I see you, I’m holding you

I see her. Standing at the window. Looking out. A deep longing in her heart.

Confusion.

Hope.

She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t even know.

I don’t know this until years later.

I don’t really have this memory. This a memory that has been given to me on the journey to understand. To fill in the blanks.

My mother tells me I am standing at the door. Looking out the window for Dad. Routine. It was the routine.

It makes so much sense.

I see the life of a 3 year old. I see the awe of life. I see the love. The everything is exciting and joyful. I see the you mean so much to me. I see the you are my whole world.

And then you’re not there.

Unaware of everything that is going on around her.

I see her shrug and go find something else to explore.

She looks to Mum for warmth. But there is none. Not out of malice but because Mum is hurting so deeply and so desperatley trying to keep it together. In 4 short years her life has turned up-side-down in ways she could never imagine.

But little me doesn’t understand this.

I see now the blissful ignorance. The next 6 years of life being life. It’s just what it is.

Sure there are things that didn’t make sense. These are my own memories.

The crying becuase at school we had made fathers day cards but I don’t understand why my Dad can’t be at home. Why we only see him every now and then. And how we have to drive really far to see him. How he doesn’t feel like my father. But he feels familiar.

I don’t remember how often we use to visit him in prison. But only two memories of being IN the prison stick with me.

Being given a gift. A box of a rip-off lego version. He doesn’t give it with love. Just hands it to me. I have to act like I love it.

Something is off.

They go back to talking.

I watch the other families. I see the other kids.

It doesn’t feel like a prison. But I know this isn’t a normal place either.

I learn later - or so I am told - that this is where prisoners that can’t go in the general population go. Not because they are more likley to run away. It’s in fact a very low security prison. But rather because the crime my father committed is one where my father is more a risk in the general population. Even criminals have a hierarchy.

In my mind we had crayfish that day. I cannot verify this.

The other memory. There are fences for that one. Big fences. I just remember that I got a toy at Burger King.

We came to live close to this prison. Driving past the turn off. Seeing the sign regularly.

Not that one word was ever spoken about it. We just drove past that road like it was any other.

I never did figure out why we came to live so close to something so shit. Something that surely would hold such painful memories.

I don’t think I’ll ever get an answer for that one.

You know, up to this point I think it’s kind of much-of-a-muchness. Sure it wasn’t ideal. Sure I’d have shit to work through, don’t we all?

Then things happen. And they seem to happen fast.

After this it becomes a blur.

It’s like I stopped recording memories my brain. Someone took out the SD card.

I just have this perpetual senses of “MAKE IT SLOW DOWN'“.

Clearly some memories got through - they must have been stored on some kind of fixed storage. But they glitch.

Flash in and out. Half a memory. Things missing.

It will never be the same again. But we will pretend otherwise.

We will play happy families.

Covering up the pain.

I cover my pain up by starting to run. At 9. I start to run to punish myself. To do anything but to feel the feelings. To avoid the confusion.

That little girl who was waiting for her Dad, she got him back.

But she didn’t.

He’s not the same.

He’s not hers any more.

But he’s all she ever wanted.

Sorry Mum. We have our own story and my love for you is deep.

But I was Daddy’s girl.

What comes next is a blur of “stop slow down, I can’t breathe, I just want things to go back to how they were” and “if I run faster, be better, will you love me?”.

And then if it wasn’t enough. If it was like everytime he looked at me he saw his deepest pains, like I no longer existed to him.

I had sisters. He had wife before Mum. I’d never met them. Well not that I remembered - I was a baby when they left. Never talked to them since.

Seeing through the eyes of an adult I see now he was clinging onto whatever he could. His new life mission was to have his daughters back.

I had been the filler child.

The space inbetween. The consolation prize. The, this will do, but if I could have it any other way I’d not have it. But it’s awkward to give back constellation prizes. So we take them home. Pretend to love them. Pretend to be grateful.

I can see the light in his eyes when he got his daughters back. When the second daughter came to visit. It was like a part of his heart has been restored.

If I run faster, be better, will you love me? Will you look at me like that?

The irony being that my sister couldn’t see it that way. She thought I ‘had it all, I had had my father’.

Yup she’s been through some shit that no one should ever have to witness or experience but ironically being in the same country as my father made him further way from me than he ever was to her.

And then, if I had still had any hope, any shred of belief that I could still mean something to my father, who at this point had resorted to the insult of all insults “you’re just like your mother”, there was to be one more. A forth sister.

Again I saw the light in his eyes. He spoke of a future. He spoke of doing things. He had dreams. Visions. Ideas.

None of them included me.

If I run faster, be better, will you love me? Will you look at me like that?

And so I clung. I clung to any shred, any scrap sent my way.

What was one of those scraps?

I don’t even know how this came to be. My father never came to anything of mine.

But he came to the parent-teacher night at school.

Remember,that in his world children and seen and not heard.

So he answers for me.

“What are her goals?”

I pause. I wait to find out my destiny.

“To get excellence in all her subjects”.

The world does that slow motion thing.

I look at him. I feel it in my body. My heart sinks. And then my resolute kicks in. I guess that is what we are doing. We never wanted to be creative or do drama or arts or sports anyway. Who wants to be social and have friends. We are going be excellent.

And then I know I must turn towards my teacher. I must make this seem as though it is what I want.

I know what I am to do.

“Yes that’s the plan. I want to achieve excellence in all my subjects”.

It’s short and sharp. I don’t remember anything else about that meeting.

I do remember the silence in the car on the way home.

There is no need to speak about it. I know what is expected of me.

If I run faster, be better, will you love me? Will you look at me like that?

That was the day that it changed. It was no longer me trying to do what he wanted.

I took who I knew I was and put it in a box. Not to be opened up again.

My soul purpose was to achieve that. The mission had been placed upon my shoulders.

Welcome to how the next 15+ years have been.

Striving for excellence.

Sure, sometimes I came out of that box. Never nicely. Always with great intensity. Always explosive. Always gasping for air.

Only to be stuffed back down again.

Then he disowned me.

I had broken the rules. I wasn’t being compliant.

I had let myself out of the box too long.

That phone call forever etched in my brain.

“you make your choices and you have to live with the consequences”

As I sit in the school office, wondering where I will sleep that night. Wondering what comes next for me.

Knowing I have committed the sin of all sins.

And so I do this dance, to this day I do this dance.

Myself wanting to be out and free.

A part of me believing that everything will be restored if I can just ‘achieve excellence’.

If I run faster, be better, will you love me? Will you look at me like that?