Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.

Sometimes you think you're ready for something, and then you realize you aren't.

I just told my Dad I'm not ready to be adopted:

Loving you has taught me a lot of things. And I know that if it were you in my father's place, I'd still love you even if you didn't deserve it. I don't know why, but it feels too much like a betrayal. A double-sided betrayal: if I let go of Dale I'm betraying him, and if I don't I'm betraying you. I'm not sure what to do. I thought I was ready; I want to be ready. But then I thought maybe I was just still angry from the past few days, and I don't want to do this because I'm angry. I'm sorry.


I had to fight to keep from crying. Ten thousand thoughts are chasing their way through my head, and I can't make sense of any of them. If it were just my mother we were talking about, I wouldn't have to think twice. I'd have the adoption papers signed, sealed and delivered by tomorrow morning.. Michelle Allen went a long way toward erasing any love I ever had for her, and she did a damn good job of it -- I don't have enough good memories of the two of us to use up all the fingers on my left hand. She hated me, and I knew it. And she knew it. And Dale knew it. She used to say things like, "I should have thrown you away the minute you were born. You're useless. You're a disgrace. You'll never amount to anything. I should just kill you now and get it over with." And then she would make me get down on my knees in front of her and beg her not to end my life. I even had to clasp my hands: "I know I'm useless. I know I don't deserve to live, but please don't kill me, Mommy. Please." It was humiliating and degrading. It stripped me of my humanity. I hated it so much I would even go so far as to beg her not to make me beg her, but it never worked: she'd just beat me till I did as I was told. I was eight, nine, ten, eleven, fifteen years old; it went on for years. My knees had permanent bruises, and my powerlessness and rage was pressed and shaped and built upon until it turned into a hatred so profound that no amount of time will be able to erase all of it. These days, I alternate between not giving the slightest bit of a damn about her and waiting meanly for her to die so I can get back the stuff she has that I want: Christmas ornaments, childhood toys, beloved books. Sometimes I feel like sitting down and crying for Mommy, but not her. Not who she is. When I want to cry for Mommy, I cry for who she should have been -- because I know, deep in the very fabric of my being, that I was a motherless child in all but the most technical of definitions. But Dale was a different story.

I was a little girl who adored her Daddy. I didn't care that he was gone most of the time, or that he was constantly drunk. I loved him even though he left me to suffer, even as I watched him walk away time and time again. I would have followed that man to the ends of the earth; I would have trailed him to Hell and back. My fondest memory of him is something so incredibly simple that it almost feels silly even to mention it. It was the day he taught me how to hold a pool stick.

When I was little, the pool sticks from our game table were almost as tall as I was. I was so very clumsy and uncoordinated; try as I might, I could not hold one correctly. My baby brother could do it better. Patiently, over and over again through the course of a single evening, Dale would come up behind me and guide the stick through my fingers. Leaning into his chest, smelling his aftershave and cigars, feeling his big hands over my little ones and moving in tandem as he guided the shot to pocket the ball ... I felt so safe. I didn't want him to let go.

There were other times, too. One day after we moved to Norton Road, me and Matt were helping him wash his semi when he got a strange grin on his face, lifted a sopping, soapy sponge from a bucket of water, and threw it straight at me. This started a water fight to end all other water fights in the world: both buckets ended up being dumped, the water hose entered the fray, and somehow Matt's Super Soaker made an appearance. By the end of it, I was crawling downhill as fast as I could manage while shrieking with laughter, two voices behind me shouting, "Hurry! She's getting away!"

The sheer joy of these simple things was enough to overshadow even the repeated abandonment. For a long time, these little things kept me afloat. Even when things got ugly between us, I could not hate him: instead, I loved him more, with the fierce and bereft kind of love a girl has for the knight in shining armor who, even having turned on her, will forever and always be her first hero. I remember a night of fear and disbelief that ended  with me rocking back and forth at the foot of my bed with my arms wrapped around myself, sobbing out to the empty room: "Daddy, daddy, daddy, can't you see I need you?"

But he could not see, or would not, so in the end I had to go. I finally had to give up on the idea that he would save me and do what had to be done so that I could save myself. I was lucky to find Lou when I did. I will always be grateful that there's a place in his heart with my name on it, because no matter how old she gets, a girl will always need a daddy. Whether she's twelve or 120, there's a spot in a woman's heart for her father. I guess that means I'm lucky, in a way, because I have two of those spots now. One belongs to a man in a brown shirt with "Bennie's Garage" stamped above the pocket, who taught me how to hold a pool stick and let me call for radio checks on the C.B in his truck when I was no more than four. The other belongs to a man who wears a bandanna around his ankle in a persistent throwback to the eighties, who fixes me a pot of chili on my birthday every year because he knows it's my favorite and who turns me around sometimes on the sidewalk so I won't miss the hot girl walking by, which I wholeheartedly appreciate. Today, in 2010, it is this man who makes me feel safe and cared for and protected. I go to sleep at night knowing that if I ever need him, all I'll ever have to do is call his name, and he'll come wading through Hell and high water to keep me from harm. I never had that in Dale; Dale walked away. But somehow, I still can't let go of him, of the memory of that man who used to be my hero and the sense that by being officially adopted, I'll somehow be betraying him. I guess it boils down to what I told my daddy earlier:


Loving you has taught me a lot of things. And I know that if it were you in my father's place, I'd still love you even if you didn't deserve it.