I had a meeting this week that I’ll never forget. One of the participants said to me afterward, “I am so proud of you. It’s like you just found your voice.” If there’s anything that I’ve been trying to do over this past year, it’s exactly that. I needed to be my own again, and now I’m starting to reap the benefits of that decision. It isn’t exactly time for an epilogue, but I’ll take what I can get.

I still have days where I scream with rage at the injustice of everything that happened to me… but in the end, because of what happened to her, it gets harder and harder to stay angry. As I get older, I see the bigger picture. I have empathy for the fact that you can’t engineer a child’s reality without having a fractured reality of your own. The part of the equation that is not mine to own is how to fix her reality as well. However, I had to learn that part. It did not come easily. It was the equivalent of trying to help a little old lady across the street who didn’t want to go that way, anyway, and spent our entire walk banging me on the head with her purse.

It is literally amazing to me how many times I got smacked upside the head before I realized I probably needed it to stop. Now that it has, my life feels, well, bigger. Barring any unforeseen obstacles at work, I am on track for a gorgeous future. There’s also opportunity for travel, as my company is opening several overseas locations. I’m at the point where moving doesn’t sound appealing, but if someone needed me to be an expat for a while, I am sure that I would have the ENTIRE Bloomsbury collection on my Kindle and my bags packed before Dana could say, “where are we going, again?”

This is going to be an absolutely crazybusy week for Dana and me, but it feels like the right amount of full as opposed to being overwhelming because I already have too much to think about to enjoy being a part of my own life… if that makes any sense at all. The effect of having my abuser in my life is that I was trapped in the mind worm of how to help her, how to rescue her, while I let everything I loved drown. It started when I was so young that I didn’t know how I was affecting my future. From the moment I started 7th grade, my grades were terrible because I wasn’t doing that kind of homework. I have no doubt that my abuser could never have seen herself as such, because she didn’t really take it into account that things she would talk about with friends her own age would terrify me. Had no concept of the fact that no one in her life had time to love her like a 7th grader. It was just math homework. I could put that off.

And now, almost 25 years later, I’m going back and doing the homework I should have been doing all along. It’s harder- it always is when you know the basics of everything and the intricacies of nothing. In school, as in every part of my life outside of my abuser, I just did enough to pass. I realized that in order to have a life worth living, I needed to “show my work.”

I needed to approach every area of my life with the same love and devotion that I gave to my abuser, because it was misdirected. She couldn’t, wouldn’t love me back, and even if she could, it wasn’t going to be a substitute for being a well-rounded, whole, healthy individual. I also got tired of being so over-focused on her that other people thought I was *in love* with her as opposed to just loving her.

God’s honest truth is that I was in love with her when I was a kid, but as an adult- I’d say from about 19/20 on- it was more a case of “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is grown, he will not part from it.” By the time I was an adult, I’d been caught in her alternate reality for over 7 years. I didn’t know any better, and I didn’t have anyone to show me differently because I wouldn’t tell anyone what was going on with me, anyway.

I am blessed beyond belief that even though few other people in the world get it, Dana does. Dana understands the concept of loving someone completely without being *in love* with them. Moving heaven and earth for the people you love even though there’s no chance of romance, because that’s just not part of the package. Partially, I think that’s because she knew that’s how I loved her at first. I didn’t fall in love with Dana right away, but I loved her like the rest of the world didn’t exist. If Dana needed me, I’d drop everything, but there wasn’t an element of physical attraction until years later.

And in those years, I learned the difference between how it felt to love someone like that who really wanted and needed it… and someone who didn’t. It was the beginning of recognizing that something was wrong, really wrong, and how much I needed to fix it.

Time to get back to my homework.

This morning I have to go to the dentist because I broke a tooth all the way to the root. We’re not busy right now, but we’re down some people. My best wish is that the extraction doesn’t take so much out of me that I can’t come back to work. I arrived at the office around 7:30, and I got to speak to the doctor directly because the staff hadn’t arrived. He personally looked at his schedule and said that if I was in pain, he’d try to get me in as soon as possible. I said, “do you recommend narcotics, or will I be okay with ibuprofen?” He said that he’d have to wait until he got down in there to be able to see what was wrong. I don’t want to think about not coming back to work, but at the same time, I’m not going to take calls while I’m a) in pain b) high as a kite. I think that would be, in the vernacular, a “career limiting move.”

It’s about 20 minutes until my appointment, and now I am getting nervous. I haven’t been to the dentist in a long time- partially because I’ve been uninsured for a long time and partially because I am deathly afraid of what it will cost regardless of whether I have insurance or not.

An extraction with insurance shouldn’t be that bad, which is why I decided to go ahead and do it. Well, that and I am in excruciating pain. Yeah, that too.

Things have been going so well that I almost forgot. I spend my days learning so much, so fast, that there really isn’t time to think about the past and what I’ve been through. Keeping busy has been the balm to my grief. I constantly walk away from the thoughts that used to hold me hostage, because dwelling on them keeps me from focusing on what’s really important.

And then I fall asleep.

It’s in dreams that my subconscious tries to work out how I feel. Last night, the vision was of the evening I went to my abuser’s house, and her partner told me that the back story between my abuser and me was “this big bag of shit that I’d been carrying around forever.” Then she coached me on changing my story so that it was unrecognizable from what really happened. I knew it was wrong, but I was too scared to disagree.

