It All Starts With My Dad

I can't remember the last time I was happy.  Free, joyful, without worry, fear or stress happy.  I'm profoundly unhappy in my marriage.  I'm unhappy with my sex life (or lack thereof).  I'm unhappy with my health.  I'm unhappy with my body and my appearance.  I'm unhappy with my mind and thoughts and negative self talk.  I'm unhappy with my habits and the decisions I've made.  And I'm sad.  I'm terribly, unutterably sad.  

My dad died unexpectedly in August of 2017, and my whole world changed in an instant.  It just...died.  It died with him.  I was unhappy in my marriage before that.  I was unhappy with a lot of things before that.  But the day he died, I lost my anchor.  I lost the person who made it all seem tolerable.  He was my heart.  My true north, if we're being cliché.  I no longer recognized myself or my world.  I felt like someone had cut my tether, and I was drifting.  I suddenly realized that everything I was and everything I believed was tied to him.  And without warning, he was just gone.  And with that, in an instant, I no longer had any idea who I was as a person, as an individual.  

I had to recreate myself, and I didn't want to. I wanted him back.  I wanted everything to go back to normal.  But nothing was normal any longer.  And the world just kept spinning.  Life kept happening around me, at the same pace, and it was infuriating.  I just needed things to stop, for just a minute, and let me breathe, let me figure out this new existence.  But it wouldn't stop.  It wouldn't even slow down.  That's the most helpless and confused I've ever felt in my life.  And any time I'd ever felt helpless before, I went to my dad for advice and comfort.  Only this time, I was on my own.  And it was awful.

It's been five years.  It seems like five days.  I still feel the grief as strongly as I felt it the day it happened.  It still seems not quite real.  I still expect him to call me. I still try to call him.  I want to share the good times with him, and the funny stories, I want him to see my boys becoming men, I want to go to cheap Tuesday morning movies with him.  I want to call him on Thanksgiving morning to ask him, for the fifteenth year in a row, how to make the sweet potatoes.  There are so many things.

I also want him back because I want my mom back.  Because she changed, too, that day.  How could she not, after fifty years with him?  When he died, everything became something different, something I no longer recognized and didn't know how to navigate.  How could so much of the world be wrapped up in this one man?

At five years out, I won't say it's better.  It's just different.  It's a part of who I am now, that grief.  It will never abate, never go away.  I can shove it to the background when I need to, and often do just that.  But it's strong and powerful and sometimes it sneaks up and gut punches me when I least expect it.  I need my dad so badly still.  I need to hear his voice, see his smile, watch him engage with total strangers because he was just that kind of guy.  The guy who could and did talk to everyone he encountered.  The guy people just instantly liked.

I'm a lot like my dad.  I never stop talking, for one thing.  I strike up conversations with strangers all the time.  I'm kind to a fault and free with compliments.  I love to smile and laugh, but more importantly, I love to make others smile and laugh.  I'm naturally funny, so making people laugh comes easily.  I'm gregarious and outgoing, engaging and flirtatious.  All things my dad was.  

But there are plenty of things about me that I most certainly did not get from my dad.  I cuss like a trucker at times, which always bothered him terribly.  I'm incredibly inappropriate with my sense of humor, which also bothered him, though I think he secretly found it entertaining.  I'm what he would call a "bleeding heart liberal," something that came to me later in life.  I'm staunchly pro LGBTQ and vehemently defended gay marriage rights.  That made him crazy, as he was always very homophobic.  I'm also very defensive of minorities (being married to one tends to challenge the beliefs you grew up with).  So we agreed to disagree, and tried not to bring up the sensitive topics.    

My dad, contrary to all of his wonderful qualities, was a dyed in the wool racist.  He experienced bigotry throughout his childhood, and I believe it was sort of just hard wired into him to be distrustful of certain minorities.  I believe it was all about fear.  Fear of the unknown.  Fear of what he couldn't control.  Fear of what he'd been told.  Fear that he was wrong, a stubborn unwillingness to listen to why he was wrong and a flat out refusal to change or even challenge any of his long held beliefs.  

My dad wasn't perfect.  He was my hero, my knight in shining armor, my defender.  But he wasn't without flaws.  While he was alive, these flaws were easy to dismiss in the moment.  But after he was gone, they just sort of became a permanent part of my memories of him.  And that brings me tremendous guilt.  I want to be able to still view him with a child's innocence.  But I can't.  And I feel terrible that I can't. I wish I could.  But it is what it is.

Anyway, yes, this blog all starts with my dad, and how losing him became a catalyst to my finally wanting to figure out who I am and what I stand for.  There is so much wrapped up in this.  My marriage, my health, my experiences as a mother, how I treat myself, physically and mentally.  I have so much to work on, so much to figure out.  I'm in therapy, and I think it's helping?  But it's going to be a long road.  There's a whole lot to unpack here.  But in the end, my goal is to figure out how to be the person I was always meant to be.  Not Daddy's Girl, not Vince's sister, not David's wife, not even my boys' mom.  But Erin.  Who is Erin?  What does Erin want for her life, for herself?  What does Erin think she deserves?  Let's find out.