Friday, April 25, 2008
While I was Asleep
Last night I watched like a million episodes of Smallville. I finally got Season V. I'm sort of a fanatic. I've also been sick lately, so takin' Nyquil and watching Smallville has been fine for me the last couple nights.
Anyway, there's this episode where Chloe thinks she's going crazy, and she keeps telling everyone she doesn't want to be like her mom, and she's not like her mom. And then she tells Clark that after her mom left when she was 12 she ended up in a mental institution.
"Have you ever seen her or talked to her since?" Clark asked.
"No."
"But you know where she is?"
"Yes," she says.
And Clark says something about how she's still her mother, and didn't Chloe think about seeing her before it was too late?
It was like this voice in my head was saying Clark's lines and Chloe's. Because I have been having that discussion with myself for years, about my biological father.
The episode ended with Chloe going to see her mother. A woman stood at the end of the large sterile room Chloe entered, full of people meandering aimlessly. The woman stared out a window. You never see her face. Chloe goes to her and says, "Mom?" And the woman touches her arm and they hug, and that's the end.
It was an overwhelming scene, and nicely done. But I know it would never work the same way in my own life.
My cousin wrote me recently and said he had heard my father had a heart attack. A 90 percent blockage, but came out okay. When I spoke to my father for a brief time, six or seven years ago, he told me he had been in the VA hospital for a time because of some heart attacks. He still smoked two packs of Luckies a day and drank a whole pot of coffee, though. He was still an insomniac.
He tried writing to me when he found my music page, months ago. It was the same week my mother had her first surgery for the cancer, and the same week my house was broken into while I was asleep.
Another episode of Smallville. Jonathan Kent has died. Martha has gone to Metropolis to donate some of his old shirts to charity. She can't keep them in the house anymore. She can still smell his aftershave. Instead, she is attacked and mugged by gangbangers. They even snap the watch right off of her wrist. Jonathan's old watch. The one he had used to teach Clark how to tell time. Clark was too grief-stricken to accept the watch when she offered it. The thief made off with it.
When Clark finally tracked down the mugger he held him high up against a fence and was choking him. He told him it was his father's watch. The man didn't care. And Clark yelled, enraged, something about how he didn't understand how his father had to die while people like him still roamed the earth freely, taking.
Clark's words could have been my own: The rage I felt having to see my mother go through what she did, all the while my father still out and about, breaking the law, manipulating himself and others, still trying to sneak his way under my skin and into my life.
I couldn't handle everything at once, so I just did not respond. After all, why should he have all the power in our relationship? If you ever knew what his actions as well as absences has done to already determine the course of my life, you would understand. Or maybe you wouldn't. But for once, I had enough. He kept writing, and I kept not answering, and the last few ones, I didn't even read them. And I took my songs down because I didn't even want him to hear them. Because so much of the pain he caused me is in my voice.
Last night I watched like a million episodes of Smallville. I finally got Season V. I'm sort of a fanatic. I've also been sick lately, so takin' Nyquil and watching Smallville has been fine for me the last couple nights.
Anyway, there's this episode where Chloe thinks she's going crazy, and she keeps telling everyone she doesn't want to be like her mom, and she's not like her mom. And then she tells Clark that after her mom left when she was 12 she ended up in a mental institution.
"Have you ever seen her or talked to her since?" Clark asked.
"No."
"But you know where she is?"
"Yes," she says.
And Clark says something about how she's still her mother, and didn't Chloe think about seeing her before it was too late?
It was like this voice in my head was saying Clark's lines and Chloe's. Because I have been having that discussion with myself for years, about my biological father.
The episode ended with Chloe going to see her mother. A woman stood at the end of the large sterile room Chloe entered, full of people meandering aimlessly. The woman stared out a window. You never see her face. Chloe goes to her and says, "Mom?" And the woman touches her arm and they hug, and that's the end.
It was an overwhelming scene, and nicely done. But I know it would never work the same way in my own life.
My cousin wrote me recently and said he had heard my father had a heart attack. A 90 percent blockage, but came out okay. When I spoke to my father for a brief time, six or seven years ago, he told me he had been in the VA hospital for a time because of some heart attacks. He still smoked two packs of Luckies a day and drank a whole pot of coffee, though. He was still an insomniac.
He tried writing to me when he found my music page, months ago. It was the same week my mother had her first surgery for the cancer, and the same week my house was broken into while I was asleep.
Another episode of Smallville. Jonathan Kent has died. Martha has gone to Metropolis to donate some of his old shirts to charity. She can't keep them in the house anymore. She can still smell his aftershave. Instead, she is attacked and mugged by gangbangers. They even snap the watch right off of her wrist. Jonathan's old watch. The one he had used to teach Clark how to tell time. Clark was too grief-stricken to accept the watch when she offered it. The thief made off with it.
When Clark finally tracked down the mugger he held him high up against a fence and was choking him. He told him it was his father's watch. The man didn't care. And Clark yelled, enraged, something about how he didn't understand how his father had to die while people like him still roamed the earth freely, taking.
Clark's words could have been my own: The rage I felt having to see my mother go through what she did, all the while my father still out and about, breaking the law, manipulating himself and others, still trying to sneak his way under my skin and into my life.
I couldn't handle everything at once, so I just did not respond. After all, why should he have all the power in our relationship? If you ever knew what his actions as well as absences has done to already determine the course of my life, you would understand. Or maybe you wouldn't. But for once, I had enough. He kept writing, and I kept not answering, and the last few ones, I didn't even read them. And I took my songs down because I didn't even want him to hear them. Because so much of the pain he caused me is in my voice.
Labels: Cancer, Deadbeat Dads, Relationships, Smallville
0 Comments:
