1999

For too long I had dammed a stagnant stream, backed it up in an effort to move forward in a more expedient and mundane direction.  Life took precedence over the detritus of the past that festered and rotted, clogging some deep spiritual reserve that had always whispered, "God is good."  I could still hear a chorus chanting of His might and sovereignty.  God can know all and do all capriciously without "caring" particularly for the specifics of His creation.  My parched heart would cup its hands and try to drink from the stream of His benevolence; but, just as the proffered sweetness reached my lips, I would remember loss and all would evaporate.

I did not quit my God; I could not forsake the One I had loved so long.  But, I no longer trusted Him.  He seem arbitrary with our lives; and, His power, which is beyond understanding, was confounding and oblique, not counterintuitive and wise.  Best to put distance between myself and His electrifying, untamed hand.

The  presence of a vacuum, at first just a whispering, a hint of discontent, made me edgy.  A craving, undefined and subtle at its root, spread like a soul-eating bacteria until it had created a surprising cavern of need so great it must be abated.  Emptied of the goodness of God, convinced of His reticence, the hollow cravings called out to another to be satisfied.

In 1993, Bill and I purchased a tutoring franchise, and the first three years I spent long hours growing it.  By 1999, we had two facilities that were strong enough that I began to hire employees to take over some of my tasks.  I rarely thought of my father in those years, and when I reached down to that place in me, it was too uncomfortable to pause there for long. I lived above that current, for touching it was like touching a live electrical wire.  After experiencing the same reaction from that contact each time, I finally avoided it all together. I was also aware there was no closure for me with my father because I was convinced he still molested children, though I could not prove it.

In June of 1999, on my thirtieth wedding anniversary, I received a letter from one of my two sisters that began the demolition of my dammed up stream.  The ugly water had to gush out sometime or kill me with its poison, but the timing was unfortunate for me.  The gist of the letter was Daddy had carpal tunnel surgery on the tenth of June, and she and my other sister, in caring for him afterward, realized that he was going to need more intensive care as time went on.  My relationship with both of my sisters had been strained for a while; so, the correspondence ended with, "We'll all need to participate. I'm hoping that you will be able to release whatever it is that keeps you from being willing to communicate with me.  I'm not someone you need to avoid or be afraid of.  I'm part of you family, warts and all."

The perceived unfairness of the closing words and their accusation that I had built the wall that separated me from  her hit me broadside and threw me into a bizarre, screeching rage. I remembered her birthdays and Christmas!  That was more than I got from her during those years!  "Fuck her!" I screamed.  "Fuck Daddy!  I don't need any more condemnation! None of this is my fault!"  My mouth regurgitated filth. Stomping around all three thousand square feet of my home, I swore and bellowed, cried and justified, until Bill shook my shoulders and talked me back to sanity.  Some early smoke released from a deadly volcano.  We had not known it was roiling so near the surface.  Not an anniversary I choose to remember.

Two weeks later, I received a letter from my older sister.  The last time I had spoken to her was the previous Christmas when I had called her.  Apparently, I spoke too much about my feelings about Daddy, which was my wont, most certainly.  With her husband sleeping, she cut the conversation short.  Her letter began, "I've been thinking of you a lot lately.  I know we're very different, and that you wish you had a different family.  Many people do, myself included, sometimes.  However, we are who we are, and we've got what we've got.  My apprentice asked me her 'question of the week' yesterday - if you had one lesson that  you wish you had learned earlier, what would it be?  I had to think a long time...the principal one I came up with was this - not to live in the past and keep recreating it, but to live in the future and create that."  My sister went on to say that Daddy was old, frightened, and guilt-laden, and she wanted to forgive him while he was here and because it was healing to her.  The family needed me and I needed to "rejoin" it to help "see him through."

