Grin and Bear It

I got so tired of hurting and being uncomfortable that all I could think of was the placard on the wall of my elementary school gymnasium: "As you think, so you become."

Seeing my mom hurting hurt me; it sometimes exasperated me. Consequently my lack of patience with her grief, even as I was in the thick of it myself, shamed me. Seeing my dad's girlfriend-now-wife was even worse. The discomfort was profound. But I have performance in my lineage. We put on a brave face professionally. I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm okay.

I guess I must be good at it, because I swear to God I blinked, just blinked, just for a second when my dad left, and when I opened my eyes there was the woman he cheated with, hugging me and telling me that she loved me. There she was, crying on my shoulder. There we were, serving the dinner we'd made in my mother's kitchen, on my mother's dishes, sitting at my mother's table. I'm okay. I'm okay. I just want to get along. 

When my dad told me he was going to propose to her a couple of weeks before the divorce finalized, all I could say was that it was obvious that she's crazy about him. He probably sought my blessing. I probably said, "Sure, fine." Let's just get this all over and behind us, right? New normal?

What a delusion.

Parental Alienation Soundrack

Have you listened to "When Doves Cry" lately? There's something brilliantly therapeutic in dancing to such sad sentiments.

I am my father's daughter in more ways than I can count, temperament not the least among them; and yet I'm female and the oldest child, and I feel a strong kinship with my mother as well. We have lots of interests in common despite major differences in our outlooks. I've always felt that I was a blend of my parents, and even as I've alternately struggled with relationships with both of them, I love them deeply.

However, in times of discord my mother has attempted Parental Alienation. I'm confident that she would say given the circumstances, it was in my best interest and completely justifiable. My mother is a painfully honest person; her opinions are just that, but I don't argue when she says, "This happened," because her track record is pretty reliable. There's no denying that my dad was a terrible husband to her in very significant ways - even he has said so. But growing up and even now as an adult, the comparisons she makes between me and my father have rooted a deep struggle and hopelessness in me.

I've always known that my mother loved me - though mostly I felt her definition of love was "commitment," not love -  but since I was 12 I have also believed that she did not and probably would not ever like me. I am too much like my dad in her eyes. Now that he is gone from her presence, it has often felt as though she views me as his stand in.

A longtime favorite

The first time I read this I was 19. I knew it was prophetic but I couldn't look away.
Do we become the things we love?

SWEET RUIN

Tony Hoaglund

Maybe that is what he was after, 

my father, when he arranged, ten years ago, 

to be discovered in a mobile home

with a woman named Roxanne, an attractive, 

recently divorced masseuse. 

He sat there, he said later, in the middle 

of a red, imitation-leather sofa, 

with his shoes off and a whiskey in his hand, 

filling up with a joyful kind of dread--

like a swamp, filling up with night, 

--while my mother hammered on the trailer door

with a muddy, pried-up stone, 

then smashed the headlights of his car, 

drove home, 

and locked herself inside. 

He paid the piper, was how he put it, 

because he wanted to live, 

and at the time knew no other way 

than to behave like some blind and willful beast, 

--to make a huge mistake, like a giant leap

into space, as if following

a music that required dissonance

and a plunge into the dark. 

That is what he tried to tell me, 

the afternoon we talked, 

as he reclined in his black chair, 

divorced from the people in his story

by ten years and a heavy cloud of smoke. 

Trying to explain how a man could come 

to a place where he has nothing else to gain

unless he loses everything. So he 

louses up his work, his love, his own heart. 

He hails disaster like a cab. And years later, 

when the storm has descended 

and rubbed his face in the mud of himself, 

he stands again and looks around, 

strangely thankful just to be alive, 

oddly jubilant--as if he had been granted

the answer to his riddle, 

or as if the question 

had been taken back. Perhaps 

a wind is freshening the grass, 

and he can see now, as for the first time, 

the softness of the air between the blades. The pleasure 

built into a single bending leaf. 

Maybe then he calls it, in a low voice 

and only to himself, Sweet Ruin.

And maybe only because I am his son, 

I can hear just what he means. How 

even at this moment, even when the world

seems so perfectly arranged, I feel 

a force prepared to take it back. 

Like a smudge on the horizon. Like a black spot

on the heart. How one day soon, 

I might take this nervous paradise, 

bone and muscle of this extraordinary life, 

and with one deliberate gesture, 

like a man stepping on a stick, 

break it into halves. But less gracefully 

than that. I think there must be something wrong

with me, or wrong with strength, that I would 

break my happiness apart

simply for the pleasure of the sound. 

The sound the pieces make. What is wrong

with peace? I couldn't say. 

But, sweet ruin, I can hear you. 

There is always the desire. 

Always the cloud, suddenly present

and willing to oblige.

Sometimes you choose the art

and sometimes the art chooses you.

Susan Rothenberg
Blue U-Turn, 1989
oil on canvas
91 x 112 inches