© T.H. Warrior – Tender Hearted Warriors
– S.S.P. & E.L.C.
98 degrees on a Sunday, eye-blinding sun, and almost no wind, that’s the kinda day you wanna escape by accepting the brunch invitation of a friend, even though you know she’s invited a bunch of other people you don’t necessarily know. As an introvert whose limit of taking part in gatherings would be reached if the number of attendees exceeded three, going to a brunch with eight other women was quite unorthodox of me. But so was the heat that day in Germany. Ironically one of the reasons I moved to Berlin from Texas was the coziness of the city that came with the cold. And according to my weather app, it was cooler in Texas that day than in Berlin!
I guess I can say I was positively surprised by how lovely everyone was. My friend’s friends were all cool, not nosy, badasses in their own ways, and quite interesting people! I remember I’d heard one of my favorite writers Jordan Peterson say: „if you talk to different people and you get bored, you’re the boring one cause no single person’s life story is the same as the other. If you pay real close attention, you will be amazed.“
One of the girls was pregnant, and one of them had a 4-year-old. Her son had also come along with her that day. She was almost constantly on her phone with her husband, giving him directions to my friend’s house. For a minute there, I thought to myself, what kind of a self-respecting guy would buzz into a girls‘ brunch date? Soon I learned that he just wanted to come over and pick up their son.
Within minutes the nightmare of every parent happened: the kid started something I wanna call „the drama performance of the year“- a beautifully-balanced combination of crying, screaming, a little bit of sorrow mixed with desperation and misery, and don’t even get me started on the body language: those symmetrical switches between kicks and punches in the air, turning the head left and right and north and south almost rhythmically; I guess he had four years of practice.
Everyone was trying something.
-Auntie Mary: „Jack, honey? Who wants the biggest chocolate bar??!“ Nothing.
-Auntie Nicole: „Jack, dear? Let’s go out! The ice cream truck guy is here!!“ Nothing. No results.
-Auntie Charlotte: „Jack, sweetie, let’s watch some cartoons! What do you wanna watch?“ Nothing, not a damn thing. He even got louder at the cartoon comment. That one hit him home hard since, apparently, his dad had forbidden him to watch TV for a whole week.
Then I went:
-„Jack, sweetheart, what’s wrong?“
He then finally replied with a cracked voice:
-„I don’t wanna go home with daddy.“
-„But why, sweetie?“
-„Cause I HATE him! He doesn’t let me turn on the TV!!“
-„What do you mean you hate him?!“
-„I do!! I really hate him!!!“
-„Don’t ever say that, Jack! You only get one dad….“
…
Almost instantly, I heard a crack in my head. And in my heart. Literally, at the same time, I heard a sound as if someone was trying to open a sealed box in my head and break an unbreakable chain in my heart. And I found myself bursting into tears in front of a 4-year-old in my friend’s living room before a bunch of strangers as the words” you only get one dad” slipped my mouth”…
My father had died for four years. I remember I was sleeping when I got the phone call.
I heard, I showered, I went to work, and that was it. Didn’t attend his funeral, didn’t shed a single tear, didn’t ever think, let alone talk about it. In my head, he existed until he didn’t.
I never had the easiest relationship with him, even though I could. The age difference was so small, most people thought we were siblings. I guess I always regarded him as the weird immature older brother who always made me deeply angry. I remember my first day at school vividly: our neighbor drove me to school together with his daughter. And he drove me back himself again since my dad had forgotten to pick me up. One day, years later, he came home worried and was asking me where I was since he had waited and waited at my school, and I never showed up. I told him, “dad, you do know I’m no more in elementary school, right?”
Long story short, he’d failed me as a father- and just like every other toxic relationship I had gone through, as an adult at 21, I decided that I neither had to forgive nor forget. I simply had to become indifferent and move on. Six years passed, and I never called him back, texted him back, and was always too busy to fly back home for Christmas. Some part of me always hated getting congratulated on my birthday because the only person I truly ever wanted to remember my birthday never did.
And then he was gone.
I guess as I heard he was gone, all I could feel was, nothing.
I felt a world on my shoulders that weighed like nothing.
I breathed air that was filled with nothing.
Ate food that tasted like nothing.
Smelled my freshly washed laundry out of the washing machine that day that smelled like nothing.
