Not Going to Happen

Shut down completely. The idea of six thousand words today just poleaxed me. At this point, I’ve gotten a couple hundred, and I’m sick to my stomach, and depressed, and stalled.

The writing is simply a writing thing. The depression, however, is a family thing. Ran across pictures on the web of my two nephews, neither of whom I’ve ever met. I am estranged from my family — lost my brother on Thanksgiving Day, 1994, when he made it clear he didn’t believe me about my father and never would, lost the rest of my family sometime before that, when I explained to my mother that I knew my kid was telling me the truth about being molested by his father because I knew I’d been telling the truth when I asked her for help with mine. And she told me that’s how she "knew" my kid was lying — because she knew I was. That was also in 1994. When I talk about the train wreck in my life, that’s the one I’m talking about. My kids and I went through some very bad places that year. I won’t go into detail — what happened to me is something I could have worked out with my father if he’d only admitted it. What happened to my two kids is something their father should have been executed for. He was convicted of felony child abuse and a handful of other crimes, and that was plea-bargained down from much bigger stuff.

There are days now when I don’t think about my parents, my brother or sister, my once-huge extended family that is now scattered or gone. I don’t hate my parents or my brother anymore for what they did to me. But for what they did by walking out of my kids’ lives and taking every relative we ever had with them, and every bit of support that we should have been able to count on. Yeah. I still hate them for that.

But there is pain in knowing that people you loved more than anything for most of your life are going to die without you ever seeing them again. That you have family you’ve never met and will never meet. Most days you carry it and you go on. Some days it blindsides you, and you sit in front of your fucking monitor trying to catch your breath, blinking back tears.

This is apparently going to be one of those days, and the timing sucks.

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