Again, I was not dreaming something new. I was reliving a memory that had already happened and analyzing it now that I’d had some distance from it.

Next, I went back a little further, to the first time I’d ever come to visit. She was called away on business (or said she was, anyway) and left me alone with her partner for the night. Her partner became so angry when I washed a dish incorrectly that she stuck my hands under running water so hot that it left burns on my skin. It was the first time I’d ever experienced that kind of anger, and in retrospect, it was the first time I’d ever really experienced physical abuse.

I thought I was doing the right thing by not arguing and just accepting what happened. I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping this information from my abuser, which, at the time, was someone I thought of as a close friend. I thought I was protecting her, and at the same time, I didn’t think she would believe me, anyway.

As time went on, they both became so well-known that breathing anything seemed impossible. I also knew that the moment I said something was the moment it all ended. My parents would get involved, and there would be no more. She would pick up her toys and go home in order to avoid that whole scene.

When I woke up, I realized that even when I was a teenager, I knew that if I spoke about the game out loud, that’s what would happen.

Just because I didn’t have the strength then didn’t mean it was going to be that way forever. However, that’s the part I didn’t know. I kept myself in that place of fear for a very long time, because I didn’t think I had the strength to go through as much pain as I have been through in the last year. What I know for sure is that I’m sort of glad that I waited. If I had tried to go through this while it was still fresh in my mind, I might have died. It would have been a stupid thing to do, to kill myself, but at the time I thought that all her secrets would die with me and I wouldn’t have to carry them anymore. I was too young to see that I never should’ve had to carry them in the first place. I was too young to see that because I wasn’t being raped, I was still being used. I still had my attention yanked away from my life and focused on hers. I still had years and years of people saying that I was so over-focused on her that it was weird, but I didn’t realize how I got to be so emotionally laden in the first place, so I couldn’t fix it. I was too afraid of her leaving and not giving me attention, love, focus anymore that the abuse became second-nature. Of course she could use me. Of course. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Finally, finally, I realized that I could give her all the love in the entire world and it still wouldn’t be enough to get her to see that my needs mattered, too. I needed a friend as good as me, too.

I woke up to the fact that I had plenty of them… just not her. I saw our abusive relationship for what it was, instead of walking on eggshells and hoping not to fall through… not knowing that falling through them was the best thing I could have done.

But I know it now.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. -Martin Luther King, Jr.

I needed Christmas this year. I needed all the hope and wonder that comes with waiting for the baby. Metaphorically, I was sitting in the hospital with my scrubs on, checking my phone every few minutes for the time and making sure the cigars were safely tucked away in my jacket pocket. Any minute now, Mary was going to deliver and all the joy we’d been waiting for would come into the world. All I had to do was make it to Christmas Eve.

Waiting is hard. I’m not very good at it. Knowing that Christmas was coming, but not here, had me pacing the floor at times. I didn’t need presents (I got a lot), I didn’t need food (I ate a lot), but I desperately needed the awe of a baby that came from nothing and rose to be one of the most powerful people in the history of the world. I needed my antihero, the one that reminds me that I, too, am capable of something great.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that it’s been a tough year for me. I left a place and several relationships that sustained me for many years… and now no longer served me. I realized that I was literally giving myself away. Telling people with thought, word, and deed that it was ok that I couldn’t count on them. It was ok that if I needed something, they were too busy for me. It was ok that if they needed anything, I would drop everything and run in exchange for being treated badly. I felt sad and unfulfilled, and when I finally got up the courage to say, “hey, I feel sad and unfulfilled,” they couldn’t imagine what I meant. Everything was fine.

I had to leave to save myself, my sanity, for the people that really matter to me. I couldn’t waste any more time hoping that these people would change, and would be the people that they’d said they would. I felt that in a lot of ways, my life had been hijacked, and that made me even sadder.

I feel that I should take a moment to explain what I mean by “hijacked,” for the people who are reading this blog for the first time.

When I was 12 years old, I realized two things. The first is that I was hopelessly in love with a woman who was capable of controlling me because I let her. At 12, I didn’t know anything about the push and pull of abusive relationships, the type where only their needs matter and when you say something to that effect, they pull away and shut down emotionally. At 12, I thought it was all my fault that she was pushing away. I thought I was defective in some way, and I would do everything I could to regain her attention and her love. That finely engineered control was probably a learned behavior from her own past, and for many years, I thought I could be the one to save her… to teach her what real love could be, should be.

However, as mature as I was for my age, I still couldn’t be an adult. God knows I tried. She would come to me with problems, stories and lies that I couldn’t understand, but would puzzle them over in my mind as if I was capable of making everything all right again. She created a fantasy land in which I was the closest thing she had to a daughter, that our ties were closer than blood… and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.

She always said that there was nothing romantic between us, but there were a few fleeting moments in which I thought it might be a possibility. That was because I couldn’t see the manipulation for what it was. She would use me any way she could, and when you’re a confused kid, you don’t see the ploys for what they are. The attention feels real. The love feels real. The smiles feel real. I can only hope that the way she loved me was because she didn’t know how to love the right way. I couldn’t bear to think of her as maliciously scheming against me.

