Distant Land Part 3

I finished the book The Distant Land of My Father by Bo Caldwell.

SPOILER ALERT:

Anna's mother dies of leukemia.

Years later, Anna's dad dies of a heart attack.

I can't even remember WHAT exactly got to me, but I actually started to cry so hard I had to put the book down.

Obviously, I was not crying about the book or the story, but about myself and my own hurts and pain.

I made ugly crying faces and little gurgling crying noises and cried and cried.

I cried about my life and my parents and my alcoholic husband and my kids and myself.

I cried about how I don't let myself be comforted and I don't let myself cry.

I cried about the dilemma of facing all your hurts with your parents but still liking & loving them and wanting to be in relationship with them and is that OK?  Am I "allowed" to do that? Am I "allowed" to want that?

I cried about Hacker who is working so hard at his new job and is actually doing difficult and scary things (cold call sales) that I am too terrified to do... and while I am PROUD as punch, I am also freaked out because it makes me uncomfortable when he calls people  that I feel too uncomfortable calling.

I cried because Anna (the book's protagonist) allowed her horrible, selfish, abandoning father to hug her and comfort her after her mother's death.  She allowed herself to receive comfort, even though it would be imperfect.  She allowed it to be enough for that moment.  She needed it and she accepted it.

I cried and cried.

I felt sad.

I felt true.

I felt a little scared & out of control.

I felt a little hopeful.

I got a headache and a stuffed up nose.

Distant Land Part 2

Another moving quote (pg.218) from The Distant Land of My Father by Bo Caldwell.

This is why literature is an art.  It speaks to each of us where we are.  As the wife of an alcoholic husband and the daughter of a workaholic father, this speaks to me on many different levels.

In this first part, I identify with Anna, the young teenage girl and all her mixed up, crazy emotions.

I tried to think what to tell her, how to explain what was wrong without alarming her.  I tried to think logically, to be calm.  But finally I just blurted everything out.

"I cry all the time and some days I hate school and some days I love it and my friends are nice but they hurt my feelings and I don't like the way i look and I feel so lonely sometimes and its not your fault and I don't know what I am doing wrong - " I stopped for a moment and looked at her to see if she was alarmed or frightened or disgusted.  But she just looked worried and like she loved me, so I gave in and told her what I was afraid of.  "I think something's wrong with me."  And I began to sob.

In this second part, I identify with the Mother, Eve; the powerlessness, the aching desire to offer your child something, the anger, the love.

My mother smiled, but in a way that was so gentle that it gave me hope.  "Oh Anna," she said, in the same way  she'd said it since I was little, and she just held me for a few minutes, rocking me.  When my crying had slowed, she said "Nothing's wrong with you.  You're not crazy, you're not sick."...

..."I took a few breaths, trying to be calm "Are you sure?"  I asked...

... "Your father is making a terrible mistake by not returning," she said.  "And there is nothing I can do about it.  I can tell you he'll regret it for the rest of his life.  He's missing out on the best thing in the world."  She looked at me.  "And that's you."...

..."Don't forget that: this is his mistake.  The fact that he hasn't come home is no reflection on you.  Its just evidence of his bad judgement."  She looked at me evenly.  "Which, unfortunately, is something that we can't control."

As parents, we CAN'T make it all OK for our kids.

We can't un-do the pain their absent of addicted parents have caused... we can't love them enough to make them not feel abandoned... we can't fill them up enough that they don't feel an emptiness from the loss... we can't make it "all better" as much as we would long to. 

 

We CAN show up, we can be present, we can listen, we can hear, we can allow for uncomfortable feelings, we can offer comfort, we can teach them how to be honest and FEEL and not run away, we can offer them alternatives to the way their other parent has chose to live, we can offer "sips" of mental health (as we TRY to find it ourselves!!!), we can let them know they are not crazy or bad for having those feelings.

We can make a difference.

The Distant Land of My Father

I am reading The Distant Land of My Father by Bo Caldwell.

There is a paragraph at the end of the chapter "city of angels" that resonated with me.

The protagonist, Anna is writing about how much she missed her father when she was just 7.  He was still an Shanghai, China while she and her mother had left and moved back to the US, to Los Angeles.  This paragraph is actually about a little girl missing her Daddy, but it feels like what I feel when Mr. M is drunk and I am living my life without him and picturing my future without him.  So, these are all the author's words, except where I substitute "husband" for "father" (for literary integrity, I will italicize those instances).

"I didn't just miss my husband.  I lacked him, and without him, I didn't feel myself.  I was afraid that his absence showed on me somehow, and I thought of Shanghai's beggars. My father had told me once about pain from phantom limbs, and I understood, for I, too, was a beggar now, missing not a limb or an eye or an ear, but a husband, and here in this land that was supposed to expand my soul, I no longer felt whole."