I find myself alone a lot, even when I’m not.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, though it is new to my attention. I’ve just turned 50, and that seemed as good a time as any for some reflection.
I grew up in what appeared to be an idyllic family. It wasn’t. There was the stay-at-home mom and the hard-working father and the older sister and the dog, though no white picket fence. Later, there was a cat that I hated, given to the aforementioned mother and sister. The cat’s shit, for some reason, was my responsibility. When no one was looking, I would spray the cat — a poofy ball of fur — with a squirt gun. I thought that only fair.
My sister was — is — two-and-a-half years older than I, and in the first picture of us together it appears she is trying to suffocate me with a welcome-home balloon. I’m sure that wasn’t the case. Pretty sure, anyhow.
There were times she and I did things together, mostly at her direction. We played school. I was the student. She was rather strict. I hate strict teachers. We played house. She was the mom. I was the son. She was rather strict. I hate strict parents.
Mostly, we either fought or grudgingly allowed each other’s existence.
Mother Dearest wasn’t what you’d call lovey-dovey. A lot of mothers aren’t. She comes by it honestly. Her father was an alcoholic. If I had to choose a word to describe my recollections of him, it would be “cold.” Give me another word and I’d say “distant.” Give me yet another word and I’d say “manipulative.” I learned later that he couched his derelict behavior in good deeds. On a trip to San Antonio, he went out to get a carton of ice cream for me and my sister.
And a bottle for himself.
Both were empty the next day.
My grandmother was an enabler. Grandpa went to AA at one point in my childhood, admitted his problem, blah blah blah. A year or two later, he came to New York on a business trip. We met him for dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant. He ordered a glass of wine. All the air in the room evaporated. Mother Dearest cried. Grandpa acted as if he hadn’t a clue what the problem could be. He left the full glass of wine sitting there. Grandma, it seemed, controlled his access to alcohol and would allow him to have “just one” sometimes. It was a dick move to do in front of his daughter and his grandkids. I remember looking at it throughout the entire meal as if it were radioactive waste.
From her mother, Mother Dearest learned pretentiousness. She was a 20-year-old secretary when my 28-year-old up-and-coming businessman father wooed her away from a neglectful boyfriend and ultimately married her. She loved the trappings that came along with being married to a wealthy executive. The furs. The jewelry. The trips to exotic locales. For much of my life, I thought it normal and customary for the average Murican married couple to jet off to Bora Bora and Australia and Hawaii and and and.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t benefit from it. I was a spoiled brat, though I didn’t know it at the time. On my 16th birthday, I passed my driver’s test and picked up my brand new car. We vacationed in places I can only dream about taking my family today. My college was entirely paid for, and, better still, when I finally got my act together and earned some scholarships my senior year, Father Dearest sent me the cash I had “saved” him. He paid for an exotic honeymoon of my own, in Kona Village on Hawaii.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time alone with my sister and Mother Dearest. She was, as I said, a stay-at-home mom. She did laundry. She made lunches. She cleaned up stuff, until she finally got a cleaning lady, for whom we had to clean up in advance of her every-other-week arrival so she didn’t think we were pigs. Mother Dearest didn’t need a cleaning lady any more than she needed that gaudy raccoon fur coat. Who the hell gets a fur coat made out of trash panda? My father, for my mother, that’s who.
Three o’clock was mom’s time. General Hospital was required viewing. But it’s not like the other hours were spent playing games or doing crafts or joining her son in his interests. Oh, I’m sure there were times some of those things happened. Time, a rather free open right hand, proclivity for wooden-spoon discipline and, when I grew big enough to stop that shit, even more hurtful words have faded those warm-fuzzy memories, I suppose.
And so, I was often alone.
Alone with my Matchbox cars, for which I made siren sounds and engine sounds and backing-up sounds that were loud enough to lead to the aforementioned open-handed and wooden-spoon discipline. I learned to “Wee-woo-wee-woo-wee-woo” a little quieter. Most of the time.
Alone with my wrestling figures, for whom I designed entire storylines leading up to Wrestlemanias that would have been boss had Vince McMahon had me on the payroll, complete with commentary and sound effects that, again, were often loud enough to attract Mother Dearest’s scorn.
But mostly, I was alone with my thoughts.
Mother Dearest would have been a fine mom for many kids — just not her kid. For whatever reason, I was born a rather sensitive, feeling child, which is akin to saying the ocean is rather wet. Every feeling I had was big. Big happiness. Big laughter. Big sadness. Big anger. I didn’t know why I’d feel so angry. I just was. I remember one time in preschool or kindergarten, my friend Chris Saunders was over for a visit. We were playing baseball in the back yard. Chris cheated by cutting a path pretty much from second base straight to home to score a run. The next thing I knew, I had tackled him and was on top of him, punching him.
