On Becoming Human and 3:45am, Any Tuesday

I am 35 years old and there aren’t a lot of things I know, but I know one thing for sure: My father didn’t become human until I was 23 years old, drunk, and living on the opposite side of the country. My mother, well, she isn’t really human yet and that’s sort of the problem.

There’s something that happens when your parent dies and you are a child. They become frozen in time, exactly as they were the last time you said ‘I love you’ or ‘I hate you.’ Whatever super-human devil or angel you’ve constructed in your childhood imagination, or life has dealt you, whether your parent is the kisser of booboos or creator of them – they stay that way. 

Forever.

You grow up without them because you have no choice, well, no good ones. You grow up without them because the only other choice is to die. I tried really hard at the second one. I considered that another failure of mine for many years. It actually might be my greatest success to date, not dying.

My father became human to me one night when I called him as I sat freezing on my porch, chain smoking, and drinking glass after glass of wine. I don’t remember how we got on the subject of his relationship with my mother; I only remember two things:

1. He told me he married my mother because she was a good woman and he thought she would make a great wife and mother; but that he never really loved her the way a man should love his wife.

2. He was crying.

As I sat drinking in the dark Massachusetts winter, my alcoholic life in a slow motion downward spiral that seemed to have begun the day my father woke me up and told me my mother was gone, my father sat in Huntington Beach, California and, unbeknownst to him, became human to me for the very first time.

I was trying to live a good life, and I was failing. And I suddenly realized that all those years, all of those times I hated him, he was trying too. He was just a divorced guy in his mid-thirties; a banker who lived with his son in an apartment near the ocean and liked to surf. One weekend, when his daughter came from her mother’s to visit and they were all sleeping, her mother died. 

What do you even do with that?

The best you can. You do the best you can.

It wasn’t until a few years after my father became human that I realized my mother never had; that she was frozen, a snow angel of my little girl imagination, who never melted despite the California sunshine.

When I was 27 and I went to AA, I told them I didn’t believe in God.  An old woman asked me if I could think of one person, one thing, who would only want the best for me no matter what, and would never ever hurt me.

“My mom.” I told her.

I had made her God.

I don’t know that I realized that until now. I am almost the age my mother was when she died. I have no children. Part of me deeply fears having children and the risk that what happened to me could happen to my child; it happens to kids every day. It is 3:45am on any Tuesday and somewhere, a father is sitting on the sofa alone, crying into his hands or staring out the window into the still sleeping world and wondering how to wake his children and tell them their mother is dead. There is no right way there is only the best we can.

I was a 13 year old, church going, mommy-loving, honor student.

I was a 14 year old, school skipping, self-loathing, drug addict.

Only one thing changed.

We are often reminded that Nietzche said, “God is dead.” 

People forget that he also said “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

When you are 13 years old, and cancer takes your mother, you make your own way.  And if you’re lucky, someday she becomes human. And if you’re really, really lucky you grow up without doing too much damage or you get a second, third, fourth, twentieth chance and you get to help kids like you.  This is probably my twenty-first chance.