🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Eyes Open Wide🎶
BTY Pitching ⚾
Sadness and Anger😔
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Little Things To Notice and Be Grateful For:
- Good umpires.
- The smell of pine tar.
- Bridges.
Wordle 1,108 6/6
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🟩🟨🟩⬜🟩
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Connections
Puzzle #386
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The song in my head when I woke up: Second Chance, by Shinedown
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: My eyes are open wide/By the way, I made it through the day
Morning Tunes: No commute today.
Something I’m looking forward to today: A time to just gather my thoughts after a really difficult weekend.
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: I’m really not sure yet.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Watching Boy The Younger pitch a complete-game victory for my baseball team. Seven innings, two hits, one walk, six K’s, one unearned run. It was amazing.
What I’m writing: I haven’t written in a few days, other thank in my journal.
What I’ve written: Aunt Ne.
When the final out was made yesterday eliminating is from our last baseball tournament of the season, I took my time before getting in the post-game “good-game…good-game…good-game” handshake line. Tears welled in my eyes, and my breath caught in my chest.
It had nothing to do with baseball. Losing a game is OK. Ending our season is OK. That wasn’t what brought on the emotions. Rather, it was the breaking of a dam that I hastily built on Saturday morning about two hours before we started playing in the tournament.
We had just completed a team breakfast at a great local diner in Indianapolis. Thirty-five people — parents, players, siblings — ate pancakes and eggs and waffles and french toast and bacon and sausage. We had a few hours before we were to head to the field to prepare for our first game. As we were walking out, my phone rang, but I was in a conversation, so I let it go. Two minutes later, I received a text from my cousin, Lauren, asking me to give her a call when I had a chance.
In that moment, I know one of three people were in a bad way — my birth mother, my birth father or my aunt, Lauren’s mom. I was praying it wasn’t the latter. For the past few years, Aunt Ne (pronounced “knee,” short for “Nanette,” which I apparently couldn’t say when I was a wee-little boy and so I would call her “Aunt Ne”) has been my only blood family. My sister long ago did what my sister does, which is write people out of her life who don’t kowtow to her particular brand of drama and insanity. She comes by it honestly, as my birth parents have been doing that for years, and when I asked for an honest, adult conversation to work out the issues they said they had with me, they said they’d rather not have a relationship with me than do that.
My aunt remained. Black sheep know black sheep, and my aunt is the O.G. black sheep in our family, footsteps I’ve grown increasingly proud to follow in as I’ve gotten older and realized just how amazingly and horribly fucked up my birth family is.
It took about 15 or 20 minutes, but Lauren and I finally connected. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in decades. When last I saw her in person, she was a little girl. Now, she’s a grown-ass woman who sounds just like her mom on the phone. She told me that Aunt Ne had developed a blood infection. It is a particularly nasty kind that attacks artificial heart valves, which my aunt has owned since she was 16. She would need another open heart surgery to replace the valve that this infection is destroying.
She has elected not to have that surgery.
There are a ton of great reasons for her decisions. My aunt has had a hard life, well before she officially took on the honor of Family Black Sheep. She had those heart issues as a child, yes, and she also had an alcoholic father whose alcoholism was only one particularly nasty trait. She was treated horribly by her parents and mine over the course of decades. And then, just when she started living her dream retirement in Italy, she was struck by a rare disorder that left her paralyzed. She was forced to return to the United States and a life far, far, far removed from the one she had been dreaming of.
And so yeah, I 100% understand why she’d say she’s ready to be done. In some ways, I am jealous of her position right now because her struggle through this crazy fucked-up place is just about done.
I had an hour to take in all I had just heard and then get to the ballpark to coach a baseball team. I was … I am … numb. So many emotions flooded over me simultaneously …
I was sad … sad … because the only blood family member I have left who gives a shit about me is dying. I was angry … very angry … because my birth family is so incredibly screwed up that I missed out on so much time with my aunt, that the process of her dying now is going to lead to more drama and more bullshit that reflects just how screwed up we are, that I am going to be left in this world without anyone who knew me then who gives a rip about me. I was confused, not through anyone’s fault, about what exactly was going on, how much time she had left, etc. There was just so little known at the time, and it’s not going to be until sometime today that we start to figure it out.
