the day is not so long as to make one think eternity is a lifetime away. Depending on the mood and things within my environment, I find time slipping either to fast or to slowly. I like it this way as it affords me another avenue to bitch and gripe the age old saga of man. Time is the wicked and felonious assault on our mortality. It always has been and always will be. Only today wasn't a day of reckoning for me but reckoning from me. I have been wronged and I have wronged and now I have come to an epiphany.
A young man has no idea of what time is. It stands still for him for decades and erupts, suddenly, in a turret of tears while talking with his daughter who he has known since she was born. Only he didn't know her at all. He wasn't allowed to. His universe had a hole in it. He was damaged and the relationship between her and him was damaged for far too long. Yet, there he sat in the driver's seat of his red Ford Ranger as they drove to work some forty miles away together to a factory. He would talk to her and tell her about this hole. His needs were so many just as hers were and soon they would come to know one another. Of course she wouldn't get it at the time because she would look upon it as bitter bantering about a long forgotten past he just remembered. A time before she was born. A time when he was married before her mom; a time she never knew existed for him. A time of hell and loathing and regret and hurt that she had thought he had put far away into the recesses of his mind. She would sit and whine about her boyfriend and he would sit and whine about his "third" wife and they would chuckle together about how much they had in common. Only it would be some twenty years later after feuds and fights that she would realize he was just as much a victim of his time as she was hers.
He loved her mom and couldn't take the abuse or stand to witness it anymore. Not because it hurt him, which it did, but because it reminded him of a past he wanted to change. He knew he couldn't but it doesn't stop anyone from the want and so it didn't stop him either. His wife died and so did his child and he watched it unfold in a war that shouldn't of even been in a place he didn't belong in only to come home to a cool reception from his fellow Americans and start anew. He got married right away to a family friend's daughter after a very short courtship. They had two girls and there sat the second right next to him and he wanted to tell her he loved her but wouldn't for fear it would cause her harm. Every time he told her or tried to when she was a tot, she was punished unforgivably because his wife felt it was a betrayal of affection to the older child, the wanted child. So even still, twenty years later, he had a hard time saying it. He would have to just let this one be. He just figured if he didn't interfere then her destiny would be her own. But she wanted him to hug her and tell her it would be alright and be there. And he was there watching up close and whispering behind her back to friends and family how proud of her he was, never so loudly that it would get back to the monster that was her mother and never so she herself could hear. It was a shame it would take another twenty years for her to see he did try to tell her. He tried to give her skills and teach her things he couldn't teach another and share a familiar bond with her as she was her mother's prisoner of war as much as he was a prisoner in his mind to the war he witnessed.
Time is cruel. She forgives his weakness now and sees how hard it was for him and how so many obstacles were put there to prevent their paternal-familial union and to prevent a father from loving his kid. She sees how many scars he bears in his mind and on his person and feels so ashamed for having hated him for so long and laying blame on him for what he couldn't control or fix. He wasn't always right but he tried to do his best. Now she knows his best WAS good enough because no other child of his had been molded like her by him. And no other child has become the role model and adoring parent and person of strength she has. Today, crying, she wishes she could take back the awful things she has said and hug him and tell him she loves him. Today she has found a new respect for the man she never was allowed to know. The pieces of the puzzle fit and it is perfectly clear and now she hopes there is time for them. Time for him to be loved again and her to forgive and let go. It is time for him to get to know his grandchild and all those years he has missed. I'm not sure we have enough time, but I have had a good example of a patient man set in front of me and it will have to suffice. I am going home tomorrow, for the first time, as a woman and a daughter. I will hug that man and I will cry and I will tell him I love him and watch his painful face as he tries to find some other words to convey his and I will be thankful for his efforts because he, at least, tried.~mobe's love to her all and her all to her loves.
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