All of the emotion that was poured into me as a child turned me into the woman that won’t walk away, won’t give up, because there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done to keep her safe and happy… because then maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad about myself, because if she succeeded, then I would, too.

It is the hallmark of an abusive relationship, and one that started when I was too helpless to see it… because when I was 12, she was 23. Old enough to know better. Old enough to do better. Too young to see that she was repeating the cycle of everything that had been done to her. Because of that relationship, I grew up so fast, because I was trying to be older and wiser. Trying to invert our relationship so that I could take care of the woman I loved, because the stories she told me about her life away from me were enough to make the hairs on my arm stand up. She wasn’t safe, wouldn’t be for many years, and I desperately wanted to fix it.

It wasn’t until almost a quarter century later, this year, that I realized there had been so much damage done to me that I couldn’t breathe, I was so racked with anxiety. I could see that she wasn’t safe, wouldn’t be, because what I saw when I looked with my own heart into her life made the hairs on my arm stand up…

I called her and cried into her voice mail. “Please, please come with me. I can’t help but feel like I’m leaving a man behind. You’ve always said that I’m the closest thing you have to a daughter, and if that is true, and that is reality, hear me say, ‘Mom, let’s go home.’” The voice mail was not returned, but since then I have spent so much time hoping that I’m wrong. Not only that, it’s not my battle to fight. I knew that now it was time to leave her behind, because she’d made her choice. She didn’t even want to see me when I told her that I was leaving, and it was devastating, but it gave me strength. I was doing the right thing.

I have mourned this loss for months, and in a lot of ways, I feel like I’m still in shock. It’s not really real. This isn’t happening, because now I am left with redefining myself. It is back-breaking emotional work, this putting myself back together, because I hardly have any memories of my life before she came into it.

The thing I have clung to in all of this is the Christ child coming again, because the joy it brings cannot be contained. The music is glorious; the words even more so. It is the balm to my sadness, this unbridled joy, and I plan to use it to the best of my ability.

May the light touch you as well.

It felt so good to be at choir last night. I’m not sure what was different, but it definitely felt better than it has in the past. I was doing all the right things- breathing all the way down to my diaphragm to the point that my stomach muscles hurt in only the way that singers hurt after a long rehearsal. I’m sure it will get easier the more I do it, but it’s been a while (too long), and I am not in the shape that I once was.

Last night, for the first time in several years, high notes felt like flying. I could hear within myself that I was doing well, without the need for external validation. I mean, that’s always nice, too, but it’s a good night when you can praise yourself.

That being said, I got a great compliment from the soprano on my right at Lessons and Carols. She said that she liked singing next to me because she thought our voices blended so well. It’s the secret to great choral work- adjusting to the sectional sound, instead of falling in love with the sound of your own voice. I think every singer occasionally falls into that trap, but in my case, it’s generally unintentional. I get buried in trying to read the music and my eyes drift from the conductor… and all of the sudden, I’m dragging so far behind I think I’m ahead.

I used to hate conductors that would make the choir memorize their music, but now I understand perfectly. When you don’t have a folder in front of you, it’s harder to look away from the person giving you the beat.

I am also very lucky, because my conductor is so artistic that I want to watch him. I like the way he works, from the first warm-up to the last amen. Additionally, focusing on him keeps me in the moment. There is nothing but the now, the groundswell of feeling that comes from being a part of something greater than you could ever accomplish on your own.

The thing that is missing for me right now, and will only come with time, is camaraderie with the other singers. Right now, I’m too new. They’re still getting used to me, and me to them. There’s not the easy give and take that comes from being in a group that knows you well. On the plus side, I have decided that this is the group where I want to put in my dues. Things will look so much different once they can stop giving me the once over and decide that indeed, I do know what I’m doing.

I’ve been in church choirs my whole life, from the small and somewhat tonally challenged to blow-your-hair-back repertory that challenges professionals. I know the Episcopal service like the back of my hand, and for some reason, I have an easier time reading choral music than when I’m in an orchestra. Don’t ask me why. I can’t explain it. Maybe it has something to do with being able to hear better the other moving parts of the piece, because the tenors and basses are close to me rather than spread out like musicians are in the pit.

It also helps that so much of the music is familiar to me, and I haven’t had to sight-read very much. I am gifted at a lot of things, but that is not one of them. It has very little to do with rhythms, though. It’s that it’s hard to read the treble clef line and the words at the same time when you have no peripheral vision, which I do not. I have monocular vision, but that is another story entirely.
I routinely get lost when there are five verses to something and I have never heard it before… and sometimes hilarity ensues, even when the hymn is familiar to me. So far, I have sung “when I fall on my face” instead of “when I fall on my knees,” and angels have fallen prostate instead of prostrate since I was a teenager.

The world of choral music is opening up to me again, after I’d tried to close the door. As I have said before, I am in the process of making peace with who I am, because the emotional abuse I endured came from a choral musician and at first, I wanted to leave everything behind that reminded me of her. It was when I realized that what had been done was done, and there was no way to ever accomplish such a lofty goal. I am a choral musician, and I was before her influence. I just had to remind myself of it, because we’d been in choir for so long together that nearly everything a church conductor could possibly program would clench my stomach in grief. In “Slash and Burn,” I made the connection that it was hard when I reminded myself of her, because my anger toward her would make me hate myself, too.