And I didn’t want to be coaching baseball. It’s nothing to do with the team, the kids, the game. But I was so incredibly numb, so incredibly sad, so incredibly angry, that to give the kids the focus they deserved seemed so far beyond me. Thankfully, I have two great assistant coaches who were there with me. Wifey Poo let them know what was going on, and by the time I got to the field, they did what they always do, which is run the team in such a great way that I’m truly not necessary. I am grateful for them.
The rest of the weekend was this crazy flip flop between trying to get lost in baseball and focus on the kids and then, when the game ended, trying to keep my shit together until I couldn’t. Then, I didn’t. I just let the emotions flow.
A baseball tournament weekend can be incredibly exhausting in the best of times. Youth baseball is set up spectacularly stupidly these days, and when you add rain into the equation, well, it was a huge mishmash of juggled schedules and administrative crap just to get my team on the field in the right place at the right time. We did it, and Boy The Younger then went out and pitched an amazing game (see above) that he then dedicated to my aunt, whom he’s only met once, again, because of the incredibly fuck-up-ery that is my birth family.
Eventually, we lost. I gathered my emotions before talking to the team for the last time this season. I invited the parents into our circle because they were an integral part of the effort. It was a good time of team bonding. And then we started the drive home.
Thankfully, Wifey Poo drove. I thought. I felt. I cried. I held on. There’s talk about me going to New York to see her one last time. I’ll know more information and be able to make that decision at some point soon.
What sucks is that part of that decision will be based on what my stupid-ass birth family does. If history is any indication, they will swoop in and pretend they care, ignoring the fact that they ostracized my aunt and my niece for decades and treated her like absolute shit. My family is wonderful with grieving people as they die and making lofty promises about how things are going to be in the wake of that. Following through on those promises and treating people well when they are alive and healthy is something they have never quite mastered. Not even close. And so I will not go to NY if they are going to be there. I would imagine I’m 100% right in saying my aunt doesn’t want them there. As we’ve talked over the past few years, I’ve learned more and more about her life, more and more about the truth from her vantage point from all these years of Black Sheephood. Her sister (Mother dearest) was a shit to her, and my aunt knows it, sees her as clearly as I see her. Mother dearest shouldn’t come. But she’ll do what she does — which is make my aunt’s situation all about her and turn the attention to her so everyone can pity her. She did that with the death of my son, making his death primarily about her feelings, so why would the death of her sister be any different?
I hate who my birth family is. I hate how they treat human beings. I hate the lack of accountability. I hate the lack of remorse. I hate their lack of humility and any humbleness to say, “Yeah, I got that wrong.” I hate the way their bullshit has affected my life and made my climb out of a deep dark hole so incredibly challenging. I hate how they have put divisions in the family I have created that I work so amazingly hard to shape in a way far, far different from how I was raised and what I knew. I want nothing to do with those who would treat fellow human beings as they treat them — as discardable waste.
What I want is to see my aunt, to be there for her as she has been there for me over these past few years while we have reconnected and rekindled a relationship that was caught up in all the bullshit that is my birth family. Aunt Ne has been the one thin thread that has connected me to the part of my past that I’m OK with. She’s the person who knew me when. When I was a little boy growing up and finding myself, until my parents’ bullshit drove her away.
Late in 2023, Aunt Ne and I had a virtual happy hour. We drank bourbon (we’re both fans). We talked about the past. We talked about the present. We talked about the future. This wasn’t in that future. And so now, the very, very real possibility is that her Here future isn’t much longer.
That sucks. I don’t know how to type it to indicate how strongly it sucks. My plan had been “Get through the baseball season, go to NYC to see my aunt and spend some time with her.” Now, the baseball season is over, and the time is there on the weekends to go to NYC, and it is so incredibly awful that the trip is going to be about saying goodbye instead of “Hey Aunt Ne. How’s it going?” We had plans. We were going to get a tattoo together. That was supposed to happen numerous Thanksgivings again when we were both going to be in North Carolina at my parents’ house … before they threw a shit-fit that a tattoo would take us out of the house on Black Friday instead of spending time with the so-called “family.” I relented. We cancelled the tattoo appointments. I regret that immensely.
As you can see through the rambling nature of all of this, I’m still feeling all the feelings and they are flooding in at an incredibly random and rapid rate. Mostly, I’m just hurting. I’m sad. I don’t want to be feeling all this stuff. But here I am. And mostly … more do … I don’t want my aunt to leave me. I understand completely why she’s done. I would do the same thing in her situation. But I don’t want her to leave me.
In so many ways, she’s all I have left of a time long ago.
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