Got a couple of my condolences hugs here and there that felt like nothing.
Listened to my favorite Johnny Cash record that sounded like nothing.
Everything around me was, nothing.
Then I knew I was going through something, and that wasn’t normal. I decided to set an order to the mental mess in my head. But how?
I spent weeks shoving whiskey down my throat, which ultimately made me feel even number than before. Then I remember one day I was sitting on my bed. Staring at my closet with its door open. And I recall saying this out loud: “fuck, I hate that closet.”
I got up instantly and started cleaning it.
Imagine a closet: full of clothes and all sorts of junk. There I had old backpacks full of birthday cards and letters from ex-boyfriends, needing to be washed sheets next to expensive outfits. The thing is, as an outsider, when my college roommate saw my closet for the first time, she was bothered by it. And it had never occurred to me how my eyes could get used to such a mess. But that is exactly how it is: even as an organized person in general if you always keep your closet that way, you won’t even notice how horrible it looks. And the problem is you are not entirely happy with how things are. Your clothes are always wrinkly, and you have a hard time finding any space for even a new sweater, etc.
No matter how uncomfortable it is, the mess becomes normal for you. From time to time, the chaos annoys you, but you do nothing about it.
This was my state of your mind back then: crammed with thoughts, weird feelings, fears, anxiety, and ceaseless thinking.
A state of tension and stress.
Restless jumps from one thought to another – like a bee, flying from one flower to another.
I started by emptying it entirely- without the clothes, sheets, diaries, and those backpacks, the closet looked so large and spacious.
I cleaned it up, did the laundry, and started putting things in their places carefully.
Then I took a look at it. As crazy as it sounds, I felt liberated after. As if I had just gotten a ton of stones off my back. My eyes didn’t get annoyed looking at it anymore. I could find things much faster, and I could move my hands much more freely. There was more air.
I had more control over my life.
For the first time in weeks since I had heard about my dad, I was feeling something. Wasn’t exactly joy but more like liberty.
As if my mind was no longer packed with mental junk that wasted my time and energy and stopped me from going about life. I could finally think clearly, and I was concentrated.
Inner peace, I guess… I had emptied my mind.
It’s stupid, I know. But that peace magically was achieved only by doing something as simple as cleaning my closet.
After I emptied out my mind of hollow thoughts, it was filled with freedom.
But I did keep this one box on the top shelf of my closet. I threw everything I wasn’t quite ready to get rid of or deal with in that box.
I guess that day, I created the same box for my mind.
The thing is, back then I was a very disciplined student. I was working two jobs, and I needed to be focused. I was in the middle of a situation that could affect my future, and I couldn’t afford to lose my inner peace and balance. I guess I threw that feeling of nothingness in my box at the corner of my mind, chained it up, and put a big lock on it. I graduated with a 1.7; I got a kickin’ job contract. I was looking hotter than ever, sleeping better than ever, found love, found peace, but never again opened that box. Until that day at my friend’s house, when the nothingness became so big that it forced its way out, broke the chains, broke the lock, and burst out. That explained the kick I felt in my head and heart.
I washed my face, powdered my nose, came up with an excuse, and left the brunch.
I grabbed my old computer and looked into some old folders, pictures, videos.
There it was my dad showing up at my high school graduation in a bug’s bunny T-shirt and humiliating the shit out of me.
There it was, my dad, being the clown of a party, by telling inappropriate jokes at his best friend’s wedding during his best-man-speech.
There it was, my dad, almost fallen dead on our couch ‘cause he was too tired when he was supposed to help me with my math, and instead, I remember helping him take his socks off and putting him to bed.
There it wasn’t my dad, at my sweet sixteen, ‘cause he’d gotten stuck at work.
Childhood memories, in almost all of which I felt like an outsider, alone or annoyed.
Things were coming to the surface again.
Then I really don’t know why, but I reached out to the box from that old closet. I’d moved in with my boyfriend for already two years, brought a lot of things, opened up a lot of boxes, but kept that junk box always unopened in the new closet.
There were letters from my insurance company, old pictures, hotel shampoos, tea, basically whatever I’d found somewhere around the house and couldn’t use at the moment was to be found in that box.
Then I found an old envelope that belonged to my dad; my aunt had given it to me a year after he’d passed.
There were pictures of his first day of school.
