I need to build myself up again, because I got knocked down.
It took a while. It took the world a while to knock me down, and they did it from the inside out. They did it insidiously. They did it with small comments and lowered expectations. They took from me what was my core faith in self. They made me feel like I was a bad parent because the choices the people I love made weren’t the choices I felt were right for them, and I stewed in those choices. I stewed in the disdain and distaste the people closest to me felt for me. I breathed in the gaslighting of it being the other way.
Then, I let my environment set the tone. I allowed myself to believe the world was going to continue to move me in the right direction, because it did that for me thirty years ago. This is not the same world it was, and I am not the same person I was. In fact, I’ve started to forget who I am in the face of letting everyone else determine who I should be–both to them and to myself.
I had an extremely tough conversation with my youngest this morning. A kid he knew, and used to play football with died over the weekend over some nonsense. He was riding around (in a stolen car I might add) with another kid my boy knows and they mixed it up with some other kids wandering around in the middle of the night. The two got into an altercation with the much larger group over a weed pen. Now a kid is dead. He didn’t need to die. It was stupid upon stupid, because not one of the other kids called the ambulance. Nobody intervened — not even the kid he was with– over a few hours while he lay bleeding in the street in the middle of a community purported to be wealthy and safe. Yet until I’d heard the details myself I still was left wondering if my kid was involved in some way. Why? Because I know I’ve failed on many levels. I know I haven’t been the father to any of these boys that I need to be. I know that my eldest stepson is spiraling through an empty existence and I take responsibility for that every single day. Every single day I do little more than listen to that emptiness and let it define the culture of our shared home.
I’ve been knocked down. I see that now. I see who I am. Now I need to figure out who I want to be.