As my process has gone on, that part of myself has just had to cope, and my past is making peace with my future, note by note and measure by measure. There are still some times in rehearsal when her presence is very real, and it no longer frightens me. It used to, when I believed that I couldn’t go to that place of remembrance because I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. The mind worm was just too intense to ignore. I would see every iteration of us from 1990 to the present.

The process has been to realize that I value myself so much more than I did, and that being lost in what was held nothing precious. They were not wasted years, but our journeys diverged sharply, and I have to believe that is what should have happened. I could no longer ignore that I put my trust in someone that could not and would not put their trust in me.

It has been beautiful music in a minor key, but thanks be to God for realizing it was time for a Piccardy third.

Amen.

There are so many areas of my life that should come with a warning, or at the very least, #dumbassattack. For instance, today I was trying to run some tests on a computer and I decided that it was all kinds of fucked up until I realized I was logged into the wrong one. Dana chuckled to herself when she saw me getting ready to process into the church for Lessons and Carols and I noticed that my choir folder was upside down, so therefore, my hymnal was, too. When I was in band, I was famous for forgetting, of all things, my trumpet. When I worked at ExxonMobil in Fairfax, I used to forget my badge and have to be walked up like a visitor.

Alert Logic is the only company that has ever had my back on this. All the doors are biometric. However, there have been two days since I’ve started that I’ve almost forgotten my computer, and once, I forgot my charger. Luckily, someone was absent that day so I didn’t have to go home and get it.

I am excellent at laughing about it, because that’s just who I am. I’m forgetful, clumsy, and I will forget your name within about fifteen seconds… the flip side being that I will remember your face, your hair, and what you were wearing the first time I met you until I die. I will also probably remember what we talked about if it was interesting.

For instance, the first time I met Dana, she was wearing a sweatshirt from George Mason University, which I remembered because in Virginia, my office was right down the street from one of the campuses. I also remember that she and her then-girlfriend chased me down the street and pulled up next to me just so Dana could say, “I like your Saturn.”

Not only do I remember what people say, I remember the way they say it if I think it’s cute. If something you say has a musical lilt to it, I’ll remember it by the melody it renders.

It’s just true. 🙂

Because I can laugh at myself so easily, I also know that remembering people and conversations is something I think I do well. One of my friends actually told me, “why do you think I don’t tell you anything? You remember it.” Ahhh, the blessing and the curse.

Because I can tell you both good and bad things about me, I know that I am startlingly self-aware, and I don’t need anyone else to tell me that. I am most often “lost in my own little world” as people constantly comment, because honestly, talking to myself is more interesting than talking to you. I have a longer relationship with me. We have history. We know each other, and there’s not much I can say to scare me.

Talking to other people is a different story.

When I talk to me, I don’t have to worry that I’m going to get offended. I have a tendency to be a little anxious in social situations for a number of reasons. It was drilled into me years ago that there’s a possibility people won’t like me because I’m gay, so I have that old tape running… even though that is changing so much, so quickly. However, I still live in Texas. That’s enough said right there.

I also have a lot of mind worms that continually run in my head, because I’m just not done thinking about them yet. To me, it’s like a computer that does encryption. They work on the same problem for years at a time until they get it right. I can’t do that with math and numbers, but I would like to think that I can with human relations. I think all the time about how to make my relationship with Dana even better than it already is. I think all the time about my role within my family and how it affects all of us, especially since I’ve been away for so long. I think about the grief that I’m going through, and how I know that one day, it will taper off into nothing. But until then, I have to have time to examine the role I played in all of this… what I can do to take back my power… what I can do to be a better person than i was the day before.

I am not a one-trick pony, even though this blog has felt like it. Whether you like it or not, this blog is not entertainment. It is for me, and you are invited. I have said many times that this blog is a community, and I mean it. However, communities share frustrations and ask for help. I am not here to be the punching bag when you’d rather be entertained.

Honestly, I play the clown all day, every day in my personal life. If you meet me in person, you’ll think that I am funny, engaging, and you’ll want to see me again. But you’ll never know this part of me. You’ll never be invited past the walls I’ve learned to put up to protect myself from letting people get too close.

With that in mind, if you never meet me in person, you will never know my entire personality. If you want to judge the things I put out into the ether as the only things that make up my personality, then you’re free to do so. You’re also free to believe that my wife is a saint for putting up with me because I obviously have so many issues that it never balances out and she’s always the one that’s left holding the bag when there’s a problem in our relationship, because obviously, if we have a problem, it’s because of me.

You’re also free to believe that I am a complete nut job, because that doesn’t threaten me in the slightest. I have a chemical imbalance. Nutjob happens.

There are always going to be things in this blog that reflect a part of me, but there’s never going to be anything that represents everything. There’s so much more bad and so much more good and so much more crazy then I could ever capture in an essay…

And you’re invited.

Yesterday, in the middle of trimming the tree, I realized that I had made a dire mistake.

I’d woken up around 5:30, and spent some time watching TV before I rattled Dana out of bed. By the time she got up and we got breakfast rolling, it was 8:30. We got busy pulling the branches apart in star patterns, and by 10:30, I was curled in the fetal position on the guest bed crying my eyes out.

