Christmas Eve: The Ending I Would Not Have Written

Posted on by cindimichael

Christmas is the hardest time to be disowned. It’s when I miss my father the most. I often think about our best Christmas as a family back in 1979. My father had just lost his job, and yet it was a rich, happy time. My aunt and cousin took the train from Chicago to New York to join us for Christmas. I baked Christmas cookies from early morning to midnight for three days straight. I saved my entire baby sitting money to buy special, meaningful gifts for everyone. For my father and stepmother, it was a copper art work of lions that my Dad had admired while Christmas shopping. He said he couldn’t afford it that year, but that one day, he would get it for him and his wife. I worked extra jobs to be able to buy it for them. My Dad shed a tear when he opened his present.

This year will be the hardest. Can it be any worse than last year? My father passed away unexpectedly Christmas Eve 2009. He had battled chronic Leukemia for three years. I never knew. Nobody told me. My husband got a call mid morning, so he’s the one who actually broke the news to me. That’s the other painful dimension to my disowning: my father is famous in certain circles so the news of his death reached the radio, the TV, and the Web before it reached me.

Later that night, when I was supposed to be tracking Santa on NORAD, I read his obituaries. I was not listed as a survivor in any of them. I would later learn that this was intentional, at my step mother’s request. I would like to know what my father’s dying wish was.

Did he really never think of me again? Or could he simply not get out of that cycle of how he dealt with pain. If something hurts, bury it, and bury it deep. Be an ice cube and nothing hurts. That was always his way. I suspect that even if he wanted to reach out to me, my stepmother would not have allowed it.

Christmas Eve will forever now mark the loss of my father. It also marks the end of 20 years of hoping for reconciliation. How does one recover when hope is lost?

I cry at the worst moments, unexpected times, and even at what should be joyful moments. I pray for the pain to go away so my children and husband don’t lose to me to sorrow.

For so long, I imagined a happy ending to the situation with my father. I never imagined this one.

 

Living with Being Disowned

Posted on by cindimichael

When I think of someone who has been disowned, I picture a drug addict, a murderer, or a prostitute.  Someone who has been disowned must have done something awful to deserve to be cut off by their family. I do not picture a successful career woman, with an MBA, happily married, and a loving mother. Yet behind the smile of my present life, there is the pain of loss of my father, my sister, my brother.

I have likened being disowned to being caught in a rip tide. The ocean waves sparkle with energy in the sunshine. My children and I love to jump the waves together. I only get pulled under when someone asks me about my father.  The pain pulls me to a darkness where I assume the world would be better off without me. It’s logical, right?  if my birth family is better off with me, then my children and husband would be too?

And yet, there is that ocean floor, so solid, my child hood. I used to scoop the baby clams, tiny dots of orange and purple and would wonder at God’s palette. My family had its golden years, a time when we were close. How, then, could my father do this to me?