The Hocking Block

When my mom left, I was about 8 years old. That would have made her around 25

When my mom left, she stopped raising me.

She worked at the local Farmer Jack. 

She met a young man who worked there as well, he was 18 years old.

I am 44 years old now.

This summer, that young man died. 

He had spent the majority of these last 36 years with my mother and his alcoholism.

They have a 20 year old daughter together, my half sister. 

He divorced my mom about 2 years ago. He wasn't nice about it.

Amazingly, to his parents disappointment, his alcoholism continued on after the marriage ended. They were sure he only drank because of my mom. They were wrong.
My mom didn't want the divorce and hasn't handled it well at all.
At 62 she's basically still a kid who needs constant help with everything , won't ask for help until it's too late and then instantly resents having accept it.

This summer I was sitting at Bran's Steak House with my cousin Mike and my good friend Tom around 9:30 PM when I got a text from my wife. 

"Jeff you need to call you mom NOW. It's Pete"

The moment I read the text, my stomach dropped.

I called my wife, not my mom. My wife told me the news.

My drunken ex-step dad was found dead in his bathroom by a friend.

We'd come to find out later it was a combination of 5 prescription drugs plus a huge amount of alcohol. We'll never know if it was intentional or not.

He was 54 years old. 

The last 5 moths have been me dealing with lawyers and my mother and problems that come about when a man dies with no will, no instructions and 20 year old girl as his sole heir. 

We've been fighting his parents who thought THEY should be the executors of his estate and thought they should be his heir. 

It's cost money and time I don't have.

It's caused stress and tension I don't want.

It's all for a woman and her daughter who don't really like me very much.
It now the holidays.
My mom and half sister are around more now.
It all seems forced. She needs me, but doesn't like it.
I know I have to do what's right, even though it will most likely end badly. Again.
I don't have unlimited money. I can't get unlimited ulcers. I don't have much left in the empathy tank.

It's hard to get all of this from a stone, a cold, emotionless, dumb stone who should know better.

The Freedom of a False Knot

I like to start off every blog entry by saying something along the lines of, "it's been forever since I've written on here", basically because it's always been forever since I've written on here.

So much has gone on since the last time I took the time to sit down and write.

The most ridiculous yet perfectly expected event that happened is that my mother is no longer speaking to myself or my family. I guess you could say we're not speaking to her either, but it doesn't really matter, the point is we've broken ties.

Over the last decade or so my wife has been the driving force that has maintained amy relationship with my mom and half sister. It could be because my wife lost her own mother to ovarian cancer about 8 years ago, but most likely its because she was raised like most humans were raised, to believe that there's an innate bond between a mother and child.

My mom and I have never had that bond.

To say I am the antithesis of a momma's boy would be an understatement. I so dislike my own mother that it has seeped into every female relationship I've ever had and tainted it with hues of distrust and resentment. I am not one to put a woman on a pedestal, if she'd like to stand next to me, that would fine, but no special treatment simply because of our chromosome differences.

Over the course of the last 10 years or so my wife has tried her best to include my mom and sister in our lives, to make them feel like we're a family. My mom has done so less than enthusiastically, but as its been pointed out, she had made tremendous progress. All the while, my mom was going through a prolonged and emotionally torturous separation and ultimate divorce with my sadly, comically, stereotypically drunken step-father.

During this ridiculous ballet of leaving/not-leaving/leaving/I hate you/We're staying together/we're not staying to together my mother suffered an insanely unexpected health event.

One weekend while her husband was away up north at their cabin,  I was called to my mom's house because she had been lying on the couch in pain all day and my sister thought she was sick and needed to be taken to see a doctor. My mom is not old and not sickly, she's barely 63 years old I write this. When I arrived at their house my mom was doubled over on her couch. She couldn't move and her stomach was killing her. She could only speak enough to tell me all she needed was some milk-of-magnesea. It was clear she needed more than that. I ended up carrying her against her will to my car, lying to her that we were only going to an urgent care facility (it was 7:30 PM on a Friday night). I took her directly to the Emergency Room.

My mom wasn't happy with me. She wasn't happy with the admitting nurse who guessed it was appendicitis. She wasn't happy with the ER doctor who explained, after X-rays, that she had suffered from a perforated diaphragm. She wasn't happy with the surgeon who told her it may be that she had suffered from undiagnosed colon cancer and this was a tumor causing the pain. At 2 AM, after being admitted, my step-father showed up, he had driven all the way down from Alpena. It was soon after that arrival, that the aneurysm on the artery that fed blood to my mom's spleen that everyone had missed that had been slowly leaking for over a week, burst. She bled out internally.