There he was, looking almost annoyingly cute in a three-piece suit on his first day of school, among a bunch of other kids, all in T-shirts and shorts.
There he was laughing at the top of his lungs in a car with his friends, drinkin’ bier while driving: he couldn’t possibly be more than 15 back then.
There he was with my mom. His arm wrapped around her shoulders in Mr. Jameson’s history class, kissing her. All pictures had writings at the back, telling the date, place, and the peoples’ names. One of the best habits my dad had that I’d inherited.
There they were with me at the hospital! They were both 18.
There he was with me in his arms and a bottle of milk. I looked at the date, and it said April 21st, 1992. I was eight months back then, and it’d been only a couple of weeks since my mom had passed away.
There it was, a picture of me in my sweet 16th dress, having fallen asleep on my bed.
There it was, a note. A post-it:
“I’m sorry- I can’t do this- Annie”.
Annie was my dad’s girlfriend. They dated for about four months when I was around 13. I even remember asking my dad about her. He said she had to move to LA because her parents were sick and needed care.
After reading that note, my tears ran so widely across my face, burning my eyes so bad that I literally had to get up and bury my head in cold water.
It was as if for the first time in my life, I was looking at my father as a person. As a man. Not a dad. A man.
A man who was once a kid. A kid who was sent to school on the first day in a three-piece suit. A kid who’d probably gotten bullied and made fun of because of that.
A man who was once a wild, happy, and free teenager who didn’t give a fuck about a damn thing.
A man who was once a teenager who fell in love with the girl who sat next to him in class.
A man who was once a teenager who must’ve been the most freaked out kid on earth, having found out that he’d knocked up his high school sweetheart and was becoming a dad himself!
A teenager who was as scared as it could get already, and within months had both had a baby and had lost the love of his life.
A young man who had to finish school, get a degree, get his life as fast as possible together ‘cause he had a kid.
A man who was young and was trying to date.
A man who’d gotten dumped by the woman he really liked with a post-it note, simply ‘cause he had a teenage girl.
I couldn’t believe I was reminiscing and recapping my entire childhood and remembering things differently.
I couldn’t believe that it had never occurred to me that my father was a man of his own before he became my dad.
It had never occurred to me how he was also a person with his own thought and worries. Not everything wrapped around me.
Often times it happens that our parents don’t share their problems or even the slightest array of negativity with us that we forget that they are human beings with emotions, feelings, problems, and lives.
We forget they’re people- not just parents.
We forget they know what it feels like to be humiliated.
We forget they know what it feels like to be dumped.
We forget they cry too.
We forget how they’ve evolved everything about themselves towards us, even though it might not look like it.
The slightest possibility doesn’t even cross our mind that maybe they’re doing the best they can.
They just don’t know better.
No one wants to be a sucky father. No one wants to drink and ignore everyone around them. No one wants to not be able to provide. But it never occurs to us that every day that passes, they are actively trying. They’ve been average Joes all their lives. No one ever tapped on the shoulder and told them that they were doing a good job. Yet we take the grudge to our dying bed that they didn’t make the biggest fuss about our birthdays.
All we see is how they treat us. We never look for the reasons. We never try walking in their shoes. We never look at them; we only look falsely and unfairly through them.
A lot of people start understanding their parents once they become parents themselves.
Even though I hadn’t had a child yet, me trying to parent Jack that day, and hearing him say how he hated his dad almost instantly opened my eyes.
For the first time in my life, even as short as a minute, I could see how it feels like to be responsible for another human being. Trying to do all you can and use all your energy on them and watching them crying and screaming at your face and punching and kicking your nuts.
I was thinking to myself: that ungrateful brat.
I wonder how many times my dad had thought that to himself whenever he was trying his best to be the best dad he could possibly be, and I gave him nothing by attitude and bitchiness.
That day I sat on my bed for hours, staring at that note. The feeling of nothingness was back, and I was almost paralyzed by it. There were no more sounds of breaking chains and locks in my heart but more of a hole. A permanent hole that could never be filled. After 4 hours I tried getting up. Failed on the first try. Managed to get up the second time.
It felt as if I was trying to walk with an almost-healed broken leg after the cast was removed.
I could still walk.
And then I continued walking.
But I always felt a limp in my bone whenever the weather got cold.
That bone never truly mended.
Yet I walked.