Anchorage

This weekend has marked the 20th anniversary of my father's death. I have realized that if I keep this awareness balled inside my throat and pooling heavily behind my eyeballs, where it has been since first I crawled into bed two days ago, I will hide under the covers for another few hours or even days.

My father had dark eyes and, in his younger days, dark hair. He smelled deliciously of shaving cream. He remained physically strong all his years, and was soft spoken and kind, a mixture of the masculine and feminine. I call this quality the mother in men, and all my adult life, my radar has been alive to it.

If my father had lived, he would be over a hundred years old today. He would not have wanted to live so long. He was proud of his physical strength and beauty and would not have wanted to become frail.

My father died believing that I had married a man who could be counted on to cherish and protect me forever. I thought so, too.

I am glad that my father did not live to see my life disintegrate.

I am glad that my father did not live to see the charming young man I married become a bully. My young man was the selfish son of a selfish mother, and there is no great leap from selfishness to cruelty. Put one foot in front of the other and you are there.

Yet now that my abuser is out of my life, I live so precariously in socioeconomic terms that even the metaphor of walking a tightrope without a safety net does not begin to express it. In my married years, I was like the cartoon character obliviously walking on air; then one day it looks down and, abruptly realizing its predicament, wildly paddles its paws or webbed feet as it plummets. Squaaawk.

I am ashamed by my failure to have achieved the security and happiness my father wished for me. Because that's all he wished. The long-ago college graduation and wedding ceremonies, so pretty and hopeful, were for him only icing on the cake. It was personal joy and a safe anchorage in the big world that he wished for his daughter, and which these ceremonies seemed to guarantee.

My father was an intelligent and resilient man, though, with a capacity for appreciating nuance that his own hard life would have taught him. I have no safe anchorage, Daddy, but perhaps, finally, I am coming to your wisdom of taking each day as a gift.