When the Pretty Things are Gone

I open my eyes, then close them again. This goes on and on for hours, days, weeks, then becomes a running theme throughout my life. Imagine, a ten year old little girl. She has everything. Her parent's love story, my parent's love story is one that truly rivals Spark's, Notebook. I am growing up in a beautiful world, where I am surrounded by nature, lakes, trees, friends...two parent's who seem to have it all, and do, really. They manifested this life I live within and without now. I am precocious and sassy because I am too intelligent, emotional, and an only child. I have learned how to love but I have also learned the delicate art of seduction way too young. I am not referring to seduction in the sexual sense, but rather in the manipulative one. I look for ways to ensure that I get what I want. It comes easily to me; I am never chided for it. I spend my days riding my bike all over the place with friends, going water-skiing and tubing on my lake, well, the lake I grew up on. The dock sits overtop of it at the end of my yard. Everyone around us owns speed boats; we called them motorboats when I was a little girl. Everyone around us has a nice home, comfort...money. I have tons of little friends on rotation. They live within biking and walking distance and we play together and sometimes in twos for years, all growing up together in our little utopia, lakeside and golf course community. I see, hear, and think no evil. Everything is safe.

One day a phone call comes in on our landline. My father is in Turkey on a business trip, which was usual. My mother picks up the telephone, attached to the chord in the kitchen that is way too long from all of us trying to move about the house as we spoke on it over the years. I am wearing a teal top and teal shorts. I look at my mother who has turned a different color in her face. She doesn't speak much. She hangs up. My mother tells me to go pack an overnight bag because I will be sleeping over with my 3 best friends, who happen to all be sisters, 11 months apart, all of them for a few nights. She doesn't say anything else. She goes into the bathroom and draws herself a bath. I don't remember getting to my friend's house, but I remember my mother telling me that my father, my Daddy, had an accident on his trip and that she had to fly to Turkey immediately. Her intentions were to bring him back to an American hospital. I didn't know or understand the gravity of what was going on.

Looking back I went on that 3 day sleep over without much thought about it at all. I enjoyed the sleepover. I had fun with my friends. I remember asking the girls I was staying with one night to pray for my Dad. We were going to sleep, the room was dark, and we all lay in the eldest sister's room, with Marky Mark's, Good Vibrations playing low over the radio station she liked to fall asleep to. The middle sister, the one that was my age began to cry. I didn't realize at the time that their father had told them that my Dad had died and they were not to tell me. They pretended to pray with me. The rest of the time I spent waiting for my parent's to return, I don't really remember. What I do remember was coming back into my front door, and my mother grabbing me tightly from a kneeled position on the floor and literally just blurting out "Daddy's dead". I cried and cried into her. I didn't really know what death was yet but I guess I sort of understood that I was never going to see him again. I didn't realize this event would shape what seems like every single thing in my life there forward.

I remember my mom telling the girl's father who was coming in behind me to return our house key since he had been caring for our dogs while she was gone that "this wasn't a good time", while keeping me in her arms. I remember the neighbors offering to take us all to dinner that night and my mom not wanting to go. I wanted to go, but she didn't care. We didn't go.

Then, I remember wanting to go back to school after my mother had kept me out for a week. Unbeknownst to me they had an assembly about my father dying and how to "treat" me. I thought I was going back to something that felt normal, but i was wrong. I went through my day in a blur back then. Some kids were kind and others were awful. I rode the bus home one afternoon watching the nasty kid in front of me reinact my father's death fall on with his fingers like little puppets and repeating the word "smash" as his daddy finger landed on the back of the bus seat, which was supposed to be representative of the concrete he fell 4 stories to his death from. They really didn't spare these kids much detail at that assembly; or perhaps, it was just because I lived in a small town that so many people seemed to know and conjecture about it.

My father had apparently leaned back on an unsteady balcony which snapped, after a business-dinner meeting with someone who had done him wrong by fooling him into investing in a company that was no good. My father's entire intention on that business trip was to remove himself from the deal and get his name unaffiliated with this side investment. Some thought he was murdered by the man he met with, possibly pushed by thugs since the guy he had grown up with in the same village in Turkey as a child was now Turkish Mafia affiliated and had used 20K from my dad to invest in gun-running. My father trusted him. He shouldn't have. As soon as he found out what the side company was up to he headed overseas to break the tie that he had with it. Who knows? What I do know is that my father loved life, he loved HIS life. He did not jump. That was about all I actually knew. I could feel that.

