For Us This Once - Chapter Three
It didn’t take long for John and Kip to finish eating, despite the fact they both went back for seconds. Soon they were satisfied and made their way down to the patio in front of the nurse’s office, the established post-lunch hangout spot. Sure enough, there was Austin, hacky sacking with Sandy, a few other classmates, and to John’s surprise, Devan.
John couldn’t help himself. “Devan Caldwell? Here, during lunch? As I live and breathe!”
“Yep, it’s a miracle,” Devan replied, matching John’s level of sarcasm. His eyes remained focused on the small, bouncing bean bag as he spoke. “I’ve come to show you heathens the true path.” The hacky sack fell to him, and with three good hits he knocked it up to himself and headed it across the circle to a waiting classmate. A star on the soccer team, hacky sack came rather naturally to him.
“Yes, if only the Savior would walk in our midst more often,” John answered, his words again pregnant with meaning. As close as he, Austin, Kip and Devan had been, it was clear that Devan was slowly drifting away from them.
The year before, during a student-exchange trip to Paris, Devan had met a girl and become utterly infatuated with her. Adrienne was her name, and she, being beautiful, bubbly and self-indulgent, relished the attention. After a week of nearly every free waking moment spent together, Devan returned to the U.S., where the two commenced spending nearly every free waking moment video chatting on the internet. Where once the four might have played football in the street or ridden their bikes to the local convenience store, now Devan was at his computer in his room with his headphones on. They still hung out sometimes, of course, but to John, Devan felt even less emotionally present than physically present. He had something else, something new and exhilarating, and it had become his world. John accepted the inevitability of change, but that didn’t make it any less painful.
“Adrienne couldn’t chat today?” John asked plainly, doing his best to remove any emotion from his voice. The bean bag fell to him, and with a single kick he sent it back across the circle.
“Finished my exam early, so I had time for both,” Devan answered, still focused on the game at hand.
At least he’s still trying, John thought to himself. He knew he couldn’t fault Devan for what had happened. He was human, and a teenage boy at that, and feminine attention and affection felt good. Devan felt this fact perhaps more than most.
While full of support, encouragement and physical comforts, Devan’s childhood home had been rather devoid of openly expressed love and affection. Being one of three sons, and borne of an intense, verbally-abusive father and a tough, emotionally unavailable mother, physical displays of affection simply never came into the picture. John often wondered if Devan had ever hugged his brothers or his father, or his mother since he was a toddler. It didn’t seem likely. For all he knew, they hugged and kissed all the time. All he had to go off was his own observations of their behavior, the things he’d heard their parents say, the tones of voice used, the sense of competition for limited emotional resources. Devan and his brothers faced off about essentially everything, so it made sense that he sought environments lacking in competition. A girlfriend living in another country fit that profile.
Not that John’s family life or psychological profile were perfect, either. Though often boisterous, mischievous and never missing the opportunity for a well-timed joke, a void of self-esteem and a wellspring of self-criticism lay only skin-deep. At some point early in life he had learned, or perhaps had simply decided, that he wasn’t good enough. He and he alone lacked the knowledge, skills and work ethic to navigate the world at large, and his destiny lay in wasting the years away in a meaningless, solitary existence. From whence this lack of self acceptance had originated was unclear. The obvious answer would be to blame his father, but he knew that wasn’t quite fair and perhaps a little cliché.
The precipitating event came during a family trip to Florida one spring break when John was six. He was an angry child, and being an angry child, he loved to annoy his sisters, relishing the reactions he could get out of them and his parents. Not surprisingly, one time the reaction had gone a little too far. He, his father and Teresa were walking out to the beach, an overcast March day, the three of them wishing it were warmer than it was. As they walked across the log bridge out to the beach, John poked and prodded Teresa, an easy target, being a younger sister. After enduring what little she could she cried out in pain and started crying. John, grin on his face, could not have been more satisfied. At that moment, having been pushed to his limit, his father grabbed him by the shoulders with both hands, pulled his eyes even with John’s, and filled with blinding rage shouted, “I HATE YOU!” John stumbled back, not believing the words he had just heard. His father, Teresa now in his arms, quickly sought to repair the situation. “I don’t hate you, John. I just hate your behavior sometimes,” he offered apologetically. But the damage had been done. This new truth had become part of his psyche.
John’s father Walt was a simple and yet profoundly confusing figure in John’s world, and would remain so for the rest of his life. Though their home had its fair share of love expressed, the primary language of communication had always been frustration, annoyance, impatience, criticism and resentment. A mix of new and old school, he often hugged and told them he loved them only to berate and criticize them moments later. From him, nothing in existence was or ever could be good enough. Growing up poor surrounded by fabulously wealthy families, his inherent inferiority spilled over into everything which could be labeled “his” or “his family’s”. The car wasn’t nice enough, the house wasn’t big enough, the day wasn’t sunny enough, the beach wasn’t warm enough.