Nothing was wrong except that I’d forgotten to take my psych meds. I have to take them at the same time every day, or the lag time in getting another dose on board will cause my brain to rebel. It starts to feel a little sticky, like I’m hung over, and if I don’t take my medicine right then, I have about 20 minutes until my brain says, “screw you, lady… they don’t pay me enough for this” and begins trying to climb out of my skull. If there is absolutely no way that I can get to my medication when I need it, I can SOMETIMES self-medicate with large doses of caffeine and Advil.

Yesterday, apparently, I took a large dose of distraction along with a heaping tablespoon of “I’m going to ignore the signs because I’m busy.”

Oprah says that if you don’t listen to a sign the first time, it will get louder and louder until it knocks your punk ass down. Consider my punk ass knocked. Dana brought me my meds in the guest room and held me while I sobbed in misery until the medication kicked in. She didn’t have to. She could have just watched TV until I cried it out. It’s not like there’s anything emotionally wrong. But she didn’t. She stayed and “sniggled” me until it was over, and I couldn’t have been more grateful, because I was able to bounce back faster. Literally, within ten minutes I was able to go back to trimming the tree.

But let’s back up for a second. I want to talk about what happens before my medicine kicks in, because it’s clinically important to me that I get this down in writing.

Do you remember those old commercials by the Emergency Broadcasting System? The ones where this grating electronic tone plays for almost a minute until a voice comes on and says “THIS HAS BEEN A TEST OF THE…” Now, they still have those commercials every once in a while, but the tone they play isn’t nearly as grating.

I know, because the old one is the one that plays in my head when I’m late taking my medication. It is as if the left side of my brain is playing an A while the right is playing an A Flat. The twenty minutes it takes for the medication to kick in fully is the twenty minutes it takes for that A flat to become an F. Hell, even a G is an improvement. While this is happening I just stand there like John Malkovich screaming “IT’S MY HEAD!”

But as soon as the meds kick in, I’m fine. It happens just as quickly as a pianist letting go of the keys.

 

As I told Dana this morning, “it’s her birthday. I’m trying to keep my chin up, but if I’m having a moment, just let me go.” There will be a celebratory whiskey shot after dinner, because as Dana reminded me, there are always going to be good things that I want to remember. I’ve written before about the first birthday she had after we met. I called THE BIGGEST radio station in town because they announced birthdays, and I sent her a rosebud at school with a card that said, “for all you do, this bud’s for you.” I was 13. When I turned 17, she got me back. She sent me flowers in the middle of English. It was bigger than my desk, and the card said, “Happy birthday from the moms.” It was the most thrilling moment of my school year, because first of all, I was thrilled that she remembered, and second of all, she was able to give me a present while being just as sneaky as me. 🙂

Holidays are the hardest with grief, especially if the person you’re grieving is still alive. There’s a want to reach out, the holidays soften your heart, and then you realize that until the conflict ends, you don’t have much to say anyway. It’s just too big to ignore. So you remember on your own, and laugh to yourself at all the good memories. It wasn’t all bad, or they wouldn’t come to mind, anyway.

And that’s just where I am today. Maybe next year will be easier.

I have found that jazz is the thing that keeps me going all day long. Since there are rarely words, I can focus on what I’m doing a little better than if I was trying to understand what a musician was saying verbally. Additionally, I think that kind of higher-level mathematics running through my head makes a difference in how quickly I can think through a problem.

If you are not familiar with the way jazz works, then you won’t be familiar with just how much math it goes through in even one measure. There are eight notes in every scale, steps that have to be counted in order to know which notes fit into which key signature. There are half steps to create augmentation, suspension, and the diminishment of chords to support those 16 notes, which is known as a chromatic scale and the foundation of a solo.

Then, if that weren’t enough to keep track of, there are thousands of combinations as to how a measure can be divided, depending on time signature.

It’s mathematically the same for classical musicians~ the Mozart effect is real, and Claude Debussy is one of my favorite composers because he often uses jazz chords in a classical setting.

When I was a kid, I went to a performing and visual arts high school, and I took one year of music theory. Because I am pathetically terrible with math, it did not go well. However, I developed a healthy respect for the difference between musicians who guessed at the right key, and those who knew it. For instance, I was a guesser. People like Wynton Marsalis and Jason Moran are not… which is probably why they’re famous jazz musicians and I can’t remember where I parked at the mall.

If you never look into the heart of a jazz musician, you won’t have any idea what they’re saying to you. You’ll write it off as masturbatory noise, as if jazz is the process of a musician falling in love with the sound of his/her own horn. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Jazz speaks in ways that the human voice cannot.

One of the best examples I can think of to illustrate this is the way Terence Blanchard solos. I went to see him in concert a few weeks ago, and the first thing I thought when he finished his first four was that he’s a novelist. He just doesn’t write his stories in words.

Characters are created on the fly. Sometimes, they’re whiny and belligerant. Sometimes they just want to sing you to sleep. His horn shakes and rattles the imagination into believing that all of the sudden, the personalities his horn takes on are going to come out on stage, because the experience is so visceral, and just, well, real.

The other added bonus of listening to jazz is that the more you do it, the more you begin to feel the subdivisions and calculations. Maybe you’re not that mathematically quick, but at least your guesses become more educated as time goes on.

When I was about 14, I went to Houston’s Summer Jazz Workshop. Conrad Johnson (founder of Thunder Soul at Kashmere High) was teaching there, and he was an absolute joy. In fact, he gave my dad and me one of the great lines about jazz of all time. My dad complimented him on a solo, and he said…

“I saw which way they was goin’ and thought I’d go with ’em.”

