When I saw him, we went to dive bars and drank.
Baklava grand was telling the story of the second time she saw her father. He gave her first toke on a joint. Not just that she smoked marijuana with her father the first time she saw him when she was thirteen, but that he gave her first toke on a joint he had rolled.
An honor, from a father to his daughter.
When I separated myself from my father, and he finally understood that I wanted no contact he turned on me.
Copa...can you see yourself in this vignette through your own eyes instead of through the eyes, the heart, the mindset of, your abuser?
When, against every tender childhood belief that your father, your savior, your protector, out there in the world and who you would one day find and make family with come hell or come high water...can you see the courage, the outrageous honesty with yourself in that, Copa? Can you see, as I can, the vital core of who you are, of who you were determined to be, as you went about saving your mother and mothering your sister? What is of value here is not what they thought. We already know the gist of how they are going to think about and present reality, whatever the details of any given incident. What is of value here, what should be noted here
is your courage in doing it, in insisting that it was possible to change everything for yourself, and for your family.
Instead Copa, their toxicity changed you. In a very real way, you've been poisoned. If you live, if and as you reclaim yourself, you will develop immunity to the toxins already ingested. Future toxins will still be poison for you and for me and for SWOT, too.
As I've gone through this or that regarding my FOO, I am so surprised, so disheartened, by the neverendingness of the toxicity, of the choice to toxify all things; to toxify every smallest strength remaining to any of us.
His death was hastened by drugs.
We have learned, here on the site, that our addicted children have changed in ways that make it seem like they must have been kidnapped. There is no empathy. There are lies, and there is the forever need of money. There is blatant hatred of the most roaringly unfathomable kind.
Hatred for their own mothers, for their own fathers, that takes our breath away, that leaves us reeling and punch drunk and vulnerable in a thousand ways.
Could this be what happened to your father?
Could those words he chose to describe the incredible good fortune that was his in having been blessed with a daughter who cherished him no matter what have been the same twisted interpretation of family and of cherishing that our own addicted children spew onto us?
Could it be that had your father managed somehow to quit, those words and those stories and those interpretations would never have come into being?
It was addiction for your father too, Copa.
Try so hard Copa, not to let his addiction destroy that strong, hopeful something that strengthened you all of your life until you entered their poisonous realm, again.
Here is something to counteract this. It is a quote from a poster here who posts on P.E. as Headlights Mom.
Huh. I can't remember just how it goes now. The gist of it is that if we can find even one speck of gratitude, if we can remember one gift, if we can fasten onto a beautiful, perfect smile or a remembered kindness, then we can hold that moment in our hearts. That is our true person. Everything else is the addiction, and can be safely disregarded
lest we grow bitter, lest we grow cold to him.
Those last words were an approximation of the flavor of Headlights Mom's post.
Don't enable, blame, hate or take responsibility for your father in your memories now, Copa. If you search for the one, honest moment, you will find it. When you have it, none of the other things will matter. You will know who your father was, what the essence of him was, before his life hurt him into what he became.
I have that imagery of my mother.
That is how I am strong enough to see the other things.
Lest I grow cold....
There were two prices I paid, as I see it of having distanced myself from my father. The first, he turned on me. The second, he went to the bottom and died.
For what it's worth, I understand that neither was not my fault.
Fault is not the issue. You have no way of knowing what good was achieved simply in your having been there for your father.
As there was good in what you did, in sacrificing all things, in risking and losing that strong, stable core of self you had gone on to create in your life, to take care of your mother, to see that she would not die alone and unloved.
But like my mom does too Copa, she hurt you to the degree she was able.
Back to fathers. I am not so good about fathers. My father was a good man. He was broken through his relationship with my mother. I think that is what I see, now. But he did betray me, Copa. I had to acknowledge the flavor of that truth before I could see him clearly.
***
You know something good happened there, in those times you had with your father, or he would not have found that time he spent in your presence a valuable enough thing to have had to disparage and dirty it so completely.
You may never know. But that is what I see in his attack on those memories of his time with you. Copa? In that he described his time with you in the way that he did to your brother, I also see that same determination to destroy any possible attempt for you and your brother to create family that I see in my own family of origin.
Nothing to do with you.
Abusers abuse because they are abusers. At the dissolute end of his life, that is who your father became. And all the good things he might have been, the man he might have hoped to be?
All that was lost to, was hollowed out of him by, his addiction.
While gifted with looks, charm, great intelligence, he lacked the character to make something of himself and his life. Instead, he sunk steadily lower. The trajectory of my father's life was relentlessly downwards. Emerging horribleness. Degradation. Unrelenting decline. As much as he could, he took me with him. Did I fear on some level the same thing for my son?
You posted earlier that drugs were a piece of your father's life until he was dead from them.
Could it be that you were seeing what happens to a man consumed by addiction? Could it be that your father was destroyed, was hollowed from the inside out, empathy first and then, integrity, and finally, the capacity to love itself, by his addictions?
Then that was not your father, Copa. That person you found lost his battle and was shamed by the hero he saw in your eyes. By that man he might have been, Copa.
Perhaps he was so deeply shamed Copa, between the hero you knew he was and the life he had wasted. Perhaps it was shame driving those things that he said, trying to push away those true things he saw in his own beloved daughter's eyes before she left him as she'd found him lest she be destroyed, too.
That could be true.
But I really do think that adopting a child who had been affected by some of the circumstances that affected my father...was part of my motivation to adopt my son. A fantasy of rescue is what they call it.
