Saturday, December 02, 2006
April called this morning to inform me I am coming home for Christmas. I am to contact her when I have completed the logistics of this arrangement. I am pathetically broke at the moment, and realistically must work through the entire holiday, but I probably need to see la familia und die Freunden/innen more.
I only recently realized it has been two years since I last saw my siblings and most of my friends. Only within the past year have I resigned myself to the idea that Lubbock, Texas, the armpit of America, is going to be "home" until I receive my degrees. Friends and familiar faces I am not short of (at least one hundred fifty-three in the Lubbock region, according to Facebook, but nowhere am I afforded the wholly relaxed atmosphere I experience at April's or Sparky's or Sarah's house (or my own, before The Father kicked me out of the family because I won't call his new wife, "Mommy").
Relinquishing contact with The Father (he should not have my current phone number or address, and we haven't spoken in a year) has proven simple enough. Even when I lived in St. Louis or during my first year at Tech, I seem to recall he only initiated a call to me once, to notify me he had killed Bambi (the truck was fine). The occasions I called him, if only to chat, he behaved as though he had better things to do than talk to me. Later, he would claim to be hurt that we didn't "talk like we used to", even though 'twas he who excluded me (and probably anyone else), more especially after he met Terri and decided he would prioritize around her, to the exclusion of all others.
Being a melancholic-hypochondriac, I have expended an inordinate amount of time reflecting about the fact that The Father found me easily expendable. He lured me back to Texas, drove me ten hours through the barren west-Texas landscape, dumped me at Tech, drove back to his new home and his new family, and then bided his time for a year before telling me that he had done it all with the notion of getting rid of me. I remain unenlightened as to why he assured me he would help me through college (even asserting as much in front of Terri), then reverted his position to the claim that I was making impossible and arrogant demands. I merely expected that if The Father told me he would do something, then he would do it (though following logic, admittedly, has never been my forte).
When I asked him to co-sign on a loan to cover my schooling last year, he refused, ('Why should I?') claiming, among other things, that Terri would need a new minivan in a few years. Taking nineteen hours of classes, working a thirty-plus hour week, maintaining a 4.0 GPA, not getting knocked up, not abusing drugs or alcohol, remaining chaste and pure- demonstrating that I am responsible, reliable, and wholly dedicated to my education, to the exclusion of all other things- factored nowhere in his decision to claim I am not a worthy investment. He manipulated our family and grossly distorted my relationship to Terri, my siblings, and to him, simply because he suddenly realized that co-signing on loans to get me through school or on apartment leases would affect his credit negatively.
Again, bafflement arises: in the eighteen-year span between my birth and my graduation from high school, the notion of establishing savings accounts for me and my siblings never occurred to him. Depositing ten cents and nothing more would have spoken something for his priorities. Nor did alternative methods occur to his mind. And instead of simply stating, at some point (as in, when we were seven) something to the effect of, "Whelp, kids, if you want to go to college, you'd better find a comfortable coal mine to work in- start saving those nickels and dimes!" he left the problem unaddressed.
After he married again, The Father replaced his old F-150 with another, bigger one- with the biggest engine it could carry. Yet, he claimed he could not afford to make long-distance phone calls to me. When I stayed at The House of Usher, I was costing "the family" a gross amount of money, because I supposedly took too long in the shower and was supposedly washing my clothes too often (only as much as they required). "But Daddy drives a truck with a big huge engine, and I'm supposed to be proud."
Brooding makes me feel better sometimes, if only because it demonstrates how deeply The Father's irrational behavior affected me. That he loses no sleep over me I have little doubt, considering all he does is think of the person sleeping next to him, and the various means by which he has to "keep" her. Doubleplusungood, however, is the concomitant inability to function properly.
For instance, outbursts of crying- after my mother died, I never cried when I reflected on her or associated something to her, because death happens normally. Being shut out from The Father, however, has affected me entirely differently. One day this summer I sat eating a turkey wrap somewhere as I read a book of some kind (ostensibly- I really only ever go anywhere to people-watch over my books). A couple of men about The Father's age were having lunch together, on break from working in an office somewhere, most likely, and conversing about baseball and suchlike, the way I imagine The Father and his little work-buddies might. I teared up as I swirled a plastic spoon through the frozen custard I had been eating, wishing for nothing more than to be sitting at an Astros game with The Father again, listening to him bitch about how expensive the pretzels and soda pops are.
Over the summer I spent afternoons reading on the Flinstone benches upstairs in the foreign languages building. One week toward the end of the semester, I "missed" several days, and Dr. Grair, walking by on his way to his office and seeing me, mentioned I had been missed. After he was safely out of view I stood abruptly and hid in the bathroom for a couple of minutes to prevent anyone from seeing me sobbing. I am not a particularly "nice", "friendly", or "giving" person, and I find it hard to imagine that anyone might attach any sort of positive value to me. When someone does, it makes me nervous and anxious.
To work I must go. Thoughts interrupted.
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 3:47 PM]