I understand the innate sensitivity of the ego.  For this reason, I will cater to it briefly in the hopes of cutting through some of the delusions it likes to create…

In this story, there are no real bad guys…no truly bad guys.  What is in this story are lots of well-meaning individuals living unconsciously with their heads in the sand.  Perpetuating cycles of insanity and suffering either through repeated thoughtless behaviors or by keeping quiet…while telling themselves that they’re the real good guys…”following the rules.”

There’s no judgment.  I get it.  I’ve been there too.  Again, it seems easier, right?  It’s more comfortable to participate in the ‘Groundhog Day’ storyline.  Never questioning the narrative, never questioning ourselves…until…until something so unbelievably painful and personal happens.  Or until something is so gigantically offensive to something deep within.  And then what?  What does the questioning lead to??  If it doesn’t lead me to me, I suspect I’ll find myself back in Punxsutawney…going through the motions, but maybe slightly more unsettled than before…until…

Until the next thing happens (and it will), ad infinitum.

~

My daughter went to her father’s house every other weekend.  He lived with his parents, and I never had any reason to think that anything was wrong there.  Until…

Until one night we left to meet her father.  It’s about a 20-minute ride from our house to the meeting spot.  On the ride, my daughter and I were talking, laughing as usual.  We came upon a car at a stoplight with the numbers “666” on their license plate.  The thickest, most awful dark feeling came over me…

We arrived at the meeting spot and got out of our car.  My daughter walked over to her father’s car, opened the back door and climbed in.  He was still sitting in the driver’s seat with the window up and didn’t say anything to her.  This was unlike him.  Alarmed and already anxious from the experience I had minutes earlier, I asked him to roll down his window.  He looked very off and couldn’t even put two words together…I told my daughter to get back in my car.

What the fuck??  As far as I knew, he was sober and had been since we separated.  Though I never asked the question directly thinking it wasn’t any of my business anymore.

How could I think that it was none of my business that the person my child spent every other weekend with was sober?  Was going to meetings?  Was safe for her to be around?  Fuck.

(And we’re good now.  It’s all good now.  But I can’t help but wonder what could have happened?  What could be happening in other households, but people are too afraid to voice it.  Too afraid of the light and much too comfortable in the dark…)

We left and went back home.  My daughter was scared and that scared me as I was trying to make sense of the situation.  It wasn’t long until I got a phone call from his mother, and she was scared too…asking me if he made it to get our daughter, saying she hadn’t heard from him all day.  I was in shock and pretty panicked.  I told her what had happened, that something was very wrong.  Though she was quite upset and emotional, she was not surprised…

She told me that he had started drinking again some years ago.  She had a lot of anger towards him.  She told me that my daughter didn’t like to be around him when he was like that.  That she would call for her to get him away from her. She told me how that was something that she understood because she also had an alcoholic father.  Her best solution was to try to keep him away from her during those times and to tell my daughter that, “Daddy’s just sick right now.”  It never occurred to her to tell me.

The next best solution was to buy her anything she wanted and more.  They pretended that everything was okay and tried to fill the void with “stuff.” Meanwhile…nobody is really helping him either… 

I was in an accident with Daddy, because he was sick.  Daddy was sick this weekend…

Oh…my…God…I was furious.  Nobody thought to call me?  Nobody thought to protect my daughter??  For years???

THIS is how it happens…these are the ways you shape a human being…of course, children are resilient up to a point and that’s a blessing.  I hated this for my daughter though.  I never wanted her to experience any of this. Everything outside of me, is out of my control, but to deny responsibility here, would be self-deception. I didn’t ask the important questions and that’s something I would have to live with.

I had no desire to keep my child away from her father in any egotistical way whatsoever.  I know that that’s a special bond that is important to nurture.  When extreme and potentially harmful circumstances arise, however, someone who is able to do the right thing, needs to have the courage to do so at any cost.  The best interests of the child need to be put first.  I knew immediately that she needed to be removed from all of the players in that situation and that something drastic needed to happen before we could move forward with them in a healthy way…

My daughter’s father was in a rehab within a few days.  After a few weeks, his therapist contacted me and scheduled a phone call between him and I.  He was going to be released after 28 days of inpatient.  We talked and decided it would be best to stop the visitation schedule we previously had.  He would come to the house, and we would have an honest, kid-friendly conversation with our daughter about what happened that night and the years prior. Then, we would start with short, supervised visits and increase that little by little according to her level of comfortability.

She was sad but accepting.  The truth is that it wasn’t altogether incorrect to say that her father was “sick” because that’s actually exactly what alcoholics are.  However, there was deceit in that it was a misleading and equally sick explanation to a child.  Having this secret…having to keep this secret is an unfair stressor and pressure.  Not being protected, not feeling safe in an environment that’s “supposed” to feel that way…

~

One thing is true regarding the process of thoroughly and painfully excavating the bad in us, the dark in us…what is also waiting to be found is the good in us, the light in us…and the “light” embodies certain attributes naturally. One of them being courage in the face of wrongdoing.

As I’ve mentioned, there are no “bad guys” in this story, not in the sense that people are purposefully inflicting harm onto another.  No.  Though, does that make it any better?  Does knowing that change the moral of the story?  Harm has still been inflicted and the vicious cycles continue…if one has not begun the process of knowing their shadows, how could they have the ability to see it clearly in another?  How could they not be blinded to their own part in the harm done?  All the while believing that they’re in the right…(ego).

If you’ve not seen clearly in yourself that which is ugly about what you do, it will be impossible to see it clearly in another…And it will be impossible to have the courage of your convictions. How then can any real change be enacted?

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