mark it on the ice

I miss my dad this evening.

My dad had a gambling problem.  One story will illustrate how serious it was.

In 1958, my parents had a baby born premature.  Mary Ann. Her lungs were not fully developed. Nowadays, Mary Ann's survival would be all but assured but in 1958, modern medicine did not know care as well for premature babies as they do today.  Mary Ann wasn't all that premature, esp. compared to the miracles for very preemie babies these days.  I think she was born half way through the sixth month of her gestation.

They kept her in the hospital for most of her two months life.  She came home for a few days.  One night, our parents awakened all of us -- there were my two brothers and me at the time -- and we all knelt in the dining room, just outside Mary Ann's bedroom, which was also mine, and prayed for her while we awaited the ambulance that took her back to the hospital.

During her short life, after my mom came home from the hospital -- in those days, people stayed in the hospital much longer than they do now.  My folks had great health insurance, as did everyone else we knew. Gosh, health insurance has changed, eh?  My mom stayed with her in the hospital a long time so she could breast feed her. Mary Ann's little life was so precarious that everyone wanted her to have the benefit of mom's breastmilk. When my mom finally came home -- someone had to tend to her other children -- my mom pumped breast milk and my dad took it to the hospital every single day.

During this time, with dad taking several busses across Chicagoland because my folks did not own a car yet,  I often mentally accompanied him on his route. I had always paid close attention to travel, directions, patterns.  At age five, I could have directed most adults better than they directed themselves all over the city. So I knew the route my dad traveled to get to that hospital and I mentally accompanied him, waiting with him when he transferred, noting the darkening afternoons as Mary Ann's live emerged into that fall.  I keen in sadness for my dad's journey, for some reason. He seemed so heroic to me, so loving.  I was sad that he did not have a car, aware, I think, that my dad was ashamed that he could not yet afford one.  I flashed a little anger that my grandfather did not drive my dad on this errand.  I railed at god for making my baby sister sick -- a sister!!! -- and me with two brothers!! -- and for placing this burden on my folks. For some reason, I didn't really see my mom's sorrow, only my dad's.

And I remember longing to meet the baby.  In 1958, at least in Chicago, children were not allowed to visit babies in hospital nurseries.  Only fathers were. No adults could visit the nurseries but the fathers. Adults could visit patients but not the new babies. This has changed.

Once in college, around 1973, a boyfriend had an appendectomy.  I walked all the way to the hospital, which was no where near our campus to visit him. I brought magazines and treats. Bob was full of self pity. Bob was always full of self pity, as I recall.  I don't know what I saw him him. Well, he was not a major boyfriend. But now I have just remembered what I liked about Bob:  Bob had a big crush on me  Don't worry, anyone reading. If the goddesses ever approach me, seeking my help to design a better world, I will repair many of the problems related to romantic love.  There will be no more unrequited loves, no  fairies in the forest sprinkling fairy dust on innocent humans and tricking them into loving someone who does not love them back. Everyone will know love, be loved exactly as they long to be. Although, having said this, I think the universe is already designed this way. I think we humans muck it up.  I think it is always possible to be love. To be love, to be loving, to be loved.  We can blink twice and thus it will be so. Or we can go on struggling.

I digress. This was about Mary Ann. No it wasn't. This is about dad's gambling.

I think the main reason the doctors let Mary Ann come home was to give her siblings a chance to meet her.  How it cut me knowing I had a helpless, sick new baby sister across the city, alone among strangers, literally fighting to take breath.  How I longed to hold her and love her.  I don't remember holding her.  I don't remember seeing her alive. But I must have. She was definitely home for a day or wo. Or maybe I have made that up. Maybe we all got up and prayed in the dining room because the hospital had called to tell us Mary Ann had taken a turn for the worse.

I have no one to ask. My mom's mind is gone.  My brother Chuck the fuck might remember. He was a little older. But he is Chuck the fuck. I won't ask him. His name says it all, right?

During Mary Ann's short life, my grandfather had spent a lot of time with us. He was out back up babysitter with mom in the hospital. And he was also our backup income when dad gambled his paycheck on the ponies.

My dad was a sucker for harness racing.  He took me to the racetrack with him a few times when I was very young, like ages four, five, six.  My mom used to insist that dad only leave the house with one of the kids with him, hoping that having his child with him would shame my dad into not gambling. But this did not work. He just took my brothers to the track and told them to keep quiet. My brothers would keep dad's secrets, too, but dad couldn't hide the missing food money so mom would find out.  My grandpa always stepped up. He would come over and hand money to my mom, making a big show of not giving it to my dad, not risking it to the ponies.

