I wanted to blog before the night got away from me. Normally on Tuesdays I pick a specific post from history and reflect on the growth, change, and situation from that time in my life to now. However, I find my mind thinking more and more about ownership, place, and belonging and the thoughts arising don’t lend themselves to past post but to life before posting. A hundred years ago my step-dad died. At the time I’d been splitting time between his apartment and my mom’s. They themselves had already split officially by then. They never married, but he’s the dad who raised me. Without him I was left with this sense of emptiness not just because I lost a dad, but I lost a sense of home. His place was gone and my mom’s spot never felt like my own. She made a point to remind me that it was not my place but hers. Over the next few years I was thrown out six or seven times, finally realizing that this wasn’t home and I would one day need to make a home of my own.
I did. I lost that home. Bad financial choices and trying to carry too much weight for a family that didn’t care if that load broke me. It did. It eventually ended in divorce and the kids lost that sense of home themselves. I’ve never been able to give it back to them. I do not own the space I live in now. It belongs in name to my partner and in spirit to her side of the family. It remains a clear and present if unspoken truth that should we ever separate, I leave and I am left without a home again. It is also then true that without me here the kids themselves have no place. So, after nearly 50 years of living on this earth I’ve managed to do little more than to put my kids in the same situation I was in as a kid. Moreover, I myself am in the exact same position I’ve been in for most of my life. Trust in the woman I love makes that easier. It doesn’t change the facts. My nightmares over the past few weeks have been rooted in this truth and the worry that no matter how solid I think things are, I’m not the person who ultimately decides that and thus decides my living fate.
I don’t have any plans or means to change this situation. I spend my earnings looking forward to other joys. Yet these nightmares remind me that it never truly leaves my mind and that I have never truly moved from that mindspace I was in when my father died.