Almost every workday I ride the metro that runs just underneath the flat where we used to live. As a crow flies, we live a couple of kilometers away, separated only by a river. I with my now ex-wife and what seems to have become my ex-daughter.
I tell myself that it is her right to press the delete key on everything that ever was, from walking to school together to horseback riding, to think whatever she wants of whether I was there or not there. But sometimes I hear some girl laughing, and I have to check twice to see if it is her or not. Sometimes, I wonder what would I say, wow you look good, even if I think she does not look good. Like her candles have burned out. Would she turn away and pretend that we don’t know each other? Just some mistake, like going up to someone you don’t know in the supermarket, because from a certain angle they look like someone you know.
◊♦◊
I only know how she looks from the last time we met, in court. She won. I am not sure whether this is what she really wants, or if she is just the proxy for her mother. That is something that she will have to get real about, sooner or later. Then again,I know many people who made the choice to live off the addictive thinking of being correct and deferred this repair work until it was too late. Or maybe they were always getting ready.
The court did not agree to my motion to start mediation. So like so many fathers, I am in the role of paying and not existing. Our details often vary, but surprisingly the path to this destination of parental alienation are amazingly similar.
Not that it matters anymore, but thoughts still appear, how did it come to this? In its simplest form, I failed to say no. Then over time the power that belonged to me went somewhere else. To be honest, I had no idea that something was a bit off. Not that I had no emotions, but I was no match for someone who was so emotionally eloquent and expressive. Like many nice guys, I was pretty good at management of many things, except my own emotions. Looking back, we were very co-dependent and hooked on drama.
Though it took several years, the beginning of the end came when I started to say no. It would always scare the shit out of me. Sooner or later, the punishment would come in some form or another, or wholly out of the blue. I can still feel this tightening in my chest when I get in a lift, even in the block on the other side of the river.
◊♦◊
Then a bunch of things happened in succession. Deaths, loss of work (which eventually turned out to be a loss of profession), loss of home (arson), and I couldn’t make it work. I started to get sick and depressed. About the time I stopped paying for everything, began a series of accusations that I had or would sexually assault our daughter.
This accusation pushed me over the edge and into the land of white coats. I was stuck in a very low place of self-diminishment. It seems I got there by my inability to set limits and say no. A rather long and boring story. And yet, I am surprised how many men live out lives in some form of quiet desperation, and even more so, how many are ruined by weaknesses of their male self.
Usually, their hearts take them. Sometimes alcohol. Sometimes the law. But we have one overriding almost genetic similarity. We are ashamed of this, so we do no talk about it. Even in my own family, I heard, “well what did you really do?”
I would add, there is no possibility of negotiation with someone living in fear and fury. And there is no return to something that never quite was. True, we had fun times together in the flat above the metro line I ride every day, in that house that no longer is, but this is not always enough to ride out the incessant storms of blame, guilt, and shame.
◊♦◊
I like to think I have graduated from the land of self-diminishment. But it resides there somewhere, a bit like a hungry wolf that knows my address, which I sometimes have ignored, sometimes befriended. He comes back to me when I am not taking care of myself, stressed out from life in the precariat mode and usually I do not notice that I have invited him to the table.
But that is another story.
So I ride the metro and catch myself wondering, sometimes in that space of almost being present, by the way some girl is standing back to me, is that her? It is always in my private prayers not to criticize and set myself above others. My longing is to believe that she has the best mother possible, and I am the best father possible. It’s just that someone else in self-diminishment, maybe unhappiness, is living out the mantra of fault. Without him, she would have been happy.
I don’t really know of course, but our daughter has to make sense of this message that is replayed every single day. According to which I am the child of a lesser God who does not deserve respect. Then come all the derivative costs of diminishment. Dead dreams and living vicariously, having to say things such as “I like you, and you like me, it’s just that I don’t quite like myself.” And the court, because it does not even understand what parental alienation is, that it too is also a kind of relational violence, stamps the decision, according to the law, and says you have to pay.
—
Photo/Flick:Boris Thaser
Filip is a resident of a large city on the Wisla River. Unofficial ambassador of Kharkiv. Engaged in building a life from pieces that don’t always fit. Among other topics, I write about defense and aviation issues (also in EN) on blog: citythatwantstofly.tumblr.com
Awesome writing.