Yesterday at church, there were sacks and sacks of lemons that someone had brought because their tree produced so many lemons that they couldn’t eat that many in a lifetime. We snagged a bag, and then at work today, the same thing happened. Co-workers are bringing their lemons in droves. I knew that West Texas was famous for its citrus, but I had no idea that Houston had a talent for it. These lemons were as sweet as Meyer lemons from California, almost sweet enough to eat without needing sugar. Because I knew it would use a lot of lemons at once, I made whiskey sours for Dana and myself. They were the best whiskey sours in the history of the world. In case you’re wondering, I used Old Overholt rye.

However, you can only drink one whiskey sour with the juice of two and a half lemons. Since there were five lemons in all, I added a cup of Splenda… and even that didn’t stop our esophageal tracts from feeling like they were being ripped out… slowly. I took an acid reducer before I went to bed, and another one this morning.

Hell, yeah it was worth it! I am a good mixologist, but in this case, there was nothing that could go wrong. I used the freshest ingredients I could possibly find. The lemon juice and the pulp were so cool against my tongue and so sweet. It was the kind of bliss that can only be captured by William Carlos Williams:

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I am sometimes quite prim, but if I wasn’t, I think I would have been squeezing lemon juice into my mouth, drips on my cheeks and chin be damned. I used my lemon as a reminder that the solstice is coming, and that we will once again be returning to the light. My lemon was a symbol of summer, of sunshine, of carefree play in the sprinklers and sand between my toes on Galveston Island.

I took it as a sign of change.

Grieving the loss of an important part of my past has been the darkness. My lemon reminded me that it won’t always be that way. What I have noticed is that the solstice doesn’t mean very much physically in Houston. Literally right now, it is sunny and 73 degrees. In Houston, the solstice is metaphorical. Advent is a time to turn inward, to think about what we’re going to do with all the hope that breaks into the world.

I have no idea what I am going to do with mine. Yet.

It’ll come to me… probably while I’m making whiskey sours.

Today is just one of those days where the grief that runs under the surface of my emotions has bubbled up and is at the forefront of my mind. The friend I lost is a musician, and nearly every piece of music that my current conductor has pulled for Advent is something that we’ve done together at some point or another. Music stays in my memory longer than anything else in my life, so for me, a choir folder is not a choir folder. It’s a scrap book from the time I was a teenager, reaching into my future with its blank slots in the back.

I often don’t know what to do with this type of grief, because it affects my technical ability. If you’ve ever felt like you were going to cry while you were singing, you know what I mean. The tears don’t even have to flow before your throat starts to close and your “mask” gets congested. I tell myself something that James, one of my former choir directors, always said; “when you are performing, it is not your emotion to have. Your presentation is for the audience to have emotions.” He’s right, and using that as a mantra helps me when I think I’m going to lose it.

When that doesn’t work, I switch into “fake it til you make it” mode, which generally means that I pretend that everything is fine and that there is no conflict. She was at the earlier service and I just got there after she left. It’s not that there’s been a fight, it’s that today we’re just ships in the night. It seems ridiculous that I put myself through such a charade, but at the same time, I really don’t have another option… and I’m not talking about years from now, when the wound of loss has faded into a barely noticeable scar. I’m talking about right here and right now. In this time and place, I am not capable of singing the music we sang together without completely breaking down. I pretend that there was no fight, there is no grief, and then I can stay present and focus on the technique of the piece instead of how earth-shatteringly terrible it is that she will never sing it with me again… that she will never again sit beside me and put her elbow on my shoulder so she can hold her head with her hand. There won’t ever be another time when I get to walk her out to her car after choir practice, so we can have five or ten minutes alone. There won’t ever be another time in my life where singing for her brings tears to her eyes and she looks at me the way she’s looked at me since I was a teen and said, “it’s like watching my little girl grow up.”

There are reasons, good ones, that these simple things are gone. But that doesn’t make me hurt any less. I had a chance to get away from our relationship and it was a good move. I started to heal, started to write about healing, started to think that I could take the Band-aid off and just let the wound breathe, and then she sent me the equivalent of a “U Still Mad, Bro?”

And yes. Yes, I was.

It set me back emotionally because I’d put so much faith in the fact that we were done. So much faith in the fact that she couldn’t rattle me anymore… which was true right up until it wasn’t. I try to be so strong, and then Joseph (current conductor) pulls out something by John Rutter and all of the sudden, I’m 13 again, and she is 24. We’re writing notes back and forth, teasing each other while my dad preaches. My chest tightens a bit at the memory and my breathing gets shallow.

I have a friend that’s been talking me through this, and she says that my abuser doesn’t deserve anything. Not my heart, not my mind, not my soul, not my guts. I think that, too.

Just don’t ask me how I feel, because that is a totally different matter.

 

 

I actually brought my lunch today, so I don’t have as much time to write as I normally do. I’m down to the last 20 minutes of lunch, and then the last two hours before I come back on Monday. I think that the food is making me sleepy. Note to self: maybe you should write first. I don’t know whether or not eating actually influences my writing, but it can’t be good to concentrate on birthing an article and a food baby all at once.

