When my mom was a little girl, she lived in a cute little white bungalow on Empire Road.
As I referenced in Part 1, we moved away from the Little Red House on Tioga Trail when I was four years old. The reason we moved was that my Grandparents had built a big house out in the country, but they wanted to keep their suburban house around too, knowing that as they grew older they might want to return there. So, instead of my Mom and Dad renting the Little Red House, we rented out Grandma and Grandpa's house instead. It wasn't until later, when I was seven or eight that I realized how neat it was that my Mom and I spent our childhoods in the same house.
Life on Empire Road was a lot different than life at the Little Red House. We had moved away our close family friends, the O's: My "friend-mom," her husband, and their four kids that were of appropriate age to play with my sister and I. No more pancakes at the O house. No more Lake Erie in our back yard. No chance of going to school with my friends. I would have to make new friends. I didn't like that idea very much...which has become a running theme in my life.
Still, there were lots of kids on the block and I did actually make friends with them. I went to kindergarten, where I found out I was really smart and creative. My teachers couldn't get enough of me and lavished attention on my precocious little freckled face. I loved school! It was around this time that my weight problem began. I was constantly rewarded for my scholastic accomplishments with food; ice cream, cookies, chips, and all kinds of goodies.
Then it happened. The bomb dropped, and nothing was normal anymore. I felt isolated from other kids, and stopped hanging out with the kids on my block. Soon, the food rewards became food to replace my grief. I started getting fatter and fatter, and the kids on the block started making fun of me for being fat (although it probably had more than a little to do with me not playing with them as much anymore).
Every time I showed signs of sadness, I was met by my mom with some kind of treat, and soon I learned that I could use what had happened to my advantage. Within two years my grades were slipping, I was ditching school (in fourth grade!), and I was hanging out with other kids who had marginalized themselves for various reasons. This included a girl who asked me to steal my mom's cigarettes for her, a girl whose dad got drunk and beat her up for being too nerdy, two boys who are now openly gay (god knows what was happening to them at home), among others.
It's not that nobody was around...plenty of people were there. Mom, Salty, my mom's parents, my teachers, aunts and uncles... they were all there... Like Salty keeps telling me, not all things are good or bad; some things just are. And it just was that nobody knew how to help a little kid grieve. Grandma and Grandpa came to stay with us for a while after it happened (I don't remember any of this; I remember the night we found out about it, and the next thing I remember isn't until seven months later), and then suddenly I was supposed to be all better, like it never happened. Like he was never there. Like it was normal.
And now I sob every time I think about his absence during the last twenty years. Thinking about him...Salty was right when she said it's like finally calling an old friend that you accidentally stood up. Now I'm finally alone, and nobody can tell me to shut off my tears because it makes them uncomfortable. And with Salty's help, I've figured out where the tears are coming from, so I let them flow. Nearly every night. Sure, some of that is self-pity for the whole no-job no-money no-love thing, but it always, always comes back to being sorry that I missed out on having a dad and being sorry that it took me so long to tell him how very much I missed it.
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