Chipping Away at the Old Block

Cute title, don't you think? A real play on words especially with a picture of me and my father taken in Florida in March sitting below them. However... some "old blocks" can't be chipped away at. Sometimes you just have to stick a ton-and-a-half of dynamite below them, light the fuse and hope you don't wind up killing yourself in the process.

Yeah, for me it was that kind of trip. If I had to subtitle it, I would tag it "Process can be a bitch."

All I can give you is a taste of what happens when you know that there is major emotional baggage that you've been carrying around for way too long and you decide at some level, "That's enough." My father and I had our reapproachment back in 1995 after my younger brother died at 35 years old. He was my only sibling and at this point I had not spoken to my father for over 20 years. I had created a total detachment from his entire side of the family, burned all bridges at front, back and in between.

I'll make a long story short and say that I wrote him a letter and he was moved enough to actually meet me and we talked for hours. That was 14 years ago and we've been glaciers, slowly and emotionally moving inches over time. As for me, I could always feel the remaining distance and I knew that I was internally responsible for most of it. One can't escape the heaviness, the wordless lies. The presence is always there.

So I drove down to Florida to see him in the first week of March, my life partner Jeri along for the ride (and what a ride!) My family took this drive several times in the Sixties and just the time spent in the car on the trip down was affecting me.

So what happened during the three days we visited? I had an awful lot to forgive and release within myself about this man, our family and my view of myself. I had put myself in the position of "no escape" by traveling down there. What manifested during those days was an excruciating episode with my back that I had to drive back home with, more tears during the passage than I ever knew were within me, emotional upheaval akin to being manic depressive and more insight about being the "author of my own story" than I could ever have achieved otherwise.

Oh yeah, deep end of the pool stuff. I had been carrying it around seemingly forever and it HAD to go, so I constructed this "destruction." Of course, I know that one can't actually "destroy" anything. This much I can say; I now feel a deeper sense of peace and authority in my own life than I have felt in a very long time. It has manifested itself in the phone conversations my father and I have had each weekend since I returned. There's just a new sense of closeness there that didn't exist before this trip.

I had to travel many miles to "come home." I'm glad that I finally did. My answer to the question I posed yesterday is that I'd rather be happy. No doubt about it.