A New Letter

Just four months before my dad was to come home to an unexpected empty and spouse-less house, which sparked an entire Indian Jones-type boulder of change, emotion, and collision with growth, I had written this letter. It was a letter that, even then, I heavily hesitated about posting. It seems the older I get the less I find appropriate for blogging. (Like, I've been lost for a while now sifting through ideas I think would be interesting to write about versus plain-out dirty-laundry-airing.) And because the subject of the relationship with my father is such a highly contentious (to me), repetitive issue in my life, I didn't feel like continuing to whine about it on a public forum. I had thought about what good it would do. I also thought about the harm it could do. It was always drilled into me, contrary to my behaviour and much to the polar opposite irony that it was my father who drilled NOT griping my airs in pen into us kids, via our great-grandmother's words ("my grandmother always said....")... that what's said in the air goes away with the wind, but what's written on paper with pen stays. It's true. I'm sure it's more poetic in the Spanish my dad may have been translating from memory.

No, this isn't physical paper and yes, I could easily delete or at least un-post the ones that would incur the most controversy, either personally or outwardly, and I have several that have been moved back into my drafts folder. None of them are (were) even remotely close the the level of my scathing letter phase of my 20s, 

But it wouldn't take much for someone to find one or another and print the whole entire row of those which are published, for whatever reason, and thusly force the issue of my actions to the table. Which has happened to me before. Someone printed my blog about a work story and mailed it anonymously to my then-boss when I was in my late 20s. 

The above incident wasn't that long after my having-to-tell-someone-just-exactly-what-I-thought-of-them phase and I learning how not to write long, scathing letters to people. The poison pen, my mom called it. Obviously I still hadn't learned my lesson. Not entirely. About how to use my writing without damning someone or something. True story. I still cringe about it. 

Those letters that are probably still out there. Most likely thrown away. But hard to say if they were or were not. And regardless, forever stuck in the cring-ey, revolting recesses of my brain, the foul dark into which I am wholly mortified to be capable of. Horror made worse by being called into the manager's office about the anonymously mailed printouts of my blog.

But my generation has dealt with things differently and I have found it critical to remember that I am a part of this generation and that having some sort of online journal, for lack of a better term, has been a vehicle for me to force myself to think more through things to a more viable end and put issues to rest or in a healthier perspective. That's not to say I am more in the right now than I was before. I'm sure I'll cringe in a year at all this, and there are still several that I have critically and thoroughly embarrassed myself and need to go back and delete. But the truth remains that I struggle to wade through the fundamentally good and right and true values I was taught versus some of the bool-sheeeeit and old-school mentalities I was raised with, and that's just gonna take some time to wade through myself. Until or unless I can get to a point where I feel like I can trust my dad to be the parent and not the residual warden of my my mind and deeply ingrained responses.

I'm gonna have to write a new letter. And it's gonna have to address changes and developments since originally drafting this entry.