Yesterday got deep because that’s just where my mind went. It goes all over the place, and fortunately or not, this is just my catch-all receptacle. In all of my writing, the thing that came up at the forefront was shame. I wasn’t ashamed that an older woman was turning me on. I was ashamed that I wasn’t pretty enough for her to do anything about it… because that was the unintended consequence of all her attention. All of this sexual information was coming at me, and I did not have the capacity to see that this woman was hurting me emotionally. I only saw myself as unworthy of her advances. For years, I saw myself as not good enough, not attractive enough, not well-behaved enough… to the point that I would literally fight for her attention because maybe someday, some way, I’d be able to prove what I’d thought all along. She was giving me sexual information for a reason, because it was me. It was always me.

Years later, I went to see “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and the entire movie just hit too close to fucking home. I cried at the end, and because the friend who was with me has the most deadpan humor in the entire world, she leaned over and said, “are you crying at the part where he’s a pedophile?” I burst out laughing at the same time my heart dropped into my stomach.

I grew out of wanting to be her lover/girlfriend/wife, but the behavior where I was constantly trying to get her attention to prove to her that I was worthy of her time stayed. It was completely second nature, to the point that I didn’t even realize I was doing it. When I figured it out, and I figured it out several times before it stuck for good, she’d all of the sudden become interested in me again. The big blowout was when I realized that I was tired of being the mouse in this scenario, because the cat would only chase me if I moved.

It feels good to release some of this shame, because the true feelings of abused kids are in the dark spots… the ones we don’t talk about. Like when you engineer a response in a 14-year-old, she knows it isn’t right, but her body goes on high alert before her brain catches up. It creates guilt beyond belief that we know we’re not supposed to want what we want, but we can’t undo what you’ve done.

But we can try.

I have no idea what to write about today, but I have about forty minutes with which to come up with something. Maybe you should just come back later. I am not feeling that interesting today.

Well, that’s not ever true. I’m lying. I think I’m a riot. It’s just unfortunate that sometimes people don’t agree with me because I have no interest in making people think that I am polite. I have been a wallflower for most of my life… too shy to engage for fear of rejection… and then I got over it. I realized that I was living in a comfort zone thisbig, and I had to stop being afraid of confrontation. I am allowed to take up space in the world. I am allowed to disagree.

Once I gave myself that permission, I got a lot funnier… to me. And then when horrible things would come out of my mouth, I knew to just apologize if anyone was offended and MOVE THE FUCK ON. I didn’t have to shrink in my fear that no one would like me after X joke. X joke can be on any subject, especially since I spent a lot of my life up until now as a cook in a bar.

Nothing is off limits. Ever.

Humor lights me up, especially cringe humor so horrible that most people would vomit. I think that the world is so fucked up on its own that someone telling jokes *about* the horrible things that happen is one of the only things that saves me from freaking out over them. This time in my life has been filled with jokes about child abuse, because it is the marble in the pasta pot that keeps it from boiling over.

What’s the best thing about having sex with 27-year-olds? There’s 20 of them.

This joke works a lot better aurally, and I could give a thousand fucks if you don’t like it. It made me laugh.

Again, pasta pot. Boiling over. You don’t get that image, then maybe you’ll get this one. My childhood abuse (even though it wasn’t physical) stayed inside me until now, because I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone that they were right. Our relationship was inappropriate, but I lived for it. Couldn’t and wouldn’t walk away. For over 20 years, that abuse has been sitting over my head like a Mento over a Diet Coke. A couple of years ago, I couldn’t hold it in any longer, and the Mento dropped.

Anything I can do to make myself laugh is worth it, even if the humor is as black as tar.

Apparently, this phenomenon is not uncommon. The worse the experience, the harder it is for stupid jokes to make us laugh. You have to dig deep, and find a way to laugh at the pain already inside you so that you have a way to release it.

It’s time to give the journal back and I’m standing in front of her, asking her questions about what I’ve read. There’s clearly a menage a trois, and at 14, I don’t even know how that’s possible between a group of people at least 10 years older. I want to ask more, I’m so turned on I can’t stand it, but I’m confused. She said “it’s not like that,” and I don’t know how the hell it’s not. I have no idea what she wants me to know, or why she would give me this information if she wasn’t planning on using it.

I wanted her to use it…. desperately. Because the game wasn’t that she was going to hurt me. She just knew how to pull my strings so that I was so high on teenage hormones I could have lit a Christmas tree. I didn’t learn what sex physically meant until I was much older, but I assure you that I discovered blue balls early. It was confusing in a “do what I say, and not what I do” kind of way.

…Guy is walking through a deep gorge and sees a little girl crying. He says, “what’s wrong, sweetheart?” She says, “I just watched my parents’ car go over this cliff!” Guy pulls down his pants and says, “well, today’s just not your day, is it?”

I am again sitting in the huge leather chairs in my company’s break room, because it’s my favorite place to be when I’m writing to all of you. I put my feet up, take a load off, and drink Coke Zero to my heart’s content. I’m listening to Jason Moran, a pianist friend from HSPVA who made it big. The album is called “Same Mother,” and is truly amazing. Different styles, some electric guitar… you really can’t go wrong.

