Totaled Denial November 30, 2007

My father was involved in a terrible car accident two weeks ago that left his car totaled and him surprised to be alive. My 16-year-old sister was the one to accidentally inform me of this a few nights ago.
 
Accidentally because our phone conversation began when she called to ask how one determines the subject in a sentence that uses passive voice. And it migrated to how my mother was anxious to see her new Saab SUV. Which led to me wondering aloud why the hell our family needs four cars. Answered by my sister telling me that my father’s truck was gone and that she had cried when she saw the metal carnage. And ended when my sister asked, “Do you think I wasn’t supposed to tell you about the accident?”
 
Denial. It’s not just a river in Egypt.
 
Growing up, I lived in a town that was frequently listed in the top half of national lists that rank the best cities to live in America. Or raise a family. Or find good schools and safe streets and a real sense of community. One of those types of lists. It was a town with only one high school. The type of place where doors are left unlocked and golf courses can be found 10 minutes apart from one another. Where everyone and everything is beautiful and white and clean and perfect on the surface.
 
I played the charade. I never told anyone what happened behind the closed doors of my house, the endless oppression and desperation I felt when I was inside it for loving someone so much who used love to excuse decimating everything about me that made me me. I went to school every morning with a large smile on my face. I got the grades and played the sports and had the hoards of friends. I got invited to all the parties and the tailgates and the bonfires and I lied endlessly when explaining why I wouldn’t be able to make it to this one this time. It was playing by the rules. Because that was my high school and that was my town.
 
Nothing, I think, can be as suffocating to a person’s soul as playing so much pretend. Playing dual, triumvirate, quadruple roles. Trying so hard to convince yourself that when you tell your best friend Allison that you’ll be at her house at 5:00 pm before the football game later that night, that this time, it’ll be true. And willing it to be true. Then going home after school and accepting the reality that if you dare ask your father for permission, he may strike you just for entertaining the idea of asking if it was okay.
 
In hindsight, I don’t think labeling my decision to not tell anyone what happened at the hands of my father as being fake is entirely accurate. I truly wanted to believe that I was the girl everyone thought I was, the one with the perfect life, the perfect family, the perfect home. I may have been trying to fool everyone around me, but I think I was trying to fool myself the most.
 
I prayed. A lot. I prayed every night that when I woke up, I’d have a father who wasn’t afraid to love his family. I prayed for a father who’d stop hurting me. For a father who I didn’t need to be scared of and feel like I had to protect my family from. I placed myself in front of the firing squad, took the brunt of his verbal anger, because I didn’t think my mother and my sisters could still be whole if they were the targets. It hurt too much thinking of them hurting that much. 
 
These aren’t the things I remembered when my sister told me my father was involved in a terrible car accident two weeks ago that left his car totaled and him surprised to be alive. 
 
I remembered my father waiting for me every single day by the fence outside of my preschool with my favorite popsicle when it was time to be picked up, him hoisting me on top of his shoulders as we walked home. I remembered the day he taught me to ride my bicycle with no training wheels and how, when I finally got it right, with the background of my father’s laughter, I felt like I was flying. I remembered when my mother wouldn’t listen to my pleas to not make me sing O Holy Night in front of the whole town because I was terribly shy when I was a little girl. She was too busy insisting it was a great honor to be chosen for having the prettiest voice among all the students at my elementary school, and it was my father who talked to my mother and convinced her that it wasn’t the right thing to force me to do.
 
And I remembered how when I went home in October, my dad gave me a hug when he saw me and told me he was really proud of me. And how I just knew that this time, it wasn’t just a fleeting moment of him showing his semblance to a normal father.
 
I eluded to a family secret I wasn’t ready to provide elucidation on just yet many posts ago. But what are secrets but just another form of denial? An unwillingness to confront the truth?
 
My father was raised by a man who wasn’t his birth father, a man I thought was my grandfather until only a few years ago. My father’s birth father was my grandmother’s first husband, a great man who came from a powerful family. He was assassinated during the Korean War when my father was only an infant. The great, powerful family promised my grandmother they would care for her and my father. But my grandmother was scared and alone with a newborn in a country that was war-torn and had just lost hundreds of thousands of lives. So she married the man who came to raise my father and who I later thought was my grandfather for the first 21 years of my life. A man who passed away during my freshman year in college, someone who I always felt had treated my cousins a little nicer and a little warmer than me and my sisters.
 
