The new podcast, Notes On The Spectrum : Underwater
Something is lost. I am gasping for air. I am thirteen years old and visiting my father for dinner. We are splashing about in the swimming pool of his new wife’s house. It’s late June. I can smell the mowed grass from next door. The water glistens with the fading light of the day. My dad is in the pool. I don’t recall when he got in, how he got in. He usually doesn’t join me in the pools of my life. He is in the pool. And we start wrestling. No memory of how that happened either. Did he grab me? He is holding me under the water. I have a moment of awareness, danger, he’s drunk, he’s not letting go, he’s drunk, he’s… Fuck this, I lash out and kick him in the balls.
At dinner, there is no mention of the incident. We never talk about it. I never have another dinner with my dad that summer. I left for prep school in September. There was no time. Things went fast. I was escaping.
I did not escape at all. I landed in Logan Airport with a duffle bag of clothes and my sister’s old snow skis. They were symbolic. I never skied with them. The school was hard. I immediately got behind in Spanish and I never caught up. I might have been dealing with some low-level depression and recovery from a massive case of mono that summer. It did something to my spleen, whatever that does for ya. Maybe I’ll learn about it ten years from now when my doctor tells me about my weak spleen due to this month-long battle with the kissing virus.
Exeter was not an escape as much as a level up on all of my hopes and dreams. I had the idea that I could launch from Exeter to Harvard or MIT. The academic road ahead was all golden. I did okay with the ladies. A few crushes, a few girlfriends with a lot of kissing. No sex. I lost my virginity back in Austin over Christmas vacation that year. High-growth year, for sure.
I did not save my father from his own drowning. He committed to the bottle and married another enthusiast. They drank themselves into oblivion and darkness. My dad was moody during the divorce; now he was just blotto drunk. Accidental drowning was not going to be one of my biographical notes.
I got into Adult Children of Alcoholics in my junior year of high school. I had to come back to Austin. Emergency landing for yours truely. Boom. Fail. Reboot. Fail. Crash. Keep trying.
I also met my first wife at an ACA meeting many years later. Bad idea, shopping for love in “recovery” groups. I mean, you could go to Sex and Love Addicts meeting to meet other addicts, but that’s a dark and dangerous idea. Back to what I learned. I can’t control anyone else’s actions. My dad was going to drink himself to death. That’s what alcoholics do. I had to learn how to take care of myself. How to let go of my qualifier. Today, my qualifier would be my son. Hopefully, all the great energy of my daughter will avoid a collision with her love of partying. My son is not in recovery. Nor is he staying clean. I’ll plead the fifth on any further strolls down that storyline. He is not doing what he should be doing.
I am letting him do whatever. I cannot control him. I will not sacrifice my own hard-earned serenity to enable him. I will refrain from unsolicited advice. Sons have been rejecting their father’s advice forever. Mine does the opposite of any advice given. So, I am keeping most of my ideas to myself. Watching him wander the halls and rooms with his airpods in at full volume. He is already a ghost in my house. I wish I could change things or make things better for him. He’s growing out of his teens while he’s in his twenties. Delayed maturity due to dysfunctional parenting and … ex-wife’s poor judgement.
I became a fractional dad. I saw my kids between six and seven days in a given month. That’s a lot of time without them. For them, the darkness came fast as their mom dug harder and faster into her denial. He (me) was the problem. I (her) am wonderful, loving, and loveable. She got remarried. Married someone with OCD in deeper shades than her own. His obsessive traits fed my ex-wife’s and raised my son with some highly unsuccessful coping mechanisms. We see the results togther today. She picked him up for a dentist appointment. He was running late.
They pulled out ten minutes before they were supposed to arrive, but hey… The car stopped halfway up the cul-de-sac. They were discussing something. Something forgotten. After a few minutes they continued.
I am aching for the time to have a positive influence on my son. Time that was robbed of me. My best friend can’t understand. He’s had his one kid beside him the entire time. I am making up for lost time. I have forced to accept him on his current path and provide little but shelter, occasional food and money. He doesn’t really engage with me. Refuses movie offers. “I’ve got to work,” he says as a kind of mantra before heading out the door to do anything but work.
My mom had a similar affectation about her art. It was work. It was painful and hard. My son sees work as death. A means to an end, perhaps, if he can afford his own place. Soon would be good. He’s not going to qualify unless his side project gets funding. That’s a gamble. He does not appear to be putting in applications with the same festidiousness that I do. Each day. Even with two fish nearing the bait. He’s not doing much more than treading water. I am doing my best not to push him down, hold him under, or give him too much negative feedback on his behavior. I don’t have to like it. I don’t have to tolerate it, I can kick him out at any time.
I am in charge of my own actions and words. I am supporting him in this way. Enabling? Perhaps. But the work he is trying to do is above my comprehension. I am here to be his dad. To show him resilience. Give him the living example of how much I love him and honor him just where he is.
initial prompt: create an abstract modern painting of a young boy under water in a brightly lit pool, we are zoomed in above the water, we can see the light reflections of the water, the blue tint, the black lines of the pool bottom, and lots of specs of light, dust, motes in the water, surreal, bright colors, high contrast