Even as adults, John and his sisters could hardly bear the wall of disappointment and disapproval their father seemed to be. He seemed to be incapable of speaking to them in a kind and supportive tone. John would struggle with that feeling of inadequacy for the rest of his life, why their personal shortcomings were so glaring and inexcusable to him, when to him there seemed so much to be grateful for. We had a house, we always had food and water and electricity; none of us had overdosed on heroin. What was so bad about who were and what our lives had become? Were we so slothful and underachieving to warrant such scorn? These questions filled John’s mind even then as a teenager, but would not be clearly articulated until years later, when changes in situation did not precipitate a change in his father’s mindset.
But a change would come. With time wounds heal and dialogues emerge. Possibilities shift and a man’s heart softens.
“Where have you been?” his dad asked worriedly.
“Out,” John replied, hearkening back to the curt responses of his adolescence. His absence that day had been particularly noticeable for his father, as a snowstorm had raged on and he hadn’t seen John since the night before. It hadn’t been an accident; John knew exactly what he was doing. The easiest thing to do when he was angry at his father was to make him worry.
“And that’s what worries me, in this storm. I’m sensing a lot of negativity coming from you, John. You want to talk about it?” Walt’s eyes betrayed how worried he had been.
“Yeah, sure man, let’s talk about it.” John’s intended (though perhaps subconscious) result. John sat down on the couch next to his father’s recliner. His father quickly shut off the television and turned to him. His father seemed the most emotionally vulnerable he had been in a long time.
John took a long breath and began. “What happened last night was the result of a great many other things. I know you meant only to offer me some work, a little bit of money during this somewhat difficult time, and I appreciate that. But when you prefaced that by saying, ‘I know you’re not doing anything—’”
“But did I actually say that?” his father interjected. “Because I have no memory of saying that. Can you—”
John returned with an interruption of his own. “Well, in my memory of what happened last night, you said the words, ‘You’re not doing anything’, to which I started to reply ‘Well, I actually am doing something’, before I was interrupted.”
“Well, can you admit that sometimes we hear what we want to hear?”
“Sure, and can you admit that sometimes we say things and don’t quite remember saying them?” And from there it progressed. Sometimes wounds can heal and hurt is articulated. John opened up about the sadness he felt for his father, how he felt like every minute of life was misery for Walt, how every word out of Walt’s mouth seemed to be a complaint, that he and his sisters were a constant source of frustration and disappointment for him. It wasn’t easy, but life had taught John how to talk about his feelings.
“I don’t want to speak for anyone other than myself, though I’m inclined to think the girls feel the same way I do. Do you know how hard it is to live feeling like you and everything about you will never be good enough for your father? Do you know how bad I feel for everything I’ve put you through, for all the financial chaos and stress I’ve created for you and Mom, for everything I’m not but could have been?”
Tears welled up in John’s eyes while Walt held back tears of his own. Above all else, Walt wanted his son to stop worrying about his happiness. I’m not miserable, he said. I just don’t deal with stress very well and it comes up in certain ways. John knew placing blame on his father was unfair. His father didn’t force him to feel inadequate every day, to isolate himself from others, to insulate himself against the world with drugs, pornography and junk food. John himself had done that. He had chosen to spend all those years alone in his room, desperately using external things to try to make his insides feel better. They never did, and no one had forced him to continue living that way for so long. Only in the days since he had gotten clean had anything started to make sense, had he learned to love himself. As time wore on he learned to let go of pornography as well, seeing how much worse he felt after using it. Not that he never masturbated; he didn’t feel horrible afterward now. He still consumed his fair share of empty calories, but it wasn’t the only thing he ate now. Life had changed, because life has to change, when the pain gets great enough.
John’s first impulse had always been to question his own existence. Even as a child he had wondered, why am I me? Why was I born in this body? Why aren’t I my cousin Eric, with his huge house, all the coolest toys and all the best video games? Why aren’t I Stefan, the top athlete and most popular kid in our class? Why is this body me? He lay awake many a night pondering these things. What he of course didn’t see was all of the unhappiness happening behind the scenes, how his Aunt Francine drank herself into a stupor every night, how his Uncle Ron desperately sought to fill their home with love by filling it with gifts, how Stefan’s athlete identity would cause him to doubt his intelligence for the rest of his life. He saw only the shiny exterior.
It would a long while into adulthood before John would learn self-acceptance. It would be years before he realized that he, like everyone else, was God. A single glance at a bed of moss on an old stump in the woods had shown him that. A sky packed full of stars over the beach at his aunt’s house in the Bahamas had taught him that. None of it had ever made sense, and things had only started to make sense when he accepts that they never fully would.
