Give Me Free!
Hello, It's me again. After a long hiatus, I'm back on the blogging grind. I have so much to discuss. Recently, I was out in L.A. with a friend and we were discussing love and life. After listening to the truncated version of my life story, she explained to me that I could never love someone properly until I've released all of the hate from my heart. She believes that love and hate cannot co-exist and like so many of us, most of the hate I was experiencing was because of an absent father.
I remember meeting my father for the first time when I was around 6 years old. I could still see him walking through the door carrying a garbage bag full of toys. I guess that was his way of making up for missing my birthday for so many years. After being in my life for several months, the visits became few and far between until he eventually stopped showing up altogether. After resurfacing a few years later, he invited my mother and I to move in with his family. Ideally, that should have been a positive step, but being that my maternal great grandmother raised me, and my mother was more of a sister, the move was more like shock therapy because I was now forced to live with both parents for the very first time.
We ended up living with my paternal great grandmother in her 5th floor tenement apartment on 146th Street between Amsterdam and Convent Aves. From what I remember of her, she was extremely nice and supportive. My grand mother lived downstairs on the 4th floor. I remember always being treated with love by the family. Although they were all strangers to me, they never made me feel like an outsider.
Things started out fine but there was a dark secret that everyone kept hidden from me. Like so many people during that time, my father was an addict. I can vividly recall the days he would take me with him to a location on 125th street where he would cop his fix of methadone. I guess he was trying to kick the heroin addiction. After living together for around 2 years, things between my parents became rocky and my father decided that verbal and physical abuse was a way to regain control of his family. After the abuse reached a level where my mother's family picked up on it, they decided that the best thing for my mother and I was to get away from him. We were whisked away late one night back to my maternal great grandmother's apartment. Soon after arriving, my father showed up banging on the door demanding that we return to his place. After a while, he decided to wait for us outside.
Now here's where things got interesting. I remember looking through my maternal great grandmother's bedroom window, watching my father pace up and down the street. He stopped, picked up a brick, and hurled it at me, shattering the window, leaving glass all over the bedroom floor. Everyone ran into the bedroom and asked what happened. With tears falling from my eyes, I explained to them the "he" threw a brick at me. My aunt rushed to the kitchen and grabbed the first knife she could get her hands on and she and my uncle ran downstairs chasing my father down the street and whooped his ass! Between the years of 1980 and 2000, I would see him no more than 10 times.
I woke up the other morning and realized that in order for me to release the hate, I would have to confront my father. I called my friend and asked for her opinion and she agreed that it would be good for me to speak to him so I could release myself from the burden of hate and resentment. What's crazy is that I had no number to reach him but God is always listening. My father got my email address from www.d-nice.com and emailed me the same day I way going to reach out to him. I guess this confrontation was destined to happen.
The email started off with him expressing how sorry he was for not being in my life but then his writing became aggressive. He accused me of abandoning his side of the family and then he questioned my sincerity. He said I was raised better than that. What a joke. How would he know how I was raised when he wasn't there? In the letter he also stated that he read the nice things people wrote about me but he wondered if I was really that person. He said that he was turning 55 and asked if I could see him face-to-face so he can look into my eyes and apologize for abandoning me. In closing, he requested that I call his mother, my grand mother and ended the letter with a variation of a Biggie lyric, "REAL MEN DO REAL THINGS".
Initially, my first thought was, I am not calling this dude on his birthday. That's giving him exactly what I believed his letter was about, to get me to call him for his birthday, like I was some sort of birthday gift. I read his letter over and over again and decided to call anyway. Fuck his birthday, I had to free myself from the burden of hate so I could move on with my life.
The conversation started with him asking the typical questions; Hey there, how are you? I explained that the small talk was unnecessary and that we needed to clear up some things. I started with the one question I felt was necessary. "Why did you throw a brick at me?" He responded with the typical answer, "Son, it was the drugs." After hearing that, I mentally picked up that same brick and wanted to bash him with it! But really, what would that have solved?
For every question I asked, he pretty much gave me the same 2 responses, "It was the drugs" and "It was your mother's fault." I told him how his actions ruined my childhood, and caused severe pain that spilled over into every relationship I've ever had. I explained how I learned to be a man by emulating the dude on the corner. How I learned to be a good father by emulating what my friends were doing with their kids. How I nearly fell into the same pattern of showering my daughter with gifts instead of love. I kept thinking back to his letter, REAL MEN DO REAL THINGS... What a joke.
After conversing with him for roughly 45 minutes, the conversation ended with me declining an invitation to see him on his birthday. Come on dude... you missed at least 30 of mine. I hope he got what he needed from the conversation because I got what I needed to start the process of getting the closure necessary for me to move on and I will not be revisiting this again. Also, I found out later on that night that my maternal grandmother is latin. I guess that explains why I love J-Lo and Baseball so much.
