it rained like hell last night. i could use another three or four hours of sleep. bleary-eyed.
i’m thinking about something someone said to me last night. i think too fucking much, i know, but i also know it isn’t always a bad thing.
i remember trying to decide if i should leave Leighla’s father. it didn’t take long for me to figure out that ‘for the children’ was the worst manner of lie. kids grow up and take their cues from how they see their parents act and interact. the last thing i wanted to do was teach my daughter that marriage was a loveless thing and that it was normal or should be expected that married people would not as much care for one another as be civil.
not to mention that i didn’t want her to get the impression (sustained over time) that men were people who couldn’t be counted on except in exchange for sex.
so i left. and i raised her alone. to be sure it wasn’t easy. it would have been MUCH easier to stay. but the cost of the staying wasn’t worth it.
‘for the children’ means doing what is best for them, and no, sorry, that doesn’t always mean staying where you are… particularly if or when it isn’t providing ‘the children’ with a strong, healthy, and nurturing environment from which the things they need may be garnered consistently over time.
i’ve known people whose parents did the ‘for the children’ thing. i think i only know one who actually came out of it with any degree of care or love for them, for themselves, or for the world around them. i know more than a few who are bitter, angry, and warped for it. i’m thinking of one in particular who killed himself. Charles Liner. we called him ‘Kid’. He slit his wrists on graduation day and left a note behind saying he couldn’t take staying in a world where pretending was more important than being.
he was one of my best friends. that was damn near twenty-four years ago. i still cry when i think about it. i didn’t go to graduation of course, but i kept in touch with my friends as i could. Kid and i often hung out down in ‘the bongos’, which is what everyone called the area of a certain park in south-west Atlanta where there were actually still cypress trees. we’d sit on their thick, gnarled roots with our feet in the small stream that flowed under them and talk about ‘things’.
anyway. there are a good many others i could talk about… i didn’t know anyone in those days who had ‘the normal’ life. it was rather like a circus side show, i suppose. lots of broken people who leaned on one another as they could to get by.
i’m rambling of course. and about to be late for work. i’m distracted. mostly by the notion that i’m watching something i’m familiar with unfurl from distance…. and i’m not sure i want to see it.