honor your father and mother

I'm not into Christianity so its Ten Commandments are never in my thoughts. In the last week or so, since my daughter's birthday, however, I've been thinking about how she missed the lesson of showing respect, gratitude and honor to her ancestors. I am one of her ancestors.

I visited my great aunt Effie, my grandma's baby sister, every Sunday with Rosie. Partly I did this to honor my grandmother but I also, and this was very consciously up for me back then, wanted to show my daughter that humans respect their elders. She balked at visiting Effie and I insisted, wishing to impart to her a common cultural norm:  respect your elders.

I also trekked with her to Chicago a couple times a year, and even to Ohio where my mom lived as she grew up (mostly Ohio, my mom moved back to Chicago eventually) to keep myself and my daughter in touch with the multiple generations of our relatives.

She does not know this but I used to write to her paternal relatives, her dad's parents and siblings, offering to pay to fly her to visit them. I didn't tell her about these offers, my letters, because if they rejected my offer to send Rosie to visit them, Rosie would have suffered needlessly. Those fuckheads never acknowledged my offers to fly Rosie to visit them.

Even though Rosie had her own lawyer, a guardian ad litem, I also evaded the guardian ad litem's insistence that all communication with Rosie's dad had to go through her, the ad litem lawyer. Yet I used to write to my ex and beg him to come see her, for I knew she had a hole in her heart where her dad belonged.  I didn't tell her about these invitations because if he turned them down, it would have hurt her.

The only time I got him to come see her was when she had the lead, Titania, in "A Midsummer's Night Dream". He actually showed up for that. I never told her how I had begged, cajoled, offered him money.

I don't remember if I told her that when she was hospitalized for hemoraging in her sophomore year of high school, her father was staying in a hotel near the Mall of America, doing Christmas shopping with his then-girlfriend (and, for all I know, his current wife .  don't know, don't care). I know he was in town because caller-id was brand new and I was using it for a very cheap introduction. I used to call back the numbers that did not leave messages. That motherfucker was a few miles from his very seriously sick daughter and didn't even call her on the phone. I asked him to visit her. I asked him to send her flowers. He never acknowledged my requests to give his daughter some attention when she was ill and scared. Until the health problem was resolved, it was kinda scary. The motherfucker.

I couldn't make nasty, ugly people treat her well. The best I could do was beg them to show up in her life and then hide my failed efforts from her, to protect her from more emotional pain.

What the fuck did I do, Rosie, to have no child after raising one with love, resources and sacrifice?

She has no idea what sacrifices I made for her. She was a child and I did not tell her adult considerations.