Birthdays.

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown

Well it's official. Another Birthday come and gone, and here I am a whole year older.

Birthdays are not my favorite time of year.

For a lot of reasons really.


Every year this day comes, and it goes. I spend it, as often as I can, alone. There are so many questions that I don't have answers to. Many of them I never will. And even now, at 27, perhaps more so than ever, they haunt me.

Each year I mark the date of my birth and wonder to myself why it is I was born. It's not that I wish I hadn't been. Or that I don't love and enjoy my life, because the truth is that I do. But I can't help but spend the day dwelling on the woman who brought me into this world, knowingly. And peering into my tiny newborn eyes, decided I wasn't worth loving. That I was somehow marked. And that I was the beginning of her own personal fall from grace.

It's a kind of rejection I'm not likely to get over. One that lacks reason or logic. One that even lacks any discernible mythology. It just was. By all accounts she was fine before I arrived, and it was only afterwards that the cracks began to show.

And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'

My dad and I spent Saturday together. It's the first day we've spent together in 16 years, and it was both beautiful and strange. On the car on the way home we were talking about things. About life, and me, and the whole complicated mess that was my first 22 or so years here on Earth. He said, jokingly that I was a difficult child. And I agreed. I was difficult. It's not that I was bad, or into trouble, or anything else. I wasn't. But I was complicated. Everything with me was messy. Always messy. It immediately became apparent that he felt bad for saying it. He shouldn't have, it's the way it was, but he did. He tried to backtrack. To tell me that I really wasn't that difficult...then he paused. He said, right around fifth grade. That's when it all started spiraling out of control.

And he was right. I had to remind him of all the changes that came that year.

At the end of the fourth grade we had been expelled from Catholic school because of mom's...issues. Mom ran off to Medjugorje to see the Virgin Mary, but she didn't appear to her. They didn't tell us until the first week of school about the change. Mom decided I was too old for birthdays and hauled me off to an abortion rally instead. But I didn't make it there. I jumped out of her van at a stoplight and ran until my legs couldn't take me any farther. I hid in a tunnel behind the church playground for six hours until my dad came and found me. Mom grounded me for a month. When dad wasn't home I wasn't allowed water. But I was angry as sin and not about to be a prisoner. I threw the bunk-bed ladder through the window, climbed up on the roof and refused to come down until dad came home and understood. I was ungrounded, but the damage was done. Mom spent the rest of my adolescence trying to find someone who would have me exorcised. She started believing, really believing, that happiness was our greatest sin. We started family therapy that year, and Mom began openly blaming me for everything that had gone wrong in her life.

These things, they're just facts. Not absolute facts, but my facts. I'm sure she has her own too. I don't feel bad about them, I don't feel sorry for myself...most of the time anyway. But I also don't understand. Sure, I've written my own reasons, I have my own bedtime stories about what happened to mom and why we ended up where we did, but the reality is that they're just stories. Things I've made up over the years to explain it all to me. To make it all more or less okay.


Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Dad changed the subject quickly. The downside to the giant mess at my sister's birthday, over the OC's comments about my issues with my mother, is that dad now refuses to talk about her with me.

When I was younger, from about the fifth grade until several years after I left home things were really messy. Mom was crazy. Not the fun kind of crazy either. The crawling in through the doggy door in the middle of the night and standing over me muttering prayers kind of crazy. Mom and dad were stuck in a prolonged separation, followed by a messy divorce and a year or so where she refused to see us. Dad, in all his worrying felt he had deprived us of a mother because they had divorced. No matter how bad she was, in his eyes she was still a mom, and we needed her. After months of pleading, we were forced into Thursday night visitation that I loathed. Most nights I got out of Dad's car and walked the 4 miles home. Mom took offense at my rejection and began a lengthy custody dispute. Dad wouldn't let me testify on my own behalf, something that drove me crazy. All mom did was say terrible things about dad. All dad did was tell me mom loved me and I was being difficult.

As a result for many years it was not only me vs mom, but me vs the world. I didn't understand the complexities of divorce, or custody cases, or even relationships in general. All I knew was mom was nuts and dad kept telling me she wasn't. For a long long time I felt that he wasn't on my side. That he didn't care enough to see what was happening, to admit, just once, even just a little bit that maybe mom was insane and it wasn't my fault.

It wasn't until my sister and I were both out of the house that I ever heard dad say one unkind word about mom. He's still careful about what he says (and it still makes me crazy). But now, when we sit around remembering her, talking about the way things were, and all of the just plain insane things we've lived through I remember that I wasn't alone in it. That dad kept his mouth shut so mom never had anything on him. That he kept us safe, made sure we never had to spend one single night in 11 years, alone with her. When I sit with him and pour over all those insane details, read over the mountains of paperwork her hurricane left behind, go through dad's journals of the dark times, I remember just how much he loves me. And how very lucky I am to have him around. Even if I didn't understand at the time. Our shared commiseration reminds me that he was abused too. That we were fighting the same battle from different posts. That we both paid very different prices, but we survived.

I tried to explain that to him, but he missed the point and changed the subject.

The point is, obviously, that I'm sad we won't be having those talks, but also that it's those talks that gave me insight into what those years were like for dad. That through it we've come together, as adults, as people, looking at our shared history together without the anger that marred so many years of our lives. We've come to understand why we've taken the paths we have and how we became the people we are. I know mom has her own side of the story too, maybe even one, however improbable, that would make me hate her just a little less.

Unfortunately for the both of us, that's a chat we'll never have. And when all is said and done, I know that that's what's best for me. That whatever I would have gained in closure, in comfort, would be surpassed by new forms of torture. Torture only the truly crazy, and those who have to live with them can imagine.

So it is on my birthday, that I also celebrate the break I've made from her. The six years I've gone without saying one single word to her, without responding to the cold and often downright evil voicemails she periodically leaves me. I puzzle over the questions that remain, I roll around in the many, many things that have gone wrong between us, I lament the loss of the relationship I should have had with her, and I remember that in the end I was brave enough to stand up on my own two feet, the two feet she gave me, and walk away.

I am blessed to have a dad as wonderful as mine is. He isn't perfect. At times he's stubborn, often times wrong, and occasionally downright annoying. But he's always on my side. He always tells me that he loves me. Even when I've screwed up in ways I never imagined were possible. Even when my life is in ruins around me and I don't know how I'll make it through the days. He's always, always there and he always helps me sort things out.

I spend the weekend before my birthday with my dad. Just sitting around, watching birds, hunting for fossils, and looking at the stars. Eternally grateful that we've made it through all this mess together, and that when all is said and done, we're still family. This year I spent a whole day with him, from dawn to dusk, and it was hands down the best present I've ever gotten. Just family time. Me and my dad.