I was sent to my room. Chris’ mom picked him up. I have no clue where Chris Saunders is today. But I remember this, and I am sorry.
My father was much more affectionate, much more caring. He was and is also Mother Dearest’s bitch. I realized his weakness far too late.
He was aware of Mother Dearest’s physical and verbal abuse. Of course he was. He was there for some of it. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I ever responded physically to Mother Dearest’s abuse I would be kicked out of the house, and still there was an incident in which she compared me to the person who drove drunk and killed a very dear friend that I was up in her face and Father Dearest had to step in between. He and I left the house. We went to Roy Rogers and ate roast beef sandwiches.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked me.
Through tears, I replied, “I want you to make her stop.”
“John,” he replied. “She’s my wife. I can’t make her do anything.”
And he didn’t. He didn’t make her stop. So the abuse went on and on and on and on, and here’s the thing: He should have made her stop. As a father myself now, I know that. I know that, were my wife to have Mother Dearest’s free hands and tongue, she and I would have a major marital issue. Kids can’t defend themselves, especially when you take their shields away from them. So goddamn it, it was his job and he failed and is remorseless about that very real Truth.
And so my room became my sanctuary — and a messy one at that — during my early teen years. We lived nowhere close to anything interesting I could do on my own. Suburbia, New York, might as well have been Jupiter compared to New York City. The only thing I could do without a ride was trek my bike up the road — mostly uphill (not both ways, though) to see Meredith Fine, a girl who moved to the burbs from NYC who quickly became the object of my deep affection. She had long, flowing red hair and not only loved baseball but played it — and played it well. She easily made our Little League and would be on All-Star teams with me at the end of seasons. And so hell-yes I would ride my black Huffy bike up that everlasting hill to see her, to have a catch with her in her front yard, to eat the hot dogs her mother made us, to avoid her little sister Lauren as much as possible.
And when I wasn’t there, I was, indeed, alone. In my room, with dirty clothes here and there, toys unpicked up. Father Dearest’s rule was that the rest of the house had to be picked up, but my room could be my room, as long as there was a path to the bed and the door was closed when I wasn’t in it. I took advantage of that. Amidst that mess, I would play with the last vestiges of toys as childhood ebbed into the teen years, being multiple players in board games. Music became a thing for me, and I would listen to my self-made mix tapes incessantly. The pop of the early 1980s morphed into the rock and then hard rock and then metal of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Late at night on weekends or during the summer, I would write. First, it was with pencils and lined paper. Later, it was with an electric typewriter. Then, it was with a personal word processor that was the antecedent to a computer. The stories were often about war. Vietnam wasn’t a that-distant memory in our society, and I had subscribed to the Time-Life books from a TV commercial about the conflict. My stories were filled with brave men and gruesome injuries, huge explosions and lots and lots of death.
Occasionally, I would find myself awake at 3 a.m., writing whatever had captured my imagination. Putting letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs allowed me to create worlds in which I wasn’t alone. For however long I wrote, however long I created, I was with those characters, I was in that world … a world that wasn’t the one I was actually living in.
I had friends. In elementary school, they were kids from similarly wealthy families whose large homes I sometimes slept in and whose parents took us to Yankee games and dinners at places most definitely not McDonald’s. Thankfully, none of those friendships devolved into beatings on my lawn, but they didn’t last either. Our school district eventually merged four or five elementary schools into one middle school, and about a month into that sojourn, my friends decided I was not good enough to hang out with them. One day, I had this group of boys who I knew since school began; the next day, I didn’t.
And so I found new friends. These were boys from neighboring towns, and I awoke to the fact that not everyone lived like we did. They didn’t have spacious homes and go on extravagant vacations. Some of them even lived in apartments, which I thought was cool because it necessitated an elevator trip to reach them. The parents of these friends drank beer and worked in blue-collar jobs, and there was often more month at the end of the money than they would have liked.
I loved these friends.
And then, one day, they were gone too.
I made new friends. Again and again. Some of them were great friends. We had the best times I have ever had as a human being on this planet. And still, I often was alone, even when I was with them.
I was 14 when I took about 10 Excedrin PMs with the intention of not waking up in the morning. The saddest thing about that today is not that I was a 14-year-old kid looking — hoping — to end his life. It’s that I have no recollection of exactly why I felt that way. All I remember is that I didn’t want to wake up, and when I did, I got up, got dressed and went to school. I never told anyone about that.
