One summer when I was around 6, my dad drove my two younger brothers and I across British Columbia in a tangerine Ford Capri. It had a black interior and burned my bare skin when I sat in the front seat in shorts. It smelled of hot greasy dust, chip bags, and melting plastic, wires stuck out from the dashboard where the old radio had been ripped out. Dad loved that car. He'd been "souping it up" for months before we belted ourselves in and burned westward to visit Grandma.

He was in a vindictive mood. He and my mom were split up, maybe it was after their first separation, and I remember feeling his indignant air, a special malice held for those he believed had wronged him. He liked to be really righteous when the mood stuck him, you know, state rules about how people should behave or whatever, but mostly he just wanted do whatever the fuck he wanted. There was always a wild, unhinged feeling around him, like anything could be said, or done. We swore loudly, ate licorices and gas station treats for dinner, on long stretches he’d get me to drive or steer while he took a nap, and sometimes a wave of rage swept the car and gritting his teeth, he'd say things like, "That fat old bitch has NO business...what a STUPID fucking hag!" about someone he didn't like. He also liked to drop "secrets", adult stuff I wasn't supposed to know about, retaliative little bombs about my mom, or aunts, or grandparents or my two older half-sisters. Really mean, personal shit. Speeding down the snaky B.C. highway, he told me a big secret that shook my body and caused me to burst into tears.

"Why are you crying? I thought you already knew that." I didn't know. I held that secret in my chest for years. It made me think there were always secrets being held from me. I was obsessed with secrets. "Guess someone should have told you," he said. Guess so. Guess it was always him who told me horrible things about the ones who loved and protected me."You're my best girl, my princess."

___

"I’m just sitting here realizing that I want you to hate me. Like, I’d prefer that you hated me and things were clearcut in that terrible way rather than this strange, icky greyness I feel now. Could you block me? Or tell me something more concrete so I wouldn’t be able to communicate with you anymore?" This is what I wrote to a nice man I recently met. About a week previous to writing this message, my dad sent me an email with this inside: “As for me being a combined monster/asshole or either or both. Monsters are those people locked up in jails for serial murder, those who have molested, raped and abused and tortured children.”

I never mentioned any of the above, but he has a point:

How to measure our monsters?

I recently learned about the term "emotional incest" and it's like my whole inner architecture suddenly made sense. I've had 35 years of being open and porous to a very sick, broken man. I’ve either been the absolute epicentre of his happiness, or the point blank reason of his pain and sorrow. A princess or a piece of shit. He makes others responsible for everything that's wrong with him and his latest wife is the reason he's 'good' again. He's a vampire. He uses whatever open being to either soak up goodness or as a receptacle to spread his poison. I carried his sick for years. Long after my brothers and sisters were exhausted and boundaried, I held his sickness and I tried to cure it.

When you cut off a parent, people in our patriarchal culture love to tell you to suck it up and respect them as they gave you life. Fuck that. What's a child supposed to do when the parent fucks with their head year after year then dumps them? This is what a breakup letter from a pathetic, weak, spineless man reads like:

“I spent most of boxing day lying in bed, weeping and heartbroken about my children. No more. I have a family here who loves me and respects me, including grandsons who are respectful.

I now need to focus on those good things in my life. I'm busy and happy and productive. I do love you all and miss you all but this is not working, and evidently there is no possibility for reconciliation. You'd all rather prefer to demonize me. So be it. I'll deal with it and the pain will subside eventually....and our lives will go on.

Be well and be happy.

Love, Dad”

Always the fucking weeping: we all got it in person, over the phone, in emails, I even got one of his weeping episodes over Skype. He never sought out help, never thought anything was wrong with him. He was too rational and levelheaded, of course: like so many blind men, he was smarter than his sickness and his sadness.

I used to like men who really loved me in moments, then cut me out completely. There are plenty of special people like that, sick ones and married ones, they were perfect. My dad has rejected me in so many effective ways. Words, gestures, but mostly words. Poisonous words. I've tried to turn the words inside out -- is that why I'm a writer? Are these little shields against him? Monsters versus Monsters. Booze used to help soften these kinds of truths, all the variations of self-hate I acted out in relationships. I meet a nice guy, we spend some time together and I find myself hoping (demanding) he'll love me forever (before really knowing me) then as I reveal more of my personality, I start wishing he'd quickly hate me and cut me off (before really knowing me).

