A Mighty Story

I worked hard to be here.

To be in a place where I could sit up straight and look down. And see the roots. To behold the extent of their depth in a seemingly bottomless toxic miasma. To notice how much poison is buried there. And to not lose posture. To keep my back straight. Knowing I am vaccinated against most of what is buried there.

But there is still a lot of work to be done.

It’s interesting from a sociological perspective, really. I was raised in a household in which my polite and sensitive father, a devoted 1968 Summer of Love hippie, was a perfect counterpart to my strict, religious fundamentalist teenage mother. Childhood years, spent in poverty, simplicity, and isolation in the Deep South, were an exercise in bliss. Embraced by the evening amber glow of an endless pine forest, my sister and I played imaginary games under the arms of ancient oaks, catching lizards and making daisy chains of clovers and azalea petals as we waited excitedly for dad’s sputtering Volkswagen to pull across the dirt driveway. Wafts of mom’s stovetop delights serenading us through the open windows. And a field across the street, and the future, that seemed to go on forever.

So harmonious it was, in fact, that the concept of the sudden divorce was literally beyond comprehension. I was 10, and mom had gone to nursing school and acquired her own residence in a big city under the promise that it was not forever, and that nothing was wrong. But the truth was, the delightful understanding of “family” was going to be slowly, torturously revealed. As deceased.

The seeds of unconscionable nightmares were planted and watered, and a lush and prosperous garden of abuse, neglect, depression, self-injury, and corruption soon flourished without borders or management for the next eight years, and on the day I turned 18 my mother fled the region to devote the rest of her life to a manipulative drug abuser, never to be recognized again.

With a commitment to suicide, and the unwillingness to burden my kind father with his son’s corpse, I discarded my belongings (and hair) and left home at age 27 and, for the first time as an act of parting desperation, I allowed myself all the sins I had been warned against with eternal demonic retribution, and in doing so found my first girlfriend - and numerous new reasons to stay alive. With her support, I sought out therapy. It helped. The garden of poisons was stricken down.

But its venom was still there, pulsing underfoot even as it decayed.

Travels, adventures, and a second girlfriend later, and I thought I had unearthed the secret to happiness, the font of adult domestic equilibrium and the recipe for a permanently satisfied soul. A happy marriage. Her two children, one of them severely disabled, returned to me a reminder of that elusive essence - that concept of warmth in winter, of flower necklaces and endless fields and an embrace of mighty trees. The smile of a child’s innocence as she pursued skittering reptiles, and the teasing breeze of a summer meal. I was home again.

So harmonious it was, in fact, that the concept of the sudden divorce was, once again, beyond comprehension. I know. I should have been prepared. But I wasn’t.

I was 39, and the wife simply marched in while I was on my side in the throes of a freshly mobilizing kidney stone and, with a backdrop of Thanksgiving leaves coloring my world with beautiful doom, simply said, “You can’t stay here anymore.” The manipulative drug-trafficking schizophrenic set to replace me was apparently already on his way.

As I began to mourn my standing as the world’s sole remaining resident in a theoretical Summer of Love, COVID cheered its way into my reality, saving the day.

Gleefully, I wasn’t sick. But finding myself isolated in the very house in which I had grown up, without money or a job, with nowhere left to go and no one left to turn to during lockdown, I had no choice but to turn inward. So I embraced the pain. I decided to take all I had learned and experienced during my travels and help myself.

I found a counselor. I found support groups. I got medication. I breathed deeply and slowly, and I went for regular walks on the edge of the tiny quiet town. I wrote daily and amply. I spoke affirmations to myself, Stuart Smalley-style, in front of mirrors. I discovered lizards and azaleas, and I listened to the wind in the oaks.

Eventually a job found me. A good one. And the crumbling house now under my care became its own home, my space and my responsibility, an empty plot in which to plant seeds of my choosing. No more codependency. No more self-sacrifice in search of validation and acceptance. Just me and the silence and what I can make of it all. This is what it means to recover, I said.

That’s when my mother’s ancient memoir appeared, in a taped-up box in a corner closet, untouched for 40 years. Written between my ages of 3-4, it revealed something extraordinary. Wounded deeply as a child herself, she had struggled her whole life to have control over her suffering. As part of this, she had meticulously planned my conception, my birth, and my upbringing - only she had planned it for a second, perfect daughter.

My appearance as a boy (I am referred to as “the male”) was such an unexpected and undesired interruption of her plans that it had seemingly set in motion everything that I came to know as both wonderful and hideous about my entire life. She had been traumatized at a young age by injured, unloving parents, and like them she had rejected proper treatment in favor of religious piety. And while a discovery like that might have destroyed someone else, alone in the dark on the cusp of winter, mere feet from the very mattress on which countless hours had long ago been spent upside-down and choking on tears, do you know what I did?

With a knee-aching, sore-back, old-man groan I rose to my feet. And I danced. And I sang. And in the darkness I cried with joy like an innocent child. Not only because I had dislodged the root, but because it had not dislodged me. I now KNEW there was never anything wrong with me, that it wasn’t my fault, that my very existence held the power to influence worlds and shape endless futures, and that I had built something out of myself that was strong enough to keep its posture in a current of infected, loveless souls. And in doing so find self-validation.

No, I said. THIS is what it means to recover.

But the remnants are still below the surface. There is always work to be done.

So thank you for doing it.

And thank you for reading.