Luckily this happened IN the hospital. Emergency surgery saved her but not her spleen and not half of her pancreas. She lived. During surgery they damaged some nerves in her arm somehow. She would survive the bleeding out but not without losing the use of one of her arms and hands.

Once all of the drama of my moms ordeal and new life situation calmed down, my step-father finally did divorce her, like a true gentleman.

My wife and I, but mainly my wife, stuck by mom throughout the divorce. She was on the phone every day with her, helping her, giving her support, listening to her.

We helped her find a new house. We helped her move. We did everything we could emotionally, financially and physically to help her during this transition and the whole time we were busting our asses to make sure she knew we all loved her and were there for her, all she did was complain and act as though she had no one. Which was ok, we knew this was a difficult time for her.

It never ended though.

Finally, last thanksgiving, at our house, with her, my sister, my cousin, my brother and my brood of 6 all gathered together as a family, my mom's incessant negativity and emotional blackholeness (that's mots likely not a word) became too much to bear.

My wife, alone with my mom and sister in the kitchen, unfortunately addressed the fact that no matter how much we give, how much we help, how much we do for them both, they give nothing back. This was an emotionally one sided relationship. This upset my fragile spoiled 18 year old sister and that in turn upset my mom. When I noticed that my wife was in tears and my mom had that indignant look on her face, I saw no other option.

I walked into the kitchen, told my mom and sister they were two of the most negative people I've ever met and I threw them out of my house. My mom tried to tell me I didn't understand what was going on and I clearly told her I did not care. Goodbye.

That was 4 months ago.

We didn't have Christmas together. She didn't come over for any of the kids birthdays that have happened since. We're done. We're done according to me at least.

This isn't like some huge maternal umbilical cord had finally been cut, it's as if the false one my wife had been desperately trying to tie to my mom and I had finally lost it's knot. It was always a slip knot anyway.

Oh Yea I've nothing to Say

I haven't written in a long time. I feel like I start a lot of these stories like that, it's some sort of an excuse I tell myself, or an apology I issue myself, or it's the ice breaker at the party that is my depression journal.

The highlights, my mom is divorced and miserably living in a co-op retirement community about 5 miles away from us. We don't see her any more often then when she was living 20 miles away in a miserable marriage she hated being in. The moral here is, she hates being in things, I just hope the hate doesn't spill into our house since she's so much closer now, I don't know the contamination radius of hate, I should look it up.

I ran into my dad over the summer, shared a table with him and some new woman he brought to my cousin's high school graduation party. It was odd. Afterwards I felt nothing, I didn't want to know him, I didn't want to reconnect. It was the first time that has happened. He's never met my youngest kids before, and although he was cordial, he didn't make a big deal about meeting them.

Aside from that, I'm depressed. Oh yea, I'm also depressed.

If the Devil is in the details, then I don't have to worry about the Devil

I don't remember where I was coming from. I remember I was in the passenger seat, but I don't know who was driving. I know I was 18-years old. I know I had graduated high school, but can't recall if it was a week after I graduated or two months after. I know it was summer. I know I was being dropped off. I know I was being driven to where I lived, my dad's house...I realize most kids who have yet to leave the nest would refer to that place as "their home", but that's not how I was raised, it wasn't my home, it belonged to Steve.

I know my car wasn't running, it was in the driveway, broken down, I don't know exactly what was wrong with it. I don't know why the person who was driving me dropped me off and left, in hindsight, that was a bad move on my part.

I know that as we drove down my street to the house I began to make out the shapes and forms of items on the lawn, big items, small items, a lot of items. I remember looking out the passenger window as the car slowed in front of the house, I remember Steve, my dad, sitting on the porch.

All of my life my dad told me when I turned 18, I was out. He beat it into my head (literally). My 18th birthday had come and gone in January of that year without any acknowledgement whatsoever by my parents, so although I was a little bothered no one noticed, I was also a little relieved I wouldn't be homeless with 5-months left of high school. When my high school graduation rolled around, and neither of my parents even asked about it or acknowledged that their was a commencement ceremony, I  didn't bring it up, I didn't attend it and they didn't care. Again, I didn't get tossed out of the house, so I counted my blessings.

My luck had run out that day. That day, everything I owned was on the front lawn. My entire life to that point was strewn across the grass as if a micro-tornado hit just my room, just my life.

I had no car to pack it up into and in 1989 I had no cell phone to call anyone. My dad simply said, "I changed the locks" got up, went in the house and shut the door behind him.

I stood there, stunned a bit and turned and walked away...from it all. From my things, my clothes, my life.