There is a big difference between being alone and being lonely. This, I have learned. Many people are perfectly fine with being alone. In many ways, I was and am perfectly fine being alone. I am alone right now as I write this, and it is more or less OK. Loneliness? That’s a completely different beast, and I use that word “beast” perfectly.
If there were ever a monster in my closet or under my bed, it wasn’t some dagger-toothed demon with razor-sharp claws and the remains of children in its belly. It was loneliness. It is loneliness.
For many, many years, I didn’t even know that what I was feeling was loneliness. After all, that feeling that left me so out of sorts often occurred when people were around — Mother Dearest, my sister, the latest friends or girlfriend. Tagging that feeling as “lonely” seemed illogical, and I guess it truly is.
What I know now, today, is that I have spent most of my life on an endless quest to not feel what I understand as a 50-year-old man, husband and father to be loneliness. I searched for people around whom I could be me, because I sure as hell couldn’t be that person at home. And I was lucky enough to find some people throughout the journey with whom I could be just that. The girlfriend I shared the last two years of high school with was just such a person. But because of the struggles I had at home, there wasn’t a thought in my mind about going to college close to home. I went 1,000-plus miles away — to Drake University in, of all places, Des Moines Freaking Iowa. My girlfriend didn’t.
But even when that amazing human was in my life, I was often alone or, more pertinently, lonely. Jami saw me, understood me, made me feel safe and loved, but then I would drive the 20 minutes away from her home to my home, and there it was — loneliness, waiting for me as the familiar windy roads unfurled before me. I would park my car in the driveway and walk into the house and, after some perfunctory conversation, retreat to my room. To read. To write. To listen to music. To be alone. To be lonely.
No one knew I felt this way. Hell, I didn’t even know I felt this way — not with anything I could put words to.
In the years since, and especially with the rekindled connections Facebook allowed nearly two decades after nabbing my diploma, I have heard from people who said they were envious of what I had in high school — the various girlfriends I had, a good friend group. I heard that sentiment as recently as earlier this month, and it still shocks me. Envious? Of me? Do you know about the tears? The thoughts? The Excedrin PM? Of course not. But still …
Very early in my college journey, I met my future wife. We fell in love. Less than a year after we graduated, we said “I do” and set about making a life. We got pregnant. We buried our first son and were surrounded by people who loved us and supported us and who cared about the sadness and tragedy of it all. But they weren’t there at 2 a.m. when I would wake up in tears and then, unable to get back to sleep, go into my home office to write what would become my first book that recounted that journey of sadness. Of course they weren’t there. They had their own lives to lead, and 2 a.m. grief isn’t a part of anyone’s journey outside of the one who is feeling it.
It has dawned on me recently — way too recently — that this desire — need — to find love and be loved was born from this loneliness, from being unwilling to sit in that feeling when there was the chance of finding someone I could share me with. When I would find a person, I would invariably screw it up. In the process, I hurt far too many people. I often wonder who out there is sitting someplace right now bearing the scars from my own inability to figure my shit out sooner. Much like my feelings about Chris Saunders for the backyard beatdown, I am sorry — so, so sorry.
Rarely but beautifully, someone would pop into my life who made it all better. Jami was probably the first, but she wasn’t the last. Too often, the feelings I shared for those endangered few became entangled in confused emotions like love or lust or desire or something that was way more complicated than what it actually was — safety. With these precious people, I felt safe. I was seen. I was understood. And so I would cling to those people like they were life rafts in stormy seas — because they were.
In the process, of course, I caused more hurt. The non-wife person with whom all of this was the strongest rightfully wants nothing to do with me today. I understand that, honestly. I was nothing but chaos in her life, and then I was gone, so why in the hell would she want to unlock that door? So I can explain that I had mommy issues and that I never meant to hurt her or anyone else? Yeah, it’s as sick as it sounds and I wouldn’t want to hear it either.
Understanding it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, that it doesn’t rekindle the loneliness. Once you’ve been safe, been seen, been understood, going back to a lonely world is even more difficult than when you last lived there. I understand that now, but, of course, it’s too late and it doesn’t matter.
My 50th birthday, like a Category 5 hurricane or a wave of plague, gave me greater clarity on all of this. All of it. In all its ugliness. I’ve thought about a lot of things over the past few weeks, triggered by the death of my aunt, who, in many ways, was the last person in my blood family who ever gave me that feeling of safety, of being seen and understood. I’ve often said that time is such an arbitrary concept. We are on a loop around the sun, which means there really is no definitive start point. We choose start points and then mark their end points because of a complete revolution, but we as a species suck at marking time so badly that we have to add an entire day once every four years just to compensate for the inherent lack of precious in how we measure it. A year could just as easily start on June 21 as it does on January 1, but that’s not how some ancestor of ours decided to do things. So to say that turning 50 is anything special is absurd. We give significance to birthdays that end in a zero. Turning 10 was the bomb. Turning 50? Not so much. Not for me, anyway.
