Ripple
“Every story starts with something is wrong, something is rotten in Denmark, right? That’s rule one. Something needs to be healed, the land needs is broken, and I think for me it comes from my mom dying, she died when i was like 11 or 12, if that didn’t happen I don’t know where i would be. Its a game changer. You’re living one way, I’m a kid from Queens, and then -boom, your mother is just gone. You’re too young to deal with it, so you just wall it off, you scab over it. I didn’t cry at her funeral, you know, its just the age you are at, and you think it didn’t do anything, you’re a little numb. And then later when all of the sudden a girl wants to break up with you while you are in college, you’re devastated, its like……the monster comes out you look at Swingers. Swingers is funny. Hahaha he can’t get over the girl that leaves him. Well, that’s me trying to deal with my mother I think. That’s what made him that way, thats why I get so heartbroken… Because it touches some other deep fissure in my guts.”
My mother left when I was 13 years old. When I say left, I mean that she took my sister and left my father and me. She wanted nothing to do with either of us. My mother left, because she was having an affair. My parents tried to keep everything hush hush, but I could hear them argue from my bedroom with the covers pulled over my head. My dad couldn’t deal when my mother left. He was isolated and drinking and soon started to date. He left me home alone.
I was 13, in middle school, going through puberty. I was full of rage, depression, sadness and mostly, abandonment. I started drinking a year later, at 14. Many women have talked about having daddy issues, but I have mommy issues. Many men choose to act out these issues by being a “player”, mistreating women, or by simply being a dick. More men than will ever admit or realize that their beavior may stem from somewhere. For me, it took reaching a certain age in my life, where I needed to look inside, to see where this was coming from. I’m not sure how many men are motivated to do this - it isn’t easy.
I’m constantly striving for that maternal love that I feel I missed. I have more female friends than male friends, but I never view my interest in female friends as something that I want to blossom into a romantic relationship. For me, it’s so much deeper. When I develop these friendships, I’m afraid I’ll lose them. Somewhere deep inside of me, every woman triggers a fear of abandonment. I fear that I’m incapable of being in a romantic relationship because of all these issues.
For 20 years, I was filled with anger and emptiness that can’t be described. The hole is so deep that I don’t think it could ever be filled again. I started drinking, because it was — and still is — the only way I could deal with the pain. I had no one to talk to. Back then in the 80’s, there was a new phenomenon being talked about — latchkey kids. We were kids who came home from school alone and were expected to cook our own food, keep busy, do our homework, and live a normal life. My life was anything normal, my life was more like KIDS.
I had no one to look after me, and my dad was always working and dating other women. My friends, my crew as they were known to be, were from one-parent families, too. We would drink Cisco (pre Mad Dog days) and forties and buy dime bags at Washington Square Park. We never had Christmas like most people did or dinner with anyone, but we had each other. I am friends with them to this day. It helped me get though those years. The addictions and emptiness carry on with me to this day too.
When I was 33, I got a phone call a little after 6 a.m. Any phone call between midnight and 6 a.m. is never good. It was my father. He said, ” I need to tell you something. Your mother is very sick. She’s at Sloan-Kettering with cancer. It’s spread to her liver, uterus, and stomach, and she wants to see you.”
My father wanted an answer, would I go see her. I told him I needed five minutes to think about it. I hadn’t seen her in 20 years. I only had visions of what she might look like. There were many years, what I had wondered what she was up to. Had she ever thought about me. I had so much anger and resentment. Did I want to go to the hospital, and say, “Fuck you. You ruined my life when you left me. I hate you. I have all these issues because of you.” Or did I want to be the bigger man, the man I taught myself to be and that she didn’t, and go to the hospital and fulfill her wish. I didn’t owe her anything.
I decided to that going to the hospital was more important than taking the opportunity to express everything I’d held inside for 20 years. So I went. It was hard and awkward and there wasn’t much to say. Walking into the hospital, and down the corridor, every emotion I have felt for the last 20 years was running through my body. My mother was a stranger to me; I felt no emotion, not a tear dropped from my eye. She apologized, but some apologies just don’t go very far. When I went home, I drank my Jameson and thought about it all. I never saw her again.