Listening to an album called “Same Mother” seems appropriate, because someone left a comment on one of the posts re: my childhood abuse that said if I stopped paying attention to her, she’d find someone else. I believe she already has, because I was very clear that until she climbed the long and winding staircase toward resolution, we were going to continue being broken beyond repair. I have defined my standards; I will not put up with pretending that the way the dice rolled when I was a teenager was a random throw. When the die were cast, they were weighted on one side.

Plus, the abused part of me is the first one to say, “but if I do take it, then no one else has to.” I know the game. I know how to play it. The unsuspecting victims in the next round are woefully unequipped. They just don’t know it yet.

I don’t write about this stuff to figure out how I can get or give more attention from or to someone else. I write it out because I am slowly discovering who I really am. Who I might have become without this form of sunshine and chill… why my childhood was so wrapped up in an older woman, and not because I was crazy, but because it was engineered that way and no one could’ve caught it, because we were both very sneaky about when and where we saw each other. When and where we talked on the phone. I waited by the mailbox for her letters, because I knew that if my parents got them, I never would. I deceived my parents for the longest time, and do not regret it anymore. I had to work through the regret, because there’s nothing I can do to change my past. It’s just wasted energy at this point.

I wonder what would have happened if she’d gotten caught, or if she did… because no one (least of all, her) would have told me. I was almost 15 by the time she left town, and I am sure that those closest to me breathed a sigh of relief. I, however, was miserable. I didn’t want to start high school without her, and I walked around most days with her graduate recital playing on my Walkman. I missed her so much that there were times I couldn’t breathe, because coming out at school was not left up to me. Someone close to me ratted me out, and I was never the same. All I wanted was to be able to run back into her huge hugs and reassuring words.

My sophomore year of high school, I found out that my Wind Ensemble was giving a concert at the school where she was getting her Master’s. I found out when the bus was leaving to go back to ‘PVA, and we spent the afternoon together. It was one of the best days of my young life, because I was a jazz freak and she’d gotten me a t-shirt from the most famous collegiate jazz band in the state. I got to see her office, because she was getting to teach.

At the end of our time together, I thought I was going to break in half. I didn’t want to leave, because we’d have to go back to sneaking letters and phone calls. I wanted her to be real and present in my life, without having to hide the fact that I was her friend. I hugged her one last time, making sure to breathe in her familiar perfume and snuggle up into her neck. It might be years until next time.

It was.

But that’s another story for another day.

Harlem
Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

---

We walk arm-in-arm down a bustling sidewalk, fast and “with a purpose,” as her mother has always said. We have to get going, get started, because this project has been a seed in my mind since I’d turned 19, the same age as my dad was when he began a similar journey. I’d just turned 36. Enough time had been wasted, and it was time to get down to brass tacks.

We turn into a coffee shop that looks forgotten, shitty folk songs overhead that she seems to like but somehow come across as whining to me. Maybe it’s a generational thing, I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not why we’re here.

The barista comes by the table because we are so engrossed in our work that we haven’t even ordered… and it’s kind of bad form to take up space in a business without paying for it. I look over and order the most expensive thing on the menu. It doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll drink it. I just don’t want to be the douche that orders drip and stays for three hours. She orders drip… not because she *is* that douche, but because it really is her favorite. Overly strong, cream, no sugar. It is a trait we now share, based on the first cup she shared with me. I’d never had anything like it, so far above Folgers that there weren’t even words to describe it.

Me: What are you planning for the offertory?
Her: Nothing so far. What is the text?
Me: It’s Advent I. We’re waitin’ for the baby.
Her: So, basically anything I want?
Me: Should I trust you?
Her: Are we talking about all things, or just this?
Me: Just this. I already know not to trust you with buying your own jeans.

We laugh and decide on something we both like from back in the day at St. Mark’s, before she was in the unenviable position of working for me. I’m a complete Type A control freak when it comes to upholding the title of Senior Pastor, not afraid to pull rank when push comes to shove, because unfortunately, the buck stops with me and I’m not going to take the fall for something that was never my decision in the first place.

Luckily, this is only a problem every minute of every day.

In a weird way, we have grown up together. Sometimes she’s the older one, sometimes I am, but we fumble through life together. She is the Rhoda to my Mary, the Laverne to my Shirley, the Gayle to my Oprah… at work. Outside of work, I am content to let her run me like a shell script (shout out to the nerds… holla). We’re not a married couple, but we bicker like one. It’s the give and take of companionship without the messy hardship of trying to figure out truly difficult issues, like sex, money, and which one of us is eventually going to smother the other one with a pillow and try to collect the insurance. She votes on me. I tend to agree with her on most days.

I really can be an asshole, especially after having worked in several kitchens. She vacillates between annoyance and acceptance at my truly foul mouth. I’m not fit for mixed company, but her dad was in the military. It all comes out in the wash, because I have things that annoy me about her, too. For instance, she likes the shitty protest songs playing overhead.

I give her the outline of my sermon. She hates it, so I know it’s perfect. She’ll forgive me by the time she’s finished getting her choir ready in the morning and we meet for the last minute huddle. There are so many details to running a church that routinely draws 2,000 people a Sunday… not counting the 300 in the choir.

We pray together that this Sunday will be a magnificent tribute to a simple idea. We’re waiting for the baby. The cigars are ready. Clocks are synchronized and phones are on us at all times. Any moment could be THE moment, the one where hope and light and peace breaks into the world…

And we are once again united with the child that will lead us.