The Man who Raised Me

I got the text late on Sunday night. I told myself not to think of it and just sleep.

I said the words aloud on Monday, but only the anger at the means of letting me know and the timing. Is there ever a good way? A good time?

I threw myself into my novels to escape.

I read the obituary. I raged at the erasure, the inaccuracies.

I stuffed my feelings down.

I slept and slept. rinse, repeat.

My head still aches. But not like my heart.

This morning I was filling out a permission slip for a field trip and my kid was tell me how much they didn’t want to go. The tears started. My beloved said, ‘parenting is hard.’ Thinking it was the conflict. All I could say was “no, it was that Sunday night text.”

I told myself there was no point in writing. It was a complicated, but ordinary life. My grief is my own and no one else’s. It’s messy. But, write I must. Just for me.

I was five or so when I met him, another of my mother’s boyfriends. He made her crepes. She was impressed. His furniture matched. So modern, so nice. Not a futon on the floor, not hand-me-downs. I remember his apartment. It wasn’t in a basement, like ours. It had big glass French doors. He said he remembered dancing with my mom at a sober holiday party when her belly was big with me. He said he remembered waving us off in our red Volkswagen square-back when I was two and my mom went off to find herself own way on the road and on the Left Coast.

I don’t know if any of this is true. He would lie to make the past better. Or, if a lie would not work, he’d walk away.

There were two wives before my mom. The first a shotgun marriage to make his son legit. We called him Yanni. Because James was too hard. He was named for the uncle, his father’s older brother, who died in Vietnam of an overdose. Listed as drowning, I was told, as he vomited in his helmet. The second was a short lived romp with Miss Fergus Falls, runner up for Miss Minnesota.

Again, is any of this true? I don’t know.

My mom was third. Common law only. She would never sign a damn thing or trust anyone. Not completely.

He wanted so badly to be middle class, a better life. He knew you had to walk the walk and talk the talk and look the part for anyone to ever take you seriously. Look like a yuppy and be a yuppy. He taught my mom how to dress for a job interview. He supported her finishing her college degree. As a new family we took a caretaker position for a property owned by his employer in order to save enough money for a house. A real home in a good neighborhood. A responsible choice.

My mom was furious the day he came home with a Thunderbird, because he wouldn’t drive a beat-up Volkswagen one day longer, even if my mom could rebuild that engine one more time. He’d never asked: he knew what she would say.

He was a coward with women. He loved them strong and exciting, all the better if they were petite and dark-haired. He barely touched his family of origin in those years. His ‘crazy’ catholic mother in the garbage house. The drunk of a dad who walked out of the crazy, and was dead before 70. The younger siblings who were so strung out they passed out in the soup one Thanksgiving. It wasn’t a lack of love but a deep fear the same demons would eat him up. The bare bones of this are true, I saw it for myself, even the soup. I think he wanted a strong woman who would make it all right.

He brushed my hair so tenderly. He’d made a great story out of his failure in making me edible oatmeal when left in charge. He told his friends my mom’s cute kid stories about me, as if they were his own experiences. They weren’t, but I knew he did it to claim me as his own. He told me it was OK if I loved church, even if my mom didn’t approve. I think that was the only time he ever directly contradicted her to me. One year he picked me up from Christmas midnight mass and saw a woman at bus stop waiting in knee deep snow. He stopped and we took her home. No question asked, just the right thing to do. When we saw a terrible accident and I was worried about the hit pedestrian, he made all the phone calls to the police and hospitals to help reassure me of the outcome. I don’t care if he lied about that. It was what I needed.

After my mom got her degree and a good union job with the county. He found a MBA program that would take his work experience instead of a college degree. He only ever had a GED before that but he was one hell of a good non-profit manager, usually healthcare adjacent. He worked his ass off for that MBA nights and weekends at a large oak roll-top desk.

Another purchase he didn’t ask my mom about, but loved (and, yes, also left behind).

Like the music equipment.

I can hear him playing Blackbird on his acoustic guitar for me. The saddest, most beautiful sound I know. I never loved his synthesizer compositions, but he did and I have no ear. So perhaps they were beautiful too because they gave him joy. He taught himself carpentry and build a case in the dining room for the speakers and records and stereo he loved so much. Chicago and ELO I remember best.

My mother encouraged the carpentry; it reminded her of her grandfather – the making, the do-it-yourself home projects. He built all the cabinets in the bathroom. He learned to tile too. The wallpaper never lined up and the stain was a little too orange. He wanted everything new, not old. He was ready with a can of spray paint to treat any antique lamp, much to my mother’s horror. He polished an old glass Santa ornament, a family heirloom of my mom’s, and made it a nice new noose(!) to hang it on the tree. Again I hear my mother mad, but laughing too. I still hang it by that noose each year on my tree.

