I've got a stack of papers waiting for me, and I know I've got to get to them, if only because I'll get drafts this evening at CSU.
I wrote that poem partly because the house we just bought comes to me care of that house, the one in the poem, the one I grew up in. I wanted to acknowledge how influential that place has been in my life, and continues to be, despite my desire to escape it.
My father once said "No one will ever love you but your parents," and I would reply, "Then God help me." I was thinking that if that was the best I could do for love, I was in trouble. But by the end, things had improved of course, and I understand what my father, in his typically spiky way, was trying to communicate.
2 comments:
Spiky. Like that. And that you accepted your parents with all their spikes when you were grown. I know people who resisted their parents to the end, even though the cause of separation was not so large. I'm thinking of one in particular, somebody I know well. His parents were punished for their strict parenting style for decade after decade, and then they died without ever bridging the gap. I never could grasp it, although I thought not having children of his own made him even less able to forgive.
It helped having a child who suffered with many of the things my father suffered with. I developed real compassion for him because of what I saw my son suffer, but the truth was that I always identified with and adored my father, despite his cruelty to me and to my mother, born of mental illness. I always knew he was ill. Though I needed to get away from my parents at an early age, excising them from my life completely was never an option.
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