege of bringing the long remembered and forgotten past into the present and felt the healing power of holding the two in balance, allowing the presence of such a perspective?