Mixed up memories.

When I condense all of my posts to a book I am going to have to put a disclaimer in the beginning.  Because of my wish to forget it all I find it impossible to get the story in a linear line that matches the order in which things actually happened.  Even now, as aware as I like to think I am, I cannot seem to keep track of the days.  It just is not important to me.  What is important to me is not the order, but the significance of the experience itself.  We are all on the same journey; we are all taking a different route.  That is a duality of course, but eventually one learns to surpass duality.  That is when we are able to see the whole.

Somewhere in there, after moving to live with him, my grandfather passed away.  I am talking about her father not his.  The grandmother, who was my only source of safety, lost her husband.  I did not know it then, but she was relieved.  He died a slow painful death.  Knowing what I know now that was his karma.  As my parents deserve theirs, he deserved his.

This is that memory thing I mentioned before.  I loved my grandfather very much.  When I knew him he was living on their farm out in the country fifteen miles or so from Montgomery City.  A small farm.  It was only sixty acres or so.  Some field, some woods, a barn, a shed, couple ponds, some livestock, the garden.  It really was an ideal farm for a small family.  I am still hoping I live on a farm like that myself someday.  He grew up in a similar fashion when he was a kid.  Naturally they grew up old school and I was always fascinated by their own stories about their youth.  He grew up dirt poor with lots of brothers just like me.  Honestly I do not know much about his past.  I did not know anything about him at all when I was a child.

What I did know was that he never hit me.  He never called me names.  He taught me things and he talked to me like a human being.  Being used to the violence and craziness of my home life this man was an angel to me.  He spent a portion of his life working at the McDonnell Douglas plant in St. Louis and the years of breathing fumes and chemicals destroyed his liver.  Most of my memorable childhood he was suffering because of this.  He wasn't still working there when I remember him.  When we would go spend time at grandma's he was a frugal carpenter.  He was always rigging up his own stuff.  I remember him going around taking down old barns and then building houses out of the materials he salvaged.  I once spent an afternoon re-straightening the nails he had pulled from a barn.  He even reused the nails.

From my perspective he showed me respect.  He didn't always give me the answers but helped me figure it out on my own.  It was the best when I would get to sit on the fender of the small tractor he owned and we would go grade the gravel road to his house.  Once I was big enough he would let me drive the tractor.  He always graded the road himself because the county would never keep up with it to his satisfaction.  During my childhood he was the only male that ever taught me anything.

I cried for a long time when he died.  We all knew he was sick and dying.  Somehow he developed a kind of animosity for my grandmother because he wanted to die and she wouldn't have it.  It went against her religious beliefs.  Several years before he actually died he flat lined in a hospital and forever after he was angry at my grandmother because she had them bring him back.  He made her pay for this in his own way, so she was relieved when he died.  I just never understood all that was going on between them.  One of the last times I saw him was in the hospital.  He was that sickly yellow color people get when their livers fail.  He didn't really have a liver anymore.  Even the drugs they gave him to keep him alive were destroying his liver.  The hospitals still perform these same tactics to this day.  He took prednisone for years and years.  I don't know about you, but whenever I have ever taken that stuff for just a week it fucks me up.   If I knew then what I know now I could have saved him, but I was just a kid.

When he died I just stayed in my room for days and cried.  I imagined that he was watching over me, that even though he was dead, he would still somehow teach me the things I needed to know.  I prayed that he would protect me from up above.  I stopped talking to god for awhile and would just act like it was my grandfather I was asking for help.  My brother and I would draw up maps of how our farm would look.  We would day dream about the dogs we would breed and the crops we would grow.  I lost the only man who ever didn't act like something was wrong with me.  The child in me still misses him very much.

You see though, these things I have said are only my memories; they are not reality.  This is only the story that plays in my mind and nothing more.  When I was a child he was my grandfather.  He loved me and I loved him.  The truth is though; he was not only my grandfather.  He was a man.  A husband.  A father.  A brother.  A boy in a man's body.  He was many many things.  The truth is he was not a good man.

It took me a long time in life to come to this point of realizing the truth, it wasn’t until several years later that it came to me.  It took even longer to come to the realization emotionally.  This kind of experience stops most of the world dead in their tracks.  He was the reason that she was the way she was.  The only man who was ever good to me was also the man who ruined my life.  True, I no longer believe it ruined my life, but back then I had to face that reality.  She got pregnant at sixteen because she was that girl who would do anything for a male’s attention.  Why was she this way?  Because she never got that attention she craved from her father.  Have we not all met someone like this?  I used to be that boy who would do anything for the love of a female, because I never received it from my mother.  That desire nearly destroyed my life. 

 The truth was, he was exceptionally cruel to her even though he never beat her like I was beat.   He was flat out mean and nasty.  She was never good enough.  I too, was never good enough.  In her ignorance she did the same exact thing to me.  Just like my story, in her story, her own mother did not protect her.  He would openly favor her younger sister.  My brother was openly favored over me.  All her life she has been a promiscuous woman.  Not that there is anything wrong with a woman having sex as much as she wants with as many men as she wants, but she was not doing it because that is who she was; she was doing it because that is how he made her.