So mom started to send me out with dad. When dad said he wanted to run an errand, visit an old friend, mom knew he wanted to go out to the track. Or at least go to a tavern with bookies. She assumed, wrongly, that our gender solidarity would cause me to rat my dad out. But I loved my dad much more than my mom. We all did. Moms get it hard, don't they?  Kids hate their moms far more often than they hate their dads. It's not fair. But I kinda get it.  Your mom is going to love you no matter how bad you treat her. It is less risky to shit on the mom. That's my theory.

My kid's father all but abandoned her. He paid his child support, although I had to take legal action a few times to enforce it. But my kid only knew that he stepped up, he paid. And the fact that he did not exercise his visitation rights, did not even, sometimes, place a fucking phone call to her on Xmas day, let alone, um, send her a Christmas gift?  That was my fault.  I kept her from him.  In his very rare interactions with her, he would say "I wanted to call you on Christmas but your mom got an unlisted phone number".  Or whatever crap he said.  In order to get my child support, 'the system' always knew where I was. as a lawyer, her father could always find out where I was. Not that he needed to find us.  I kept in contact with him. I sent him countless letters begging him to show up in her life. I wrote letters to all her relatives on his side, begging them to be family to her.

She had a paternal aunt that had moved to Florida. I wrote to that witch and told her that my Katie needed her family, that it was not my wish to keep her from having a relationship with her father's kin.  I offered to fly Katie to visit that auntie, even though the aunt is a very successful medical doctor. This aunt owns several small day-surgery clinics. Her husband manages the businesses. She's not just a prospering doc, she is a wealthy business owner.  The kid's father bragged to the kid about her aunt's wealth, the indoor pool on the oceanfront home her auntie owned.  He sent her a photo of that pool.

Swimming pools were a big deal to all of us. Me, the kid, her dad, we're all lap swimmers. Or were. I don't know if my daughter still swims.

I digress.

I am sad and angry.  I hate my life.  I hate me.  I wish I could hate myself dead.  That probably sounds way crazy, does it?  I tried to hate myself dead. After my big, serious, carefully planned suicide attempt failed in 2003 -- I was determined to not turn fifty without my kid --

My dad stopped gambling when Mary Ann was born and was so sick.  The adults in my world of 1958 never talked openly about dad's gambling. We all pretended he didn't gamble.  A classic elephant in the living room dynamic.  But I heard them talking when they pretended we did not hear them.  I heard my dad promise my mom, over the phone, cause she was in the hospital with our sick, dying baby, that he would never gamble again. And during the two months of her life, he did not gamble.

On the day of Mary Ann's funeral, grandpa came over. He was going to drive us for the funeral. But he also had to give my parents money for the funeral.  He handed the money to my dad. I was only five, just a kid, supposedly clueless, but I knew that wads of cash in my dad's hands were always at risk.  I knew the race track was far away but I knew dad could gamble at the corner tavern.

Do cities still have dingy corner taverns like Chicago had when I was a kid?  I'm talking about dark bars, with one long dark, usually black, bar on one side, a very few tables with very few chairs along the wall opposite the bar/ Mirrors behind the bar. The only light fixtures were beer light fixtures. Or so it seemed to me. For yes, I had been in these taverns in my mom's fruitless attempts to shame dad into not gambling.

It must have hurt wicked hard to see your man gambling away the money you needed to feed his children.  It is so unfair that we loved dad more than mom. But I'll tell you why.

My dad was nicer than my mom.  My mom acted like she begrudged me everything. She sent me the message, seriously, when I was so young that I had not yet figured out how to roll over in my crib, let alone raise my head.  She did not want me to ask her for anything.  She probably did not literally say these things but humans communicate with one another without using their voices. In Madeleine L'Engle's great young adult novel, A Wrinkle in Time, L'Engle describe 'kything' which is people tlaking to one another mind to mind. In the novel, kything unfolds in language but I think that 'in reality', what reality is, people can convey their thoughts to one another and they do. They do it all the time. But science has not yet identified this sense so we don't count it.

My mom told me, kything, when I was brand new, to want nothing and to need less.

I have internalized that stricture my whole life. I am 57 and I still feel like I am not supposed to want anything, not supposed to need anything. Want nothing, need less.  Want nothing, need less. It was practically the goddamned mantra of my childhood.

But as a kid, you love your mom and you don't know different.  You don't know that other moms, maybe, want their kids to come to them and ask for nurture.  In our family, the message was clear:  leave mom alone.

And what did she do?  I used to wonder, long and hard, about what my mom did.  When she had a newborn, sure, she kept the kid alive.  But when my brother Tom was born, when i was 7, my dad sat me down for a private chat in my parents' room, which we were not normally allowed to enter. He used that parent bedroom to give the event more portent. He said as the only girl it was my job to help mom now tht she was preggers again.  He was counting on me to step up, to do whatever i could for mom. And I did And when Tom was born, I did a lot for him. But I was only 7 so I did not completely take over. When Dave was born, I was 10, it was just about summertime, and I had expereince from caring for Tom.  I took care of baby Dave dawn to dusk that whole summer.