I wholeheartedly believe that blood ties are not what creates family. Father, grandfather, grandmother, daughter … they’re ultimately nothing more than titles for roles that we fill and create meaning. There’s little in my opinion that is more beautiful than when children are adopted and given homes and love they may otherwise not have. Or when your friends can become your family, the people who love you unconditionally and provide you a safety net. So why bother to emphasize the distinction that my grandfather was not my “true” grandfather or that he was not my father’s “true” father?
 
Because this was a man who never embraced my father as his son. He only saw him as a reminder that his new wife, my grandmother, was not a virgin and had been previously married, both unforgivable in that society. He wasn’t a big enough or good enough person to rise above those things, so he abused my father endlessly. My father sold newspapers and shined shoes on the streets while my grandfather kept his other three children, my uncles and aunt, well-fed and spoiled.  He moved his family while my father was in school one day, leaving my father, a 12 year old boy, to come home to an empty house and wander around alone, until a neighbor informed him that his family had moved and where they could be found. My father walked the 30 miles to get there, and when he arrived, he was ignored.
 
My mother told me all of this a few years ago. And then my father told me himself during the long car ride back home after my junior year in college had ended, in a very matter-of-fact and non bitter but sad – very sad - way. And I finally began to understand some more of why things were the way they were. Because while it doesn’t provide excuses, I’m not interested in excuses. I’m interested in understanding.  
 
It was hard to look at my uncles and my aunt and my grandmother the same way for a few months after I learned all this, a grandmother and aunt and uncles I loved and thought were great people. It took a while for me to accept that they did as much as they could to help my father but that my grandfather kept everyone scared to do more.
 
And it was ironic and sad when the story began to sound, to feel, a little too familiar.
 
The difference between who I am now compared to who I was growing up, who I was even back in college, is that I know now that I play the game of denial at times and I don’t want to anymore. So it felt ironic and sad, but I can accept that. And I can be happy that while I hurt almost everyday growing up, I don’t hurt everyday now. I can’t hold grudges. I’ve never been able to. Maybe it’s just another example of denial – wanting to forget and shove the past away as much as I can – but I’ve always been one to live in the very, very present.
 
When I heard my father got into a terrible car accident, I didn’t remember the hurt. I remembered the walks home after preschool; the mornings we’d play golf when the dew still clung onto the blades of grass; the lectures he gave me about how family always came first. And I felt grateful that there may be a chance for more because he’s alive after an accident that could have easily taken his life. Grateful – but also frightened – that I have parents that try to not bother me or cause me senseless worry by telling me my father was involved in a terrible car accident that left his car totaled and him surprised to be alive.
 
I’ll still push things I don’t like to think about into the far corners of my mind. I brush aside questions about whether I’ll finally be attending law school next fall. I try not to remember my four best friends who hurt the living hell out of my heart last summer and how things have still been left with ties loose and tangled. I don’t want to think about the fact that I’ve gained pounds that don’t fit correctly on my body. Or that my grandmother has been very sick recently. And that I really should start saving money because living paycheck to paycheck is fine until - who knows knowing me -I need bail money or an emergency room. And how I’ve noticed a dark spot on the inside of my right calf that seems to be bigger than it was when I first noticed it a few months ago and holy shit what if after all my jokes about getting skin cancer for summers upon summers of ruthless tanning are finally coming true? And how I’ve considered canceling my alert emails from the Chicago Tribune (that I have no idea why I receive because I’m no big fan of the Tribune) because looking at my Gmail account and glancing at subject lines like ”Train accident,” “Henry Hyde dead,” “Charges in U. of C. student’s slaying,” “Former model gets 8 years for musician deaths” just starts to feel so heavy and sad.
 
But the denial about my past? And the trying to pretend I’m perfect and everything is perfect and holding everything inside and lying and hiding and the faking that nothing bothers me and only surrounding myself around people who want to fake and pretend and just keep running, running from their dysfunctional demons too?
 
Like my father’s truck, it’s been totaled.