Things Happen

I moved the last of my shit out of my latest broken home today. It brought me back to 2009 when I got to experience that feeling for the first time. That night, the bar was my refuge and some country song was my soundtrack. Its lyrics talked about watching your broken dreams dance in and out of the beams of a neon moon. The neon lights of my bar were a welcome alternative to that empty feeling of my dreams of home dying once and for all in my marriage.

But, looking back on that home…it was anything but. If I had stayed, the kids would still have a robot/christian/dead man walking of a dad. And the things I know now about the reality of the situation…god damn…I’m so glad I left and got to experience the pain of those broken dreams, because in reality it was a fucking nightmare.

I got to try out therapy for the first time. And assumed it would be rough. It was not that. It changed my life. It let me feel for the first time. It made me a better person. It confirmed that there were other people who preferred real over looking good. I stopped hating myself and beating myself up over every single fuck up. In the marriage, I was a dead man. Therapy brought me back.

But, at some point a year or two ago, my beautiful 85 year old therapist fell. And since then I’ve struggled to get back up. My therapist broke her hip and I haven’t heard from her since. I don’t know if she’s alive or what, but I can’t fucking imagine where I’d be without her and I can look back and see how much it’s affected me these last couple years to not have her influence.

Writing helps. And story time with friends is always a great way for me to get my head straight. But, I need more. Because, you see…I have mental problems. I use that phrase jokingly at times, but it’s true. It doesn’t take much for me to get all fucked in the head, but I love the part of me that keeps fighting. It would be easy to give up. Or to just go back to fitting in with the type of people who say they’re fine when they’re not fine.

But those aren’t my people. Because man…I’m fucked up and what good does it do to pretend otherwise? I owe it to my kids to be real. To get shit out on the table and not make them think that everything is fine, the way my parents convinced me we were “fine”. We weren’t fine and it took me most of my life to recognize that. It’s great to know it now and be able to take it on, but my god…how much of my life was spent faking it, because that’s what I was raised to do.

And you know…I talked earlier about the feeling of my latest broken home, thinking there were only two…the marriage and the relationship that just blew up…but the other one was the one I grew up in. My parents stayed together. But, the home was broken. Nobody that came out of that place functions in a healthy way. My mom apologized on her death bed for not standing up to my dad. What if she had divorced him?

How would my life be different? It would be a lot easier to have known that things were fucked up. And I guess that’s how I’m flipping the script of my family history. My marriage was bull shit. I don’t need to go through those details, but I had to leave. And the kids…in the long run…are going to get a better version of me and clearer picture of reality because of the divorce. Don’t get me wrong…it fucking sucks for them, but they have a chance to see another side of life this way. It’s not christianity ever after like my fairy tale of a childhood was.

So, yeah…I’m moving us into this shitty duplex, because that’s where I’m at right now. And I can be all sad about taking the kids out of the fancy house we lived in with Sarita, but I should have never put them in that spot to begin with. The fact that I put them through getting close to Sarita and her dog and moved everybody in together…I’m having trouble forgiving myself for that one. It was irresponsible. And because it didn’t work out, it’s fucking hard on the kids. But, the ups and downs I went through in the relationship made me a sub-par dad. So, I had to split once again. And break another home. I want the kids to have better than I did, but there are times in this current process where my heart just breaks, because they don’t deserve to have gotten hurt again.

I wanted to believe that we had it all this time. That it was actually going to work out. That, in my relationship, we could be real and battle through the hard shit and overcome our pasts. But, I expected too much. And even when I knew it wasn’t working, I just kept going, because I couldn’t bear the thought of another heartbreak.

And it was fucking hard to look at that empty house today and look back on the high hopes I had for the family that we were trying to create. A giant fucking hole where home should be. Again. So, ya know, more tears, because that’s how it is these days.

But, on my drive away from paradise lost, I got two songs to add to the soundtrack of my story. First, while waiting in the drive thru at Culver’s, their speakers played one of my favorite songs from high school…“Touch of Grey” by the Grateful Dead. The line that got me was “I will get by….i will get by…I will get by…I will survive.” I’ve done it before man…I can do it again. No way in hell I want to be starting again again, but life isn’t a barrel of monkeys for me for some reason…so I’ll get up and carry on.

And one way I did that this week was going back to therapy for the first time. It’s a new lady. And it’s going to take some getting used to, but it was great just to have space to get everything out once again. She listened to my fucked up story and didn’t bat an eye. It was a good start. She confirmed some shit regarding my decisions to keep my dad out of my healing process and out of the kids’ lives.

Which takes me to soundtrack song number 2 for the night…right before I pulled into the new place Dawes new song “Things Happen” came on the radio. It goes, “let’s make a list of all the things the world has put you through. Let’s raise a glass to all the people you’re not speaking to.” I’ll keep making my list. I’ll keep writing and going to therapy to try to get it right. And I guess I have to go ahead and raise a glass to all the people who hurt me…the people who aren’t in my life…the ones I’m not speaking to. At the end of the day, they’re missing out. I’m pretty great. And they don’t get to experience that anymore. So, maybe I can just be glad that the people who made my life harder don’t get to keep doing that.

I hate to be starting over. I hate that things didn’t work out. But, I have a whole new batch of stories to tell and a whole new bunch of strangers to find to share stories with. I’ll be okay. It’s felt super overwhelming at times, but I keep writing and it keeps getting a little better and then worse and then…oh fuck who knows, but I think there’s been progress and I’m hopeful that therapy will make my dreams come true. Ha. Honestly if you look at my story…my dream girl is that 85 year old therapist. She gave me life. She made me believe those Grateful dead lyrics…I will survive motherfuckers. Let’s call it a day and go raise a glass to all the people I’m not speaking to…things happen…that’s all they ever do.