this chapter is streaming free on YouTube: Lost In This Big Sky
There is a limitless blue sky today. I imagine I’d have more hope in the mountain air of New Mexico. The Texas heat is going to be rough today. Where I continue to find hopefulness is not clear.
Loving your kids is complex. Losing your kids in an unfair divorce at the tender ages of seven and nine was almost enough to break me. All that I had dreamed of wiped clean. Bedtime routine wasn’t ever a chore for me. It was a sacred ritual that began the minute the kids got home from school, or for me, the minute I got home from work to rejoin the family in progress. Except that’s the part where the whole enterprise began showing instability.
I was away a lot, but that was our agreement. I would take the lion’s share of cash flow needs and she would meet the kids off the bus. We did it. We arrived. Yet, my wife was unhappy. Her unhappiness found a target in me. What I wasn’t doing. How I didn’t help around the house enough. How I was off courting these dreams of music and writing. Always off in my dark quiet spaces or dark loud spaces, trying to find my voice.
I’m going to declare my voce velata! (def. adj. ITA: with veiled voice, as in musical direction)
My hopes and dreams were ripped clean in half by my wife’s transgressions during the marriage. My actual life has been similarly damaged by my ex-wife’s actions after the divorce.
But that’s not what this is about.
My real writing began as a creative response to death. The bleak end was rushing up quickly, things were not going well in our marriage. I had gotten the savior big job with the pharma marketing firm out of San Francisco. I was certain I had saved our little boat. I tried to reassure my wife. She was not a believer. Something in her heart, her DNA, her family of origin, was causing flywheels of panic to spin regularly in her head. Often about unrelated subjects. Mostly about me and my malfunction.
Yeah, but…
I began a new blog. My tech blog was soaring, but showed no real signs of bringing in any money. I put up The Off Parent on a private and anonymous server. I let it rip. You can still see that journey online, I won’t bore you with the details. What I want to reinforce, it was the strife, the loss, the terror, and my own creative processing that kept me moving forward even when I saw no hope.
In this moment, in the warming oven of June, I can see how the energy and pain forced my creative expression into new avenues. I had written my first novel already. A handful of screenplays. I was stalled out creatively and writing about tech and marketing on uber.la. I still write there when I need to say something unrelated or tech-related.
The D fired up my photon torpedoes and warp drive at the same time. I was hoppin mad. I was victimized by a woman who played the divorce game to win. But the win for her was a loss for my kids. She panicked in the final phases of writing our “parenting plan.” The day for calendars with our family divorce therapist was the second supreme violation of trust between two parents, the first being the divorce. As I pulled out my data-driven evidence for 50/50 shared parenting schedules, my wife changed her mind. She wanted 70% of the kids’ time, fuck the money, she wanted that too. I didn’t realize it at the moment, but it was the kids who were going to suffer. I was barely treading water at the time, living in my sister’s mother-in-law suite.
I ranted. Howled. Cried. Went to Al-Anon meetings. Called my therapist on the weekends. Hunted for a job so I might be able to afford child support for her and the kids and a shelter for me. The financial burden of children should be shared 50/50 both financially and physically for their entire lives.
Again, I’m off track. Fuck divorce. And god bless my divorce for giving me both wings and a voice.
I haven’t spoken with my zero for two days. I got a photo text from him yesterday as a “proof of life.” It was a photo of a shell casing that apparently had landed upright at the shooting range. It seems he’s come and gotten his two ARs and Glock from the shed. Last I heard he was going to sell one of them to pay for his recent car damage and repair. He appears to be on a walkabout. Up late into the night, sleeping until 2 or 3 pm. Zero comms most every day unless he needs money. Since I’ve cut off the financial support in lieu of treatment, I’m not getting much back from him.
Just as I feel a connection, just as an emotion begins to show on his face, he bolts. He’s learned that compartmentalization and avoidance are the best defense mechanisms. From here, fourteen years later, it is much clearer to me how this happened. He was raised from nine to now by his stoic mom, and then from eleven to now with the addition of an OCD gold star winner of a husband. Sure, my kids both like to tell horror stories, but he stabilized her over several years. Or perhaps, they stabilized each other.
In that house, through my kids’ elementary and high school years, there was no healthy relationship modeling. Both adults are empathy-avoidant Excel thinkers. It’s about money. It’s about a job. It’s about getting up before 2 pm. Oh wait, that’s not one of them. My kid learned that lifestyle from them. Still. Right now. Retired yes, but… If you stay up late every night doing “whatever” and don’t get up until 2 pm, well…
“You’re going to miss a lot of the day,” I tell my son.
I have this idea that my son’s addiction or whatever the fuck is going on, both frightens those two adults in very specific ways.
He has learned this sleep pattern from them. They are still actively modeling the teenager flop.
He has never been required to get a summer job for his gas money, clothes money, etc.
Emotional currency in that house is either RAGE or DISAPPOINTMENT. I see where my son is coming from right now, but I’m powerless to get him out of it, or give him a clear enough picture of why “the mountain” is a hopeful solution. He says things like, “My parents want to send me away. Put me in a psycho ward. Make me sit in kumbaya circles all day.
The real sticker is this: when a family system intervenes on a “user,” all members of the family also have to get “clean” about their addictions. If my son is “required” by them to get up by 9 am every day, don’t you think they should also get up at that time? How can they dictate healthy living for him while showing him something completely different? You can’t intervene on someone without everyone participating.
At the moment, we (they) are pointing the finger at my son. I’m not sure issuing ultimatums weekly, blowing through all of them, and reissuing new ones next week has actually gotten us any closer to a healthy son.
The reality is this: it’s gotta be his plan.
The mosquito has been in my house for two days. She flies by at this moment. I don’t want to stop writing. Oh, crap, my girlfriend is up too. Guess that’s the gist of the story up to this point.
I step up from my chair and snatch the mosquito out of the air. Dead.
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