Just so you know: this post is coming to you entirely devoid of pictures. If you came here hoping for images of gratuitous nursing, what’s wrong with you?
This isn’t that kind of blog. (If that kind of blog exists, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know). Move along elsewhere.
(This is not a service our church offers).
Anyway…
The kids spent the the night at their grandparent’s house, so Lisa and I did that thing that adults do when their kids aren’t around:
We slept in.
My dad has had an on-again-off-again affair with the golden nectar known as beer. Sometime in the ’70s, he discovered a particularly noxious brew known as Olympia Gold (“Oly” for short). I’m told it had the body of water, and a flavor reminiscent of cold piss.
Oly Gold was lowcal before lowcal was a thing.
But whatever. I never tried it. What I did do, as a kid, was every time he asked me to get him a beer from the fridge, I shook it up. (This was when beer was still sold in steel cans, with pull-tabs. I’m old. Shut up). I could hear the roiling pressure of the trapped gases awaiting their released, but he usually didn’t.
Beer splosion!
Followed by, “CHAD!!!”
I either thought it was funny enough to risk the butt hurt I could be subjected to, or I had some latent resentments I harbored against the man… Probably both. It wouldn’t be the first, or the last, time I’d done something passive aggressive.
Yeah, I got issues. But I loved the man, and wanted his attention. And the “shake up the beer game” was one of the ways I got it. When a kid isn’t feeling the love, he will resort to desperate measures to ensure it. Lack love is usually why kids act out.
It’s their way of saying “Notice me.”
———–
Dad was gone more and more, working later and later hours. As I got a little older, the beer game lost its luster. I stopped trying to get his attention, retreating more and more into myself, and the world of books, movies, magazines.
But I still loved my old man. Knew when he wasn’t home. Even if he didn’t have time for me, I knew when he was there, and when he wasn’t. I mean I still had hope, you know?
I remember a night when I couldn’t sleep. The clock ticked eleven, twelve, one, two… I wasn’t up reading: I was worried about my dad. Was he okay? Why wasn’t he home? Around two o’clock, there was a noise: the sound of a door being jerked open at the far end of the house.
I heard the master bedroom door open, the pad of my mom’s feet in the tiled hall.
I followed her.
Down the hall, through the family room, and into the kitchen I followed her.
There was my dad, standing in the doorway separating the breakfast nook from the entryway, swaying a little–listing from starboard to port, and back again.
The sour notes of cheap beer, piss, and bar smoke wafted off him in waves. But the piss wasn’t his. No, there was a quivering dark bundle under his left arm.
My mom asked “Mont, what’s going on? Why are you so late? Where have you been?”
“Dad,” I asked, “are you okay?”
My mom turned to me, asked me what I was doing up? Said I couldn’t sleep. She directed me back to bed. The last thing I heard as I walked to my room was:
“Why are you so late? I was really worried about you.”
“Because… Dog?” my dad intoned like a question. Because what he had under his arm was just that: a quivering Cockapoo we later named “Puppy.”
Because… Dog?
The last few months have left me feeling so very shaken and squeezed. Despite our best efforts, medical intervention, and significant investment, things haven’t changed: my dear wife is falling apart before my eyes.
Yet God remains silent.
Despite a renewed commitment earlier this year, I feel myself drifting. There is a distance growing between me and my Father.
I’m not sure I care.
I felt this same enmity when, all those years ago, I prayed for my grandmother to live, and she didn’t. Instead, my grandfather, whom she cared for, was moved from sibling to sibling. And finally into a home. (While an uncle sold off all his earthly goods to pay off debt).
Whatever comfort may come from God seems cold, distant, indifferent.
And I’ve found I’m not strong. I’m weak and worn. I want my wife back, I want our life back. Every day a piece of my heart is torn out when I have to leave her in tears to go to work.
I don’t smoke, yet I dream of getting a pipe. The bottle sings its own siren song to me: I am comfort, I am peace, lose yourself in me.
I am tempted. When it seems that no comfort is forthcoming from the Father, it’s altogether too tempting to find it elsewhere. The bottle, smoking, that channel on TV.
Yet all are smoke and mirrors, promising things they cannot deliver. I feel like Frodo, who near the end of his quest, said he was “naked in the dark” with “nothing between me and the wheel of fire.”
And if I feel this way, how must my dear wife feel? Just this morning she said, “I want a vacation from my body.”
I don’t know how to traverse that. How do I deal with it? I try to be strong for her, remind her that God’s strength is perfected in weakness. But it’s entirely too easy to believe for someone else, and have no faith left for ourselves.
I am naked in the dark.
God help me.
Today’s guest post comes from my friend, Kevin Haggerty. He’s a Christian, husband, dad, web/graphics designer, writer, and MMA blogger. Kevin and his wife, Kim, are going through a year where they:
Both lost their jobs, and
Welcomed their son, Aidan, into the world. Through it all, hard as it’s been, God has been there.
Kevin’s blog is The Isle of Man, and he can be followed on Twitter @kevinrhaggerty
I’m a pretty nice guy.
As a kid, I was probably somewhat of a pushover. I am the oldest of seven kids. I was obedient. I didn’t get in a lot of trouble. I held the line. I was essentially next in command if the boss went down.
I also have always been an introvert, though that is not something I’ve understood about myself until very recently in life.
Because of those factors, I generally kept to myself and avoided conflict as a child. In high school, I wasn’t a lot different. Though I started to stand up for myself a little, I was very much still going through a process of self-discovery.
The truth is that I probably took more crap than I needed to for the first 18 or so years of my life.
It was somewhere along that point in time that I started to become acclimated with anger. It was my out. My new savior.
It was my superpower.
Dear God,
What was so wrong with the old normal that it had to be replaced with this?
The new normal.
It doesn’t feel normal at all. It’s like a half life–surreal, hazy, like I’m on the outside looking in. It looks familiar, but I don’t recognize it as my life. Who is this man who shuffles around in a stupor? Wait…
Can it be?
That’s me!
And me is not coping very well with this new new normal. I want to hide, cry escape when I see her–she who so loved life–reduced to a husk of her former self. The tears, shaking, anxiety.
It makes me angry.
“Why, God? She loves you. You who opened blind eyes, unstopped deaf ears, raised the dead… Where are you now?”
If this be mercy, it’s severe. Fill quickly the cup so we can return to normal. I want to see her smile, hear her laugh, be with her in the way a man is with his wife.
Quickly let this new pass so that we may return to the life we had. It wasn’t perfect, but it was ours.
And we knew how to navigate it. This unfamiliar landscape is an arid, broken place. Where is the water and shade? Whither the oasis?
God, you’ve got to do something, anything–anything other than this.
What was so wrong with the old normal? Must you take every bit of happiness, and turn it to dust?
I’m calling you out.
Calling you to account.
Not for my sake.
Or for hers.
But for the sake of the watching world. The world that hears, sees, wonders if you’re there. Are you?
Show yourself.
We need a miracle.