Oh, we all have our reasons for wanting our children. The reality of the child we finally do have makes those reasons we thought we wanted children in the first place seem laughable. It is a hard, scary, demanding thing to take on the responsibility of raising a child. If you'd backed away from it after a few days, then you could accuse yourself now of the things you are accusing yourself of. But that is not what you did.
Know what the thing is that they call it once the woman has committed to loving and cherishing and disciplining and teaching the real, living child she has, whatever her fantasy child represented?
Motherhood, Copa.
You were an excellent mom, or you would not be here on this site.
Your child has an inborn proclivity to addiction I think Copa, based on what you've told us here about his birth parents.
You did nothing wrong. You took him as he was and you loved him in place, and you have kept loving him, right where he was and exactly as he is. Your love for your child and your regret at the terrible things that are happening to him (and to you) shine right through every word that you post.
In my family I was the one who was responsible for my parents. Not vice versa. Was there the unconscious expectation on my part that my son care for me? I am not sure.
D H mom was furious with her kids and the world because she expected, and felt betrayed because, none of her children would take her into their homes. When there were family meetings with the social workers, both before and after her admission to the facility where she lives now, that is the secret she eventually roars out.
That her kids do not love her enough to take care of her now.
And she is angry and ashamed about that.
That is my first observation regarding the quote above. It has to do with legitimacy. It has to do with how it is supposed to be for every family, all over the world. We are living longer now. We are living beyond the capacity of a family to provide what we need.
That still creates conflict, creates deep shame and the anger that attends hurt, in the hearts of our families all over the world where parents are failing during those same years their children are beginning the decline that will result in their own deaths. We are of that age of reflection now. We truly cannot afford to give this ripening time over to the mindless, demanding, neverending tasks of physical care required to responsibly and ethically take on the care of our aging parents.
So, that is the first observation.
Whether that was the thought uppermost in your mind when you decided to change the world for one little boy or not, only you can say. What I can say is that I do not think you were seeing your new son in any remotest version of those ways. To me, it seems that you were presented with a choice about whether this child's life had a value or not. You chose to save him. You changed your life, turned everything toward the child, and toward creating family where there was none, before.
I think that was an admirable choice.
The second observation has to do with what I experienced with my own children. It has to do with what SWOT has experienced with hers too, whether natural born or adopted. If anything Copa, we over-mothered. If anything, we took on too much responsibility, or protected the kids too much. Note that I chose "if anything". Because I really am coming to believe that addiction is at the heart of so much of what happens to us and to our children, and not that there was something so wrong that our children went out looking to destroy themselves, or to hurt us because we were terrible parents somewhere we could never define. It is the addiction that must be dealt with. If at some point after the kids are back to themselves, anyone wants to talk about how they were hurt by our parenting, I will be and even, have been already, willing to listen, to apologize or explain the why behind what I did that they found hurtful.
I was so far from a perfect parent. But I was absolutely a good enough parent.
But those kinds of conversations are very different things than the accusations thrown out by our children while they are addicted.
What happens between ourselves and our children while they are addicted has to do only with hatred, as the addiction, and the terrible need of it, hollows them out. It is best for us to be honest with ourselves regarding these matters, or we will fall, like I did again and again and again, blindly into enabling.
We have to be stronger than we are to do what we are doing, Copa.
But just look at us, doing even that impossible thing, for the sakes of our children.
Isis, right?
He had a huge amount of money. When I was 8 I was going to five star restaurants. We took cabs everywhere. I lived like in the movie Casablanca. Colorful characters. Exotic people.
Yay!!!
Except it wasn't really like that.
It was, Copa.
That man is who your father really was, is the father he intended to be, for you.
On the heroin part...well, I don't know. He did what he had to, and what was there for him to do. That is a piece of how the myriad traps of addiction are set up, too. The money, the lifestyle, the rare wonder of all of it, in the beginning.
You do not need to post about this to us here Copa, but do you know what your father's life was like? Do you know whether he was educated and cherished and taught right from wrong as a child?
Did he come from wealth, or did he choose to create wealth for himself and his children, whatever the cost?
Those would be good questions to consider.
The idea of him more than the reality, was the thing. My prince will come.
Baklava granddaughter has a tea set, a child's tea set, that was one of the few physical representations she had that her father was real, and that he knew her and thought of her. It is here, in our home. She has it to this day and she will always have it, whether it is here, safely stored, or whether she takes it into her own home once she has one.
The other thing that she has, the other concrete proof that he existed, and that he loved her, was a tiny plastic heart.
That was not stored here, and has been lost to time. But when she was a little girl, she had it with her every single time the grands would need to come here, where there was protection, and safe haven.
I wanted you to know this about my grands Copa, because "My prince will come." is a beautiful, is an exactly right, beautiful and strengthening thing that was true. Yet, I sense self contempt in your posting that part, Copa.
You were a cherished little girl. Your father was hollowed out by his addictions and could not save himself, even for you.
Why else would he have wanted you with him, why else would he have thought of you at all, during those wonderful times you remember?
He loved you, Copa. You were like the dream to him that your own son is for you. Or like my children are for me, or like SWOT's are, for her.
That is human, Copa.
You were loved, cherished by your father in that special way only a father can cherish a daughter.
He must have been so proud of you, Copa.
I'm sorry it ended as it did; but no one can take away or tarnish what you had.
Not with your father, and not with your son.
As he aged.
Sadism.
Alcoholism.
Amorality.
Cockroaches.
Drunk.
Cruel.
Lost looks.
Cool.
Dissolute.
Hepatitis.
I hated being in that life.
It was a very hard thing.
Cedar