Just like I was at sixteen, clueless about the real true effects of what was done to me, she too was as ignorant as could be.  This has been a bitter pill to swallow several times in my life, but it also makes it painfully obvious just how much my memories were really just lies.  In reality, every single one of those people in my family was fucked up.  Really really fucked up.  The person I am now would not get along with that man who was my grandfather.  He never made right with her, what he had done is not forgivable when you are the victim of it.  He died and she never ever once felt the love from him that she craved so much.  If I remember correctly he never told her he loved her. 

This is a critical difference between her and I though.  When she dies, it will not be the same story.  It will be freeing for me because the person who fucked me over will no longer exist.  It will be a weight off my shoulders to see her go.  Honestly I cannot wait.  I broke free of this cycle.  I became that which does not need love in order to be who I am, to be what I was meant to be.  I saw through the lie.  This is an extremely difficult spiritual lesson to learn, and now at this point in my life I feel blessed to have learned it.  This lesson stops the vast majority from ever realizing who they really are. 

There are so many stuck at this fork, so many who take the wrong path, it is not possible to count them all.  Sometimes I struggle with my own inner peace knowing how many who have this same past, but never break free of the lie.  Being sensitive like I am, it breaks my heart.

In my life now, I prefer to help women break free.  Living in this patriarchal society, it seems to me, it is of the upmost importance to help the feminine realize it's equality in the universe.  This was another spiritual lesson I had to learn along the way. I had to give up the idea that a male is supposed to act some one certain way.  Painful as it was at the time I had to identify with my feminine side.  Having done this I am one of those rare males who can actually be good friends with females.  A lot of females laugh, but I actually do understand women.  Having learned this important lesson I can say I am a female.  The ideas of gender and gender identification in this society are lies like the rest.  Ask anyone whom I have lived with and they will tell you what's up.  Anyways, I am only saying this to build up to what I want to say next. 

My friend, we will call her Nicky.  I have known her for many years.  Throughout the years she and I have shared different levels of friendship.  She has always been a depressed type person.  She is utterly convinced that something is wrong with her brain and the only help for her is medication.  Like I used to when I was a kid, she thinks she is broken.  This makes sense because she works in a hospital.  Her entire education revolves around the medical industry.  Off and on throughout our friendship I have tried to help her overcome her mindset.  I have tried to help her see that her worldview is built upon lies.

I have even met her parents.  They are nice people.  No one would say otherwise meeting them as they are now.  Farmers like my own family.  She loves her parents and talks to her mother almost every day even though she is in her thirties now and lives far from her parents.  When we used to have our discussions about her belief system she would talk about her childhood sometimes.  A lot of people in this society disregard the impact of childhood on adult life as some silly notion created by psychology; nothing could be further from the truth.  She would talk about her brother and how they are now.  She, like me with my grandfather, has this story in her memory of her parents.  They loved her and she loved them.  The truth is though, that when she was a child her parents fucked her up.

My friend Nicky will be living a lie probably her whole life because she cannot come to terms with the fact that her parents are not the great people she wants to believe they are.  She has such a strong emotional attachment to the fact that her parents were good parents that she cannot accept or even realize that they are the reason she feels the way she does. 

For me, I separated the two things.  Yes, in my memory, my grandfather was awesome to me.  He was the best.  The only male that did not mistreat me, but he was still, in reality, a bad man.  It is acceptable to believe lies as children; believing them as adults though only creates suffering and misery.  This is why the mystics say that one must remove attachment, because if one stays attached, one can never be free.  Realizing the truth is exactly what sets one free.  This is consciousness in affect; awareness in the moment.

She was obviously not abused like I was.  This makes it even more difficult for most to come to terms with reality.  I think to my friend Nicky, because she was not literally abused, she is blinded to the fact that her parents still did not handle business.  Her dad was a drunk, her mother an enabler.  Because of all the experience I have dealing with people and the fact that I was always paying attention instead of chattering about nothing I have a tendency to see people for what they really are.  You see when I hear her talk about her childhood I am able to realize what was really going on.  Neither she nor her brother was loved as children deserve to be loved.  Admitting that is excruciating when one has spent their whole life believing otherwise.  This is that attachment I was speaking of. 

I can tell you from personal experience, realizing that we were not loved as we should have been is extremely painful.  I have dealt with it my entire life.  If you are like Nicky and have always believed that you really were loved, that your parents were good people and did the best, there is no way around it, coming to terms with reality is going to be brutally painful.  The way people are raised in this society is fucked up regardless of how much one wants to believe otherwise, and it doesn’t matter how much love a parent feels for their child.  If you asked my mother if she loved me she will tell you she did.  Nicky doesn't talk to me anymore because our talks got right up to this point, and now, just seeing me, causes her pain because it makes her think about it.  She still takes her meds, still believes she is bi-polar, she still dates losers and wonders why she isn't happy.  She still believes she is helpless to her depression because her brain is just that way.  Her beliefs make it so.  What she does not understand is that we suffer no matter what.  Is spending a life depressed, in misery really better than realizing the truth?

I know for a fact it is not.