The smoke again.  A boiling, steamy mess rising up in me.  We did not know the same father.  Frightened, old, and guilt-laden and done with boys?  I did not think so!  I had seen him with children recently.  She had taken the "high road" and forgiven our father, and I should do the same!  Again, it was I who had relinquished my family.  They had no part in that?  Shaking, wanting a voice, I crumpled in my living room floor and wept the inequity into the hands covering my face.  No, I had not forgiven him!  How do I forgive what has not come full circle?  There is no cleansing in the forgiving of a crime still in progress!  My quandry was how to live in the midst of the ongoing chaos and still protect my sanity and my children.

I did not respond to their letters for several days.  I wanted an appropriate reply, not one filled with the histrionics I was manifesting.  My response was, for me at the time, measured.  My sisters were correct in their assessment of my need to forgive so that I could let it go.  There was an endless, surging surf of buried words, thoughts and feelings that once given power by the slightest wind would pound mercilessly from my fractured heart.  No catharsis seemed in sight for me.  My father and I were at an impasse.  My letter, in part, was an effort to explain the inexplicable.  "My latency in responding to you has not been over a lack of love for Daddy or an inability to forgive him.  I have always been there when I am needed and have no intention of leaving his care up to the two of you..Daddy recently wrote a letter to Bill commending him for his ability to stand by Daddy and love him regardless of circumstances.  I was absolutely left out of that scenario though it was I who had picked him up from jail, despite Mother's desire to leave him there, offering to take him home with me.  He came to California on two separate occasions to visit the ten-year-old boy next door and tried to correspond with him, leaving me with the responsibility of telling the boy's mother that my father is a pedophile and must not be allowed to contact Daddy.  Afterward, I made another effort to speak with him about his difficulties and was screamed at that I was never, NEVER to bring up that subject again as long as I lived. Subsequent conversations with him would cause me to immediately have the runs so that I was virtually sitting on the pot crapping while listening to him speak.  Two years ago, when I discovered he was teaching children's Sunday school and having a young boy from his church spend the night with him occasionally, I called and said I would say what I needed to say and if he would not listen, I was no longer his daughter, for I could not live the rest of my life in the position into which he had forced me.  He listened.  He did not reply.  That is where we are.  Never has it been acknowledged that I was there for him, trying to understand his difficulties, praying and fasting that he would not go to prison.  Never has he understood what it took to have him in my home after he took Will to the park for hours without telling me where he was.  He does not have the capacity to understand.  That is not a thing of the past. That is a reality of the present. I have forgiven the past, but I take care of my family and myself in the present.  So, let's just be honest and say you both need my time and monetary resources to take care of Daddy and we need to get along in order to provide whatever care he needs.  I understand your need to contact me for the benefit of help. As with Mother, none of us wants to do this by ourselves. I do not know specifically what it is you want me to do.  What is it that you need from me now?"

I ended the letter with this: "I am as mature about this situation as is possible for me, and it seems, as the two of you are.  So, please try not to couch your desire for me to be available in this situation with any more insinuations, intentional or unintentional, that I cannot accept you or do not love Daddy or wish you were not my family.  The real issue here is Daddy, and he is difficult for all of us. Love, Kay.

On my fifty-first birthday, I received a response to my letter.  It was honest and heartbreaking once again.  This land of forgiveness into which my sister wanted me to venture, unfettered, seemed a foreign destination, and I had no clear road map to it.  She did not want to talk with me about Daddy's problems any more as we had better things to discuss.  Of course, she was right.  Her list of offenses was also long, but she had overcome.  We all agreed that we needed to unite for Daddy's care, and her final suggestion, a wise one, was that we meet together to talk over what we were willing and able to do for him. For years afterward, Bill opened letters from my family before I read them.  I was just not whole.

They made me look, the sincere words of my sisters.  My own heart was diseased and attacking me.  It was dark and angry, insistent in its quest to destroy me.  I wanted to run, though I could not say to where.  To comfort?  To a well from which I could drink some joy?  That race is destructive; I came upon a spider's web, and it entangled me.  The wicked ruse is that pain will take a broken spirit by the hair and drag it into more pain, nearly destroying the will to fight and live.