Dating : Human needs are wily things

I remember the trauma of trying, for the first time, to get what I needed in a relationship. I remember it like it was big, or important, or meaningful. I probably remember it vividly because it was a tragic failure. At least, that’s the story I’ve been telling myself about that day all those years ago.

It was autumn 1975. I was 13 years old and a sprite of a little thing. Barely comfortable with the speed of my body’s aging or how bad attitudes often had their way with me. We had recently moved into a nice house in a new neighborhood. I started 7th grade. I lived with mama, her new man, Leonard and my little sister. My parents had divorced two years before. Things were still pretty gnarly between them. Her voice always held a proper scolding for him when they spoke. I didn’t see my daddy near enough. But I was young-lovin’ and bright eyed in spite of the few sharp turns my life had taken during my pre-teen years.

So this one calm day in early fall, my daddy called after an unsurprising bout of absence. We musta chatted for a minute or two before he suggested, “Why don’t you girls walk to the ice cream shop to meet me and I’ll give you some money for the county fair.” My sister, listening on the phone in the living room, thought he was being nice. She got all excited, agreed and hung up fast so she could hurry off to meet him.

But something awful got all stirred up in my belly, rising up like a fireball, to perch itself in the back of my throat. I’d been pondering the cowardice of men who don’t do right by their wives and daughters. My mama’s disappointment in him escorting my questions about the right and wrong it all. But of course, I didn’t have my own words for that sort of thing back then. All I had on that day was the burning hum of unmet needs and they was about to take on a name and voice of their own.

I’m thinking I remember asking him why he couldn’t pick me up at my house. Then, in a burst of adolescent impulse, abandonment caught fire, probably stoked by his excuses. “If you’re not man enough to come to my house to pick me up then you’re not man enough to be my father!” I know brutal, right?

I heard our world shattering harder than a snow globe hittin’ hot concrete as my words landed. I don’t remember much else about that day or that conversation. I may have hung up on him after I dropped the bomb. Or maybe I waited for a response but he hung up on me. I can’t remember. I know what actually happened next.

My father never called me again after that day but he spoke to and visited my siblings a few times. The next time I saw him was 2 years later. He was lying lifeless in a gorgeous black coffin with a white fluffy lining. A hit and run driver killed him as he walked along a stretch of road littered with honkytonks in our home town of Dallas, Texas. That sealed the deal on who I would become in relationships and how I would manage my own needs.

I was raging beneath the sweetest of the southern lady mask I’d learn to wear. I bolted from the viewing room at his funeral. I ran as fast as I could to a clump of skinny trees. I fell to my knees in a patch of scratchy orange mulch and a big burst of tears. I’d fought the tears for years but grief won. I remember how the air felt still, the way it does in the grey light of a rain storm fixin’ to start. I wasn’t breathing too good neither.

I had perfected the art of holding my breath while living rejected for two whole years. But this felt like something was dying inside me so the urge to breathe pulled rank. Without much fight left in me, I leaned back against the strength of a tiny black barked tree and let it all out. After years of holding my breath under the weight of shame and fear, it felt like the biggest exhale ever. It was over. Never again did I have to wonder or worry about our ‘someday’ reunion. I’m thinking it was there, alone and hiding behind that tiny tree, that I first thought “well shit, that didn’t work!” Then, with all the wisdom and courage of an abandoned teenage girl from Texas, my soul must have decided, “never again, never again!”.

I dried up my face and stuffed my shirt tails back into my skirt, along with whatever shame had surfaced in those brief moments of authentic grief. I adjusted my shoes so I could stand steady and found a bit of comfort in my dangerous, yet powerful fresh resolve. Believing with all my heart that I had messed things up in the worst of ways, I decided my pesky needs would never again be big enough or strong enough to push anyone else away.

So I forced the biggest round black period I could summon to mark the end of my daddy chapter. My stubbornness moved me to turn the page. I set out to find a place where my love was not selfish and where giving everything for love was as natural as dying. I shed the burden of needing anyone to know or care about my time by the skinny trees. This new resolve got me through the rest of my father’s funeral that day (not to mention the next 10 years). Looking back, I’ve attempted to fill in the blanks, to explain this shameful act of dishonor toward my father. Truth be told, I had nothing on my father when it came to shame and fear.

My father was good lookin’, fun-lovin’ and had a childlike zest for wild livin’ and lovin’. He was also a ‘missing in action’ alcoholic for the better part of his life. You know the sort. He’d go out for a pack a smokes; return 6 days later with nothing more than a few new stories, and a few more pounds of shame to store between the lines. Those two aspects of his nature never did square up. My father rose and fell hot like the sun but was far less reliable. The chaotic rhythms he battled so hard to control never soothed. The damage of his falls soon outweighed the lift in his rise. He died before his song could find a natural healing melody. And while all that might fill in some blanks for his story, it don’t do much to bring my story to life.

I’ve learned to tell myself what I imagine that 13 year old girl needed that awful day was to know she mattered. I tell myself she wanted her father to fight for her, to stand up for her, to choose meeting her needs over his own. She wanted to know she was worth the respect and extra effort of a front door pick up. I’m sure she wanted him to hear how bad she needed it. But truth be told, I don’t know for sure what she needed. In the end, the resolve I found on that autumn day in 1977, leaning against a skinny tree outside at my daddy’s funeral, grew much stronger than I imagined possible. I’m thinking my needs still hide behind that tiny black barked tree where I left them. Perhaps, the rest of my story is about finding that tiny tree so I can retrieve the part of me I should never have resolved to give up.