In a life lived, I've learned this truth: "Life isn't simple nor is it simply understood."
This lesson would be learned by my then high school-aged mother during the summer of 1959 when she simply understood that she'd be going on a date with a boy from school. But her life lived wasn’t going to be that simple, when two other boys came along for the date also. What was supposed to be an hour or two of simple conversation punctuated with happy giggles and maybe a few calm but out-loud laughs, would soon escalate into humiliation, anger, brutality, and intimidation. I’ll never know how my mother felt; I know she’s very strong and even more stubborn than that, but feelings are always present with all of us at all times, and I can imagine her experience magnified those ever-present feelings into a dark space that left no room for even the tiniest fragments of light. Afterward, she’d have conversations with her mother about her father concerning what he should and shouldn’t be told. It was decided he should be protected from the discussion, such that there would be no possibility of him being convicted for a count of premeditated murder.
Life isn’t simple nor is it simply understood, and nine months later I was a brand new life birthed into this world by her, my very young and very naive mother. No, while I didn’t come to her in the usual way of a love that’s tender and true, but amidst feelings and emotions intrinsic and knowable only to herself, she would have me anyway. This would be the dark legacy of my very existence. This legacy would someday cause me to consider the very meaning of Exodus 34:6-7 and what role it would hold in my life, as well as in the lives of my own children. Suffice it to say, what happened that night would be the cause and effect of what was inherent in me by nature. As to what was integrated into me by nurture, I can say only that my mother needed love in her life. She needed someone to love her, to listen to her, to show her security and make her feel desired. Eventually, she'd find that man, but in seeking him sometimes she lost her way—sometimes she lost me in that way. Eventually, she'd settle on the man that would become my step-father, a man not simple or simply understood.
That man was often a shining light that everyone wanted to be around, the life of the party, the one who made everyone smile and laugh. But that man would also be an alcoholic, drinking all the time. It would become a pattern; every day he’d drink until he was drunk, then he and my mother would fight, argue, yell and scream at one another. But on one particular day when I walked into the room where this was happening, he looked at her and yelled: "Tell him." At this very moment, at this very point in time and space, emotions and feelings for three people were on edge for the complexity of a life lived. My mother looked at me and through her tears told me I'd been born because she’d been raped. Up to this point in my life, while I didn’t understand it at the time, I’d always been deeply affected by emotional and mental issues. So much so that even in this painfully dark experience, this day seemed to me to be a day like every other. In retrospect, I see it as a pivotal point, a marker to use to look back on my life and scan a very uneven playing field from my very beginning. I see my beginning marked in ugly darkness that would always try to hold me back by not allowing light, color, and beauty into my life.
Is life simple? Well, when doctors ask about my family history, because of what is inherent by my nature, I can never simply answer half of their questions, which used to always expose very raw and extremely dark emotions. As far as the nurture I received beginning in my childhood, well, it would be too easy to lay all this messiness squarely on my mother. But an undemanding, kind, and compassionate reflection that’s objectively fair has to conclude that at that time in her life, she wasn't ready for such trauma or the life that came with it—not emotionally, not financially, and not intellectually. Still, I'll not lie to you; I always felt like I was being forced to live life like I was a competent and capable, like a 25-year-old even when I was hardly 7 or 8. I can honestly tell you this added to the complications I’d always live with. When I was that young, I was scared a lot, worried a lot, and wondered why a lot of things were thus and so. But it was mostly the simple things that ought always only to be simple to a kid that forever puzzled me with puzzles that were as unsolvable as Gordian Knots; these things put a dark cloud over my head that would be forever present and inescapable. Even so, was I a happy, joyful, inquisitive, playful, precocious little boy with a beautiful spirit and gorgeous smile? I mean, heck yeah!
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