Just got home from Cleveland, OH about an hour ago. My husband and eldest son are already out the door… on to the next hockey activity. My husband is so incredibly supportive and affectionate with our two boys; even when he’s more physically tired than the rest of us, off he goes. Of course, I have my own share of things I need to tackle now, but I am grateful for the small reprieve (and so is my little guy!) As a family, we have more hockey teams that the kids play on than actual kids living in the house – it is not for the selfish.
In a week, I’ll turn 44. As of right now, I am triple booked on my birthday – 1 ice hockey game in Canada, 1 ice hockey game in the USA and 1 NHL street hockey game in the USA. We will be going to Canada and have to forego the rest – such is life. (Spring hockey is complicated, to say the least.)
To be a busy family, connected, with goals and purpose, is such a gift. But it is so hard. I feel like I carry the weight of my own sensitivities and those of my children each day. I analyze how so many things have come to be, inherently understanding that, generationally, I was coming from a pre-designed life-in-a-box. A whole bunch of fucked up men, that never were allowed to feel their emotions, much less express them — subdued by substance and empowered “respect” that is only really derived from being born a man in a society that expects very little from men to be considered “good”..and the women that defend and rally around them – raising their children to do the same.
To hear my aunts tell stories of my grandfather and grandmother when I was younger felt abstract, not real, and the way they would tell the stories were full of real affection and warmth. But they would be like “yeah, grandpa got wasted again, and fucking crashed a plane and almost killed your grandmother – but she survived HAHAHAHAH.”
My sense of normal is not normal. It is not now, and I strive every day to try and understand the box I was put in, and the one I am capable of. I may never escape the box, but I can plant my seeds differently and make it a different home. My husband and I, both to some degree, reparenting ourselves and challenging the things we were brought up to believe that do not fit our family today. I can say this out loud and rationally, knowing that the guilt I feel is not my fault, but it is nonetheless heavy, and I have been conditioned to be the person at fault. The burden. Some years, after I’d acquired my fourth collegiate degree, professional certification and was successfully and honorably discharged from the United States Air Force, my brother, completely full of himself because he saved a bunch of money said “he made better choices than me.” And I guess I agree with him, if I saw life the way he does, basically a sea of people and resources to use to advance his own positioning. Narcissism to its absolute core.
Of course, I wouldn’t be here if I believed all the good things people said about me. I have done and said things that I am not proud of, but in sum, in my life, I have always given more than I have received. Whether or not I was conditioned to, doesn’t matter. I truly do believe in serving others is the key to a more meaningful life, than just serving my own. And despite my successes, I still more days than not “less than” and undeserving to be in certain rooms and spaces.
But then my therapist says to me a few weeks ago “well, what were your parents doing at your age?” and I swear to god I laughed out loud. Why I had not thought to see my progress this way, or to see me as an adult in comparison to my own adult parents with kids…is just a testament to the bad little girl and person-at-fault I feel inside, as soon as I wake up each day. The truth is, a week before my 44th birthday, I was traveling with an elite team my 10-year old son made at a well-known hockey organization. My husband (or me) did not go drinking, staying up in the hotel lobby until the wee hours — and I say this with really zero pride, because I don’t care what people or parents choose to do with their time. It just is.
Around the age I am now, my dad’s plan of action was to move the secretary at his work he was fucking, while my delusional and addicted mother was in the looney bin, his two kids already dealing with the house of horrors and no wall, into the house. She was 7 years older than me, I was 16 I believe. In retrospect, there’s not a woman on Earth I am convinced, that would have had the elementary mindset of my dad at his same age to even consider dating him, but it’s not like he was going out trying to find a woman with standards (again). She knew he was married. He ended up marrying his second wife, while I was in basic training, and of course, they immediately had a baby. As absolutely fucked up as this entire story is on its face, living through it is more complicated and painful than I can bare to write. To be actively abandoned by the people you need most at a young age – in favor of Office Ass… and then fathering a child with a woman that by all metrics, was still a child herself. Vile. My mother was hooking up with dudes at bars, doing coke on the coffee table at the apartment I eventually was kicked out to, after I struggled to live under my father’s “new roof”.
All of this really sums up why I left Michigan, served my country and tried to put a life together. I guess in comparison to my brother, my choices were not as good as his because I didn’t follow some fake American Blueprint, smoked weed in high school (LOL) & didn’t pretend that we lived a normal life. I chose discomfort and growth and unknown, instead of staying with the people that mentally and physically abused me, while keeping their alcohol and sex addictions in the background, not at bay, close enough so that the entire Thomas family suffered for it. The comments that my dad would make to me about sex, years later, about my own husband while we were actively trying to save his house after the second failed marriage, still haunt me. I was in my 30s.
A week from 44, I am starting to see that I am worthy of being loved, the way I am. My original family cannot see me as I am, because of the boxes they’ve chosen to stay in. The maturities they’ve chosen to stop at and reach, do not have to be mine and I realize now that the things they said to me or did, have really nothing to do with me at all. None of them even know me, and today… where that used to be filled with emptiness and sadness…that fact brings me peace.
We are not the same, and we never will be.
Black Sheep Memoirs 
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