The T-bird went the way of such things and was replaced by TWO brand new (yet very sensible) Honda civics right off the lot. A wagon for my mom and crx for him. The Christmases weren’t just a make-do affair anymore–one year there was even a three speed bicycle with my name on it under the tree. He brought home a laptop as soon as a laptop existed, so I could write my papers on it rather than the typewriter. On hot summer days with no AC, he would make root beer floats in the unfinished basement and we’d play scrabble or put together a puzzle or backgammon ( I don’t remember how to play but he taught me) or gin rummy.

His son Yanni got into some trouble. My mom insisted we do the right thing and give him a second chance. They turned the attic into a second floor loft space so we could have a third bedroom. Some contractors, but mostly their own sweat and tears. Then, for a while, I had a brother, not just every other weekend, but all the time. He was fun and funny and tall and protective and a very very lost soul. Yanni last called me in 2008; he was drunk. He’d just gotten off the phone with my mom. He was missing his dad who he had just learned had remarried for the 6th (and last?) time without letting him know.

I found out Yanni was dead too in that same Sunday text. Two gut punches. I can’t think about Yanni yet. I’ve not even looked for his obit.

Where did it all go wrong? Was it ever right?

I remember the yelling more from my age 14. From 15 I think I remember them both having a beer behind the others back. Each said the other was the worse alcoholic and I shouldn’t tell the other parent about the occasional drinking. It was just one beer or may be two. He liked Moosehead. She liked Sierra Nevada. A relationship predicated on sobriety could not survive this. Yet, they also wanted very different things. Once they got past just surviving to thriving the dreams no longer matched regardless of the love. They were really, really good together at those first steps out of poverty. It gave me a chance for something different, my own.

They told me they were splitting up when I went to college. I knew the marriage wasn’t good. I loved him so. I wrote my senior speech about finding the father I never had in him. Even after all the shitty things I said to him in my teenage angsty years.

He promised I got to keep him. He was signing the house over to me and my mom free and clear. He sent me lifesavers my freshman year of college with a hundred dollars inserted in the hole between the candies. And, he stayed calm and consistent as my mom dropped to 90 pounds and took up smoking in her grief. I lost a part of her in that divorce too.

Then there was the Christmas eve, really the wee hours Christmas morning, I bailed him out of Jail from a DWI. He didn’t call me. He called my mom. She wouldn’t go, so I did.

When I went to Oxford for study abroad, he bought me a brand new leather jacket, modern and well cut to replace the tattered and painted one I’d worn for years. He threw me one hell of a going-away party at his downtown loft apartment. He was always willing to let me use that apartment and the roof deck with friends to play at being a grown up.

I felt so special he kept momentos of me. I knew he never kept anything. When he was done with something, the past was over. I cannot imagine how Yanni felt.

Or, the wives.

I lasted through two more of those.

Rosemary was in toastmasters, had a house in the suburbs with two perfectly groomed and well breed dogs. He shifted his whole existence and tastes to match hers. I was so happy to be at that wedding. The house and way of life were strange but I was welcome. They even took me on a vacation to a resort (no more tents in this new reality).

Then back to loft.

Then his ex-secretary Diane. They opened a restaurant –her dream, not his — but he was all-in each time. It failed. She called me overseas to let me know the day she kicked him out for his drinking. I valued that call it made me feel like family. I’d learned that year I really couldn’t tell if he was in a blackout. He’d seem so normal as we watched a movie and yet remember nothing the next morning. He came to visit me in Oxford. I got him a guest room in college. He drank too much. I couldn’t feel connected.

He went to treatment. He decided he wasn’t an alcoholic, just bipolar. If he found the right meds, he’d be able to manage the booze. Yes, this is another lie he told himself.

He asked my mom to let him moved back in. I begged them both not to do it. If they had changed it was not in ways that made them more compatible. The yelling was so awful that summer. He cut off his finger while trying to repair something. I drove him to the hospital. Of course there were painkillers. I went back to England.

He left.

He left everything behind.

Even me.

I saw him once more. Winter 2003. He’d moved to Bismark, ND by then. His one functional sister was there and she’d moved their mom into a home there. He’d got a job. I drove to Fargo and so did he. We had lunch in a truck stop. I drove home across the frozen plains in car I’d borrowed from my grandfather.

I got one Christmas card at my mom’s house from him. I think. I don’t really remember.

Whenever I looked on the internet for him I found nothing. It was like he vanished. I always feared he was dead.

Until Sunday when I got the text. And, now, I know.

Too late for any funeral. I must make my own memorial.

I don’t know who he was the last two decades. In my heart he will always be my Charlie. The man who raised me, who made so much possible.

But for others he was Chuck or Chaz or Charles. And there were so many lies too. Some to ease the pain of a hurtful past, some to enlarge the good.

Even so.

I know he made me feel safe and loved. And, I know there is a hole the shape of a father inside of me.

A father I lost long ago but grieve today.

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The photo album I made him in 1998 was one of the things he left behind when he left my mother’s house a second time. I’m glad I have it today and Robert Frost’s words hit different, but I wish so dearly he had kept it close. I wish he’d been able to remember all those beautiful days.