A Natural Prick

 

Over the years and toxic landscape that is my “love life” I have dated a few single mothers. I think my inclination to them is based on my own upbringing. As a kid I always sensed my mom had emotional problems and suffered from depression more than anyone, herself included knew, and it was hidden from me. My sister was 8 years older, my brother was 4 years older and I always looked, compared to them, and felt like some remnant. 

So years later after a  truly miserable childhood where I dealt with my abusive dad and lost but there mother I realized that I was literally a bastard. A kid knows something is wrong and it took me years to pinpoint it. My uncle told me one day while we fixed a screen door at his house where I was staying because my mom threw my dad out of the house after he punched all my front teeth out after i dropped a  brass garden hose nozzle on the liner of the pool we were installing. He picked up the nozzle, wrapped around his fist and said “You’d wreck the nation” and then he punched my lights out. 

My Mom had one of several nervous breakdowns over this incident  and an agreement was made for me to live with my uncle. So one fine day he told me that his brother, my dads brother too was in fact my father. My actual dad was a  bar owner and gambler and such an alcoholic mess of a man he was the only one of 13 children that got a legal divorce in the late 1950′s, thats how impossible his poor wife found him. He died while driving a  rented car on one of his many jaunts back over to ireland and drove the car off an unlit road into a  ditch that was in fact the very land that he was born on. The outer remnants of a once thriving farm. 

I repaired my mother later in life and am beyond glad I did before she passed of emphysema failure from decades of smoking. She is my heart and the most decent pulse in me. I promised her that I would at least try and repair things with my Dad , bro and sis two days before she passed  and have made peace with my Dad. I haven’t spoken to my brother or sister in a  decade and I am leaving it that way. At my moms wake and funeral I attended two nights of a wake, sat in a pew at the mass and even drove in a limo with them and didn’t even make eye contact with them. 

So I have been given morbid thought to the whole “what if my “dad” passes” thing. A dead man can’t  call you to tell you is dead and he is the only one of them all I have any semblance of contact with. I made peace with him and keep my eye on him in his empty, cold house near my apartment. I call him pretty much every night to see if  he is still there and vice versa. Other than that its about as pedestrian as street sign. 

So I decided recently how I will handle his passing. I think I handled my moms passing differently because I was in fact hers. So i bought a  brand spanking new black suit for her and attended properly. I showed face to the only person that ever showed me a  true one, even when she was in pain inside and lost. I am glad I did too because , if anything, it was prove at the falsehood and stagnation and erosion of my family. All that love endured,  irish silence, falsehood and pain. It was a  release to know she was at peace and the wake and funeral to me was an absolute parade. I knew she was in heaven the second my dad called me to tell me she passed. A discarded harp that plays beautifully now that it is higher and on a calm cloud. 

So when my father passes I will just hope the one aunt i have that is decent to me calls me to tell me the news. “oh sweet jaysus Edward Im sooo sorry to tell ya that  your father has passed, you’ll need to know the arrrrraaaaaangments” or some shit like that. Some lilty, lyrical irish brouged decent communication out of necessity. I will got the  wake and say a prayer at the casket while its opened and I can have proof of who’s ass is in it. Then I will attend the funeral and stroll in once they are all seated and sit in the  very last pew of the church and let them all walk past me as the casket is rolled out. Then I will just  go home and visit the grave when a headstone is there a  few weeks later. He will be next to my mom, I always go to hers, so its decent and unavoidable really. 

Just like my odd inclination with single mothers. Decent and unavoidable and always ending badly. The nation is wrecked, but i didn’t fucking do shit but try and help. Word to my mother.

 

EjcO

11/11/11