I thought I could change him, that he'd finally change and look at himself, get help. I thought it’d be different after my last letter to him. I was so compassionate, clear. I wasn't drunk. I just asked him to please respect me and not speak badly of the people I love. When I need to tell the truth my heart pounds. It pounded as I wrote him that letter asking he please respect my boundaries and not speak ill of my loved ones. It's pounding right now.

The next morning I wake up with some clarity*. I realize that my anxiety is less about his reason for not wanting to kiss me, but rather that maybe I, me, I'm not choosing and instead merely succumbing to his attention without checking myself first. Plus I wonder if I'd built up a fantasy in my head and kept it simmering on the back burner for a year. Holy shit, I think, do I even like him?

Along with a small group of other foreign grown-ups learning English in Vancouver, I taught my future husband a grammar class. At the end, feeling slightly less hungover and slightly more adventurous again, I wrote the name of a restaurant in East Van that hosted samba and salsa dancing on Saturday nights on the whiteboard, inviting the socially deprived people out to an area that didn't directly cater to their naïveté*.

He approached my desk after class and wanted to know a few specifics on the grammar lesson. I probably faked my way through the answer because grammar always felt like math (sorry, all my former students!)* but he was earnest in his approach. I looked at him with a slight leer, in one of those liquidy moods where all I can think about is rolling into the next bender and fucking the world, but he was so nice. Like, really, a good person.

The next evening, I almost didn't go meet him, but she drug me out of our ratty apartment and down to the restaurant. We were already halfway in the bag, skipping through the street, doing that thing where we were in love with one another but going out to meet men when I spotted him sitting at the bar all by his lonesome, all dressed in black. He stood up to greet me and that was it, I knew our destinies would be looped together by that invisible string.

I didn't even know if I liked him yet but I was in love.

The burdens of expectation and disappointment have lifted when I come downstairs for breakfast and see him sitting at the table puffing on his vape. He stands up to greet me with so much tenderness in his eyes that I almost break into tears. But I don't. I'm going to let myself choose this time, see if I like him, put some space between us, try "slow".

"Can I make you a coffee?" he asks.

"Sure."

"How did you sleep?" he looks at me from under his brow. His body seems to sway between reticence and devotion.

"Fine."

He sets down the coffee. We sit in silence for a few minutes as I drink it, and it's not unpleasant that silence.

"I tossed and turned all night. It was awful," he finally says.

"Oh you did?" I reply softly, not wanting to sound like I care that much.

"That oil from Paris, I could smell it all night...could smell you. It was just, God, it was just too much," he says the last few words forcefully.

"Why because you're seeing someone?" I blurt out.

"No!"

"Then why didn't you kiss me?" I say looking down at my hands, then back up at him.

"I just want to take things slow. I like you. You're so smart... and different." He puffs on the vape and smiles, "Wanna hang out today? Talk and cuddle?"

That makes me so happy I want to burst but I stay cool.

"Yeah, sure, that sounds nice."

Silence used to be painful because I didn't like what I heard in it; endless chatter suggesting I was stupid or ugly or inadequate or indecent or vulgar or unworthy or too much. Sometimes I would lay down at night and my head would be screaming "I'm sorry" -- sorry to whom? Sometimes I'd default to choosing a man to be sorry to, the last man I encountered. I must have done something to make him not like me, I must have come across too strongly, turned him off. Even though those voices are the machinations of self-hate perpetuated by how one grows up, and the woman-hating culture at large, they're also protection mechanisms. They're all about me in the end, damaged or victorious. The obsessive chatter fuzzed out real contact with others and more importantly, with myself.

I was saying sorry to me. Compassionate, loving, but still very quiet me was apologizing for all the hurt I caused myself.

*Footnote on the amazing extra benefits of sobriety: I so rarely wake up with pangs of regret, I've lost weight without trying (no more gazillion wine calories, late night crap food or hangover pizza), I have money in the bank, and substance-free, I sleep so much better. I can nip cravings and obsessive thought earlier, whatever they happen to be. I feel actual fucking FEELINGS. Mornings have become light moments of truth instead of dark rushes of anxiety. Are these the secondary embers of self-love?

*Second footnote on how much I hate shitty bars and restaurants in downtown sectors across this country. It SUCKS BALLS to be stuck in a foreign city and be subjected to mass mainstream bars and restaurants. If you ever meet a foreigner in your city or town, please throw them a bone and suggest some decent places to eat or hang out. Thank you.

*Third footnote on teaching English. It was my golden goose for almost 10 years. I met so many deeply fascinating and beautiful people and was privileged to be their teacher. I was weak at grammar but I hope I made students feel loved and heard. Teaching is really hard and requires so much energy, dedication and heart! Respect.