I had no siblings out there in the world to call, no friends or relatives to take me in. When I called my estranged mother from a pay phone her response was, "So, wow, where are you going to go?". Exactly what a boy in trouble wants to hear from his mom.

I wasn't a bad kid. I wasn't in trouble. Never got suspended, never got so much as a parking ticket. I just wasn't what my old man thought I should be.

That's the day I learned that no one will ever have my back.

On my way to Waiting

My life is slowly slipping by. I think when you have kids, life moves faster then when you don't have kids and the more kids you have, the faster time flies...because they have so many mile markers along the way to remind you of just how frickin' fast time moves forward, "Oh look she's walking!" "Oh look she's talking!" "Oh look she's in high school!" "Oh look she's picking out our coffins!". Your kids milestones polarize the passage of time. 

I haven't moved to California. I have been convincing myself to be happy with what I have and where I am. I have a lot. I am in a nice place. It's cold as hell, but it's nice.

I still want to be in California. 
I feel like every day that passes, I lose another chance to move there. I lose another day by being here. 

I can't shake it. I can't shake the longing. The wanting. The pangs of regret of not being there.

In a few weeks I'll be in the bay area, like I am every few months, I'll soak it up, I'll take it in and try to savor my time in the sun. I'll dream of living there of staying there of simply being in my Valhalla. I'll wish my wife was with me so I could show her why I love it there, so she could fall in love with the air and sky and ocean and the soul of it all. Then I'll leave. 

I'll get sad. I always get sad. 

Rambling about my own Stupid.

I've never been fatter in my life. Ever. I'm huge. I'm working out and eating better, but still, I'm fat.

My stress levels are through the roof. I'm working on not being so stressed, but still. Stressed.

My mother turned 60 yesterday, my wife planned a surprise birthday party for her. It was wonderful. Just over 2 years ago I was standing in front of a surgeon in a hospital in the middle of the night as he explained my mom had a leaking aneurysm for about a week now, and it had burst without anyone knowing. She was bleeding out...her vitals were almost non-existent...he was very unsure. She survived.

I have 4 children. I have a wife. I've been thinking about dying a lot lately. I really don't want to die, but I know the way I'm going, I'm not going to last as long as I should. It's sad. I'm sad.

Most of my blogs tell a story, this one doesn't. This one is just me thinking. It's not a very good entry.

Money. Responsibility. Family. Work. Friends. Life. I need to be better at all of those things and worry less about some of those things.

I need to figure this out. I'm running out of time.

I love things

I love Neil Youngs music. I have loved it since I was boy. One of the first vinyl records I ever listened to was Harvest by Neil Young, it belonged to my dad. Actually, I'm listening to it now as I type this, tens of thousands of feet up in the air, flying back home from San Jose California. I also love California, specifically, the "silicon valley" area of California, the area I am in the process of flying away from at his very moment back to my heart and soul, my wife and kids and my home back in Detroit.

Whenever I'm in is part of California, which is at least 2 or 3 times a year, more if I can manage it, I make a point to drive up into the mountains that separate silicon valley and all of the technology and the Pacific ocean. Up there on a winding mountain road named Skyline Blvd is a cool little restaurant named Alice's Restaurant after the restaurant from the famous album by Arlo Guthrie. While driving that crazy winding road I take solace in knowing that Neil Young's sometime home, Broken Arrow Ranch is also nestled in up inbetween the redwoods and cypress trees on that very road. I can't see the ranch, I can't get into the ranch, I dont see Neil Young walking around or anything, but somehow I feel like I'm communing with the soul of music that is area has inspired Mr Young to write.

They say that up there in those hills of La Honda, Jack Kerouac sat and wrote, inspired by the same feeling and aura I'm often inspired by when I'm there.

As I said, I'm on my way home now, to the Midwest, to Detroit. Ive spent the better part of my adult life trying to get back out to northern California, through business or by making friends out there could return to visit. I'm drawn to that place like no other place o earth. But it's not home. It's an idea. It's a connection o a part of me I wish I had held onto. It represents my creativity, my dreams, my aspirations that so often get replaced by the realities of adulthood, of parenthood, of mortgages and college funds.

I know I think that if I could just relocate my family to northern calironia, somehow the stresses and pressures of life would be lessened, somehow the same intangible feeling of positivity I get when I visit here would insert itself into our mundane and stressful lives. I also know that's probably just a dream.

Real life  has a tendency o be stronger than ones hopes and aspirations and it usual wins in a fight between it and ones dreams.

I think i need t learn how to bring the peace and inspiration I find in California back with me to Detroit, and not the other way around.