Otherwise, my imagination took over as my perfect world became something I did no recognize. My attentive mother withdrew in grief. She didn't bond with me or play with me. She laid in bed, all day in the same green and black dress, day after day. I hated that dress. When she would bathe occasionally during this time, I hid it a couple of times on her. She cried that it was the only thing that fit now that she had put on weight in my father's absence. I gave it back each time. I thought if I could take it away from her, she would put something else on and become her again. She was never the same.

The house was the same, the motions of life were the same but nothing was really ever the same again. The imagination escape began when I used to look out my bedroom window into that of our across-the-street neighbor's window and pretend I could see my dad in the reflection. I would sing to him. I would stay there for hours at the beginning. Eventually, as I grew older, I could no longer see him there either.

My first relationship happened way to young for me, emotionally. I fell in what I thought was head-over-heels love with the first boy that showed me any interest romantically to have give him everything I could, everything, and then have him break my heart, tell me I was an ugly crier and that I should probably leave and go home when he broke up with me a week after taking my virginity and then "wanting us to know what else was out there." It took him a year and a half to court me and second to let me go. I fell hard that day, like my dad 5 years before. It broke me inside. It was like everything I loved left me. This became something that I couldn't handle then and I began gravitating towards words and thoughts. As a creative, this was a good and bad thing. Words can be misconstrued and often are unnecessary to others, even if they are so important to you. Thoughts are even worse! They can be down right deceiving.

When I realized the power that I had in merely being a pretty girl in my teen years, I went about making as many boys fall for me only to break their hearts. I would have multiple "relationships" like this going at all times to ensure that my void of invalidation and loss was being filled in some way. I had no regard for their feelings. I had none left, why should they. It wasn't even on a conscious level that I did this to them. It was like a game I played with myself and they were just there for my amusement. Don't worry it backfired. Trauma responses, selfishness, whatever you want to call it always do.

By the time I got to college, I was still up to the same methods of keeping myself seemingly adored and attention-full at the expense of others who knew nothing of each other and if they did, I didn't seem to notice or care. Until, I realized I did have actual feeling for the most unlikely in my little brigade of boyfriend's; the one I would never even give that title to, actually among them. He broke my heart back after years of playing with his. That stung like nothing else, because I wasn't really a bad person and I truly did love him. I just didn't understand how to love or trust in a healthy way. It hadn't been modeled for me in 10 years. By this time my mother and I hardly knew each other anymore and what we did know we didn't like. I had the lasting impression that she hated me. The truth is I pushed her away the same day she broke the news to me about my father and I never let her back in until much later in my adult life. I was awful to her too, because my heart had been broken and I had no idea how to piece it back together. I became so familiar with feeling pain or grief and forgetting real love, because that had the ability to hurt so much more that I actually curated relationships only to ruin them so at least I felt in control of the pain; somewhat akin to what anorexics must feel when they starve themselves. I too was killing myself slowly, but through emotions not food restriction. I was like a cigarette smoker who says each day "I should quit, I know this is hurting me", but the habitual nature of the beast keeps winning day in and day out, so you go on smoking or in my case, living this way.

I wanted something real and almost had it once or twice. I almost made myself "normal" for it. I wish that those involved in that understood how hard I tried for them. They never will. I decided at 25 that I would create the family that I yearned for ever since my dad died by talking my then party boyfriend at the time into having a baby. "It will be great," I said. "We will become closer and can make something wonderful out of our lives!" We started trying for one. I was a college drop out at the time and a waitress; he was the chef at the restaurant I worked. We became pregnant. We had a beautiful baby boy and I knew immediately, for the first time in 15 years what real love actually was. Unfortunately, I don't think my counterpart at the time quite had this 180 degree change go on within him at our son's birth. It overwhelmed him and he was dealing with a lot in his own little world from his own past that we parted ways and I became a single mother. However, my heart was full. I was an excellent mother. I still am.

Life continued and circled back somehow, and we wound up back together after 7 years apart. We have two children now. Our oldest is nearly 13; "the baby" is 5 and will be starting Kindergarten next year. We own a home in Arizona. My estranged mother is now one of my best friend's after coming out to live with us after she retired and since I work from home I have gotten to know her on a deep and wonderful level that possibly surpasses the pain of my child-parent relationship with her and has transcended into a great friendship and understanding. My life is not unhappy. It is truly something to be grateful for. However, there is still a part of me that will forever be that lost little girl, fragile and broken no matter how much my life grows and changes as some things really do leave a lasting impression on your heart.