Hello! It’s been too long! This is Loose Leash, a newsletter you probably forgot you subscribed to several years ago. In the wake of a Twitter ban and a unquenchable need for attention, we’re back, at least for now. Please stick around! But only if you like reading other people’s diaries, because that’s basically what this is at this point.
It's hard to know what to say when you're used to getting in trouble for telling the truth. "It's just that you were so...honest," my mother once admitted to me a decade ago while discussing our own communication issues. It was the first time she confirmed what I'd always felt to be true: I was punished a lot as a kid for merely telling the truth, by my mom most of all. Today on a walk in Huntington Gardens with a friend I’ve known since childhood, this scenario was confirmed to me once more. “The truth is you were the normal one, the outlier, and they gaslit you into thinking you were the crazy one and the problem.”
I have long expressed myself in extremes during my teenaged and adult years: I will either share nothing with anyone or everything with everyone (see: me on social media), and even then it's usually just an immediate reaction rather than a processed thought/feeling/emotion. It's always been a compulsion of mine, thanks years of being groomed to please and address the needs and emotions of others before my own, to anticipate other peoples' feelings rather than understand what was going on inside my own heart and mind, lest I end up physically or mentally/emotionally assaulted. I don’t speak so much as explode. I'm still learning on this front, but the positive strides I've made in that regard over the past year have been hard to ignore.
Which is why I am so mad at myself right now.
Thing is: there is some super-heavy, wild-ass shit going on in my life right now. Like, the sort of shit people write books and movies and TV shows about (lol/hi), and all I want to do is talk about it. With everyone. And also no one. But also anyone who gets it? Or maybe that's just my desperate need for attention talking. I don’t know, though! Because I feel like I’m exploding on the inside, 24/7/365.
How would I know who would understand what I'm dealing with without talking about it publicly? Sure, talking about it with my friends helps a little. I could probably email my old therapist (I "graduated" from therapy a few months back: that's how good I'm doing) and ask for a couple sessions to help me wrap my head about the emotional minefield I'm currently neck deep in.
But even then, I feel so certain that this pull to discuss this shit would continue, because I've yet to meet someone who really gets it. Even as I've allowed myself to open up to friends about it, it doesn't feel like enough. But maybe that's because there's one person I really need to talk to in order to find the closure I need...and that person has not responded to me.
"You don't talk about the family!" my brother bellowed over the phone. In a heart-racing panic, I heard him barrel up the stairs to where I was sitting on the phone with my friend Vicky, telling her what I was dealing with at home. The fight quickly became physical (they always did in my house growing up), and Vicky, worried I was being hurt (not unprecedented), told her mother. Her mother called the Department of Children and Family Services. It would not be the first time they were called to my childhood home. (A cousin once joked they had our number on speed dial.) Nothing came of any DCF visit, though: the woman they sent was a high school classmate/friend of my mother's. Everything always seemed to disappear or get swept under the rug. Like when I was arrested as a teenager for calling 911 on my brother when he held a huge knife to my throat and threatened to kill me after he beat the shit out of me with a wine rack. *I* was the one who got in trouble, both at home, and in the arrest record. Because I was older, I should have been in control. I should have known better. After all, my brother has always had a temper. Why did I have to egg him on (asking to use the computer to study for my final exams)?
Typing that out and leaving it up makes me terrified. On one hand, it's the truth of what happened. On the other, I know bringing it up will only cause me more drama and/or pain, especially if particular members of my family read this. Adding to this complication is the fact that I would really like to repair the relationship I have with my brother so that I can be in his children's lives, and I have taken the high road (as I always must with them) and attempted to make inroads there. But we’ve NEVER addressed this OR the reason we ultimately became estranged (my support of Black Lives Matter while he was a cop). Because we don’t fucking talk about shit in my family. Half the time, most of the wrong-doers can’t even remember the wrongs they did because they were too drunk at the time anyway. Sigh.
The truth can be really sticky, especially when it's still being written.
And the truth is that my long-estranged father is dying. He left when I was 10 and was not in my life after that, though he did raise another daughter named Alicia Lutes that was not me. I wrote about that experience, once upon a time. I first tried to reach out to him in 2013 when I was in the town he was living in. He agreed to meet and then never showed. No call, no text, nothing. And when I called him out on it he said—and I fucking quote!—"I can't keep having this fight with you, Alicia!" To which I scream-cried the reply, "What fight? We haven't spoken in 16 years!" on the balcony of a south Florida motel, and that was the end of that.
There's so much more to say, but I’m going to save that nuance for the book (someone buy this book proposal I am currently writing, please, dear god, I beg).
I reached out again (via his brother) a few weeks ago, to try and get some questions answered. I hadn’t planned on it, but a conversation with a fellow writer (about a pilot I’ve written loosely based on this Alicia/Other Alicia/dad dynamic) made me reconsider whether or not I should try to make contact.
At first my father said no. A few weeks later, he changed his mind. So I asked my questions: I picked four, very logically minded, simple questions, and I emailed them:
- Why, in your opinion, did your relationship with our mother not work, and why did you have to leave us to get what you needed?
- Do you ever regret not staying in our lives?
- What was it like to raise another daughter named Alicia Lutes?
- Is there anything else you think I should know?
He replied quite quickly, with vagaries and generalizations about "things" that didn't work. He said he would answer any other questions I have.
So… I sent 21 follow up questions to address the three or so sentences worth of answers he gave me. (I should mention that not once has he ever apologized.) He asked if we could do a video call. I agreed and asked to schedule a time.
That was almost a week ago now, and I am once again feeling like that girl in 2013, disappointed but not surprised, and wondering if this is it. If these few emails will be the full extent of the relationship I have with my father. The man who was the primary caregiver in my life from ages 1-8. The person who is half of me, if not more, considering I look just like his side of the family and my brother and sister look like my mother's. My sister was like 4 when my father left, so she doesn't really remember him, so it's not like we can commiserate over a shared experience. We didn't have one. And, well, my brother and I are, well, you know.
Things are still happening, ongoing, amorphous, and in flux. I mean, shit, my father could be emailing me right now as I write this. I have no idea! (I checked before pressing publish and he has not.)
It is the sitting in the unknowing which makes me obsess over it so much. It is the oldest wound in my life, opened anew. It is surreal. It is maddening. And I am so goddamned desperate to heal it this time. I am so determined to feel okay in the after of all of this...whatever that after is. But the truth is I might be in the after right now. My father may never respond. He could decide my request to record our conversation was too much and never email me again. He could die.
And the truth of the matter is, I feel like I'm waiting on the edge of an emotional cliff and I just want to get the fall over with already. I just want to know what this is, what this will be, what the end game is here, and how to get back up and fix myself in the wake of it. Because I care so much it's making it impossible to do anything else but obsess over it. So I'm hoping writing all of this out helps.