I have spent time taking stock of the blessings in my life, chief among them the wife who has stuck by me through all this figuring-out and the boys who lived whom we created together. They, themselves, have too often been victims of the side effects of this loneliness, but for some reason they still love me, and for that, I am eternally grateful. I see things so much more clearly now than I did when they were little, but no words I share with them can make up for the times when loneliness made the world opaque and led me astray from my promise to them to be the best dad they could ever possibly have. I haven’t been. That makes me sad.
The blessings extend somewhat from what I dubbed the Core Four and now, with the addition of a daughter-in-law, the Fab Five. I am grateful to have reached people through my writing and for having moved hearts and touched souls. Like any writer, I wish I could say that impact has been greater, but I can’t. I do take solace in those I have touched through this assemblage of letters into words into sentences into paragraphs, and it tickles me that some random strangers are attempting to re-sell my books online for prices way more than the cover price or what the words inside are worth.
Yet outside that small, small list, I today am left with that old familiar feeling, and I have spent far too much time lately wondering exactly where this all leads. I will not be here when the next 50 years ends. This, I have promised myself. The scientific community continues on its never-ending pursuit for longevity, yet I find myself asking, “How much longer?” far too often. I know what awaits. As insane as it sounds, I’ve been there, and it’s beautiful. Not visually. No streets of gold. Not audibly. No harps. Rather, inside. That feeling of being done, of having nothing on the to-do list, having no calendar, no appointments, having finished the goddamn race and knowing you are finished. I was There. I was forced to come back. I’m sure there was a reason, so I keep doing what I’m doing, not really thinking that I’ll ever understand why but doing it nonetheless. There are no Excedrin PM bottles in my home.
At some point, something will happen. Either the only person in my life who sees me and provides a semblance of that feeling of safety will leave or I will. If it’s the former, I don’t know that I want to stick around for the aftermath. Losing my aunt was a precursor, in that case, to the feeling of not only being without blood family but being without anyone who truly gives a damn — enough to actually be involved and be there and see and understand. Over the past several years, I have battled this nagging feeling that my return from what I call the There has left me just playing out the string, so to speak, existing while waiting for The End. It’s not that I don’t think I have a purpose or can’t do any good. I go about doing that without sharing pictures on social media or telling many/any people about it because that’s just how I feel it should be done. So I do it.
But it’s hard — really hard — to not sometimes feel like it’s all pointless. In the end, I will die, and not all that long after that, there will be no one left who will know anything about the path I carved to try to make life matter. I will be nothing more than two dates — a starting date when two people I wouldn’t have chosen to be my parental units welcomed me into this world and an end date when I was mercifully allowed to go back to what I think more and more about every single day.
This is, of course, morose as fuck. I am well aware of that. It’s not something I talk about with too many people. I find that it’s a pretty big buzzkill, even if there apparently are other people feeling the exact same goddamn thing. Instead, we talk about the moments of joy we somehow manage to find amidst all the suck and cling to those, and that is entirely worthwhile and proper and good.
It’s also a little like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, which must be something they do though I never have seen it myself. Otherwise, why the saying?
Bird behavior aside, loneliness sucks. Worse than that is doing things to change the narrative and coming up empty again and again and again. I tried to start a movie night and invited Facebook “friends.” No one came. I started a poker night. The people I felt could be people to walk this journey with found various reasons to not come, though the friends of my older son were down. I envy that boy, and I have told him that. How he has done things differently to end up with such a great band of brothers is something I don’t understand, but I am happy for him because I know he is happy.
And so, what now? I am 50. Fifty goddamn years old. I look it. I feel it. I bear the wrinkles and frown lines and tired eyes of a person who has seen some shit. So what do I do? How do I address the loneliness? How do I deal with the guilt of the hurt I have caused to people who rightfully won’t unlock the door to let me in to explain, to apologize, to try to make things right? What do I do with this feeling that there’s going to come a time when I’m going to cease to exist Here and it’s really not going to matter that I lived?
I have no answers. I have never had answers for that loneliness. Knowing that loneliness is what it is should have brought me some clarity as far as what to do about it. It hasn’t. Identifying a feeling and all the repercussions that have come because it doesn’t do me any good, I am finding. If anything, it makes it worse. It’s like having the answer to the million-dollar question after the cameras and the lights go off and you’ve said something is stupid as “corno-curo cabinet.”
And so, no matter where I go, there I am. At least the feeling is familiar, but that doesn’t make it good.
I really want some good.
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