Toy Soldiers

My dad loved toy soldiers. You know, the little green plastic ones. He loved them so much apparently he was buried with a bunch, they were tucked into his coffin by a cousin of mine. I am certain of that.

There’s not much more that I am certain about when it comes to my dad.

I know: He was a U.S. Marine. He was crazy in love with my mom. That he always wanted a daughter, so much that my brother’s name was supposed to be Christine Michelle…not Christopher Michael. He was a big kid at heart. That he would do absolutely anything for his family, even if it meant compromising himself. He was misdiagnosed and killed by the ignorance of western medicine.

I know these things to be absolute truths, because these are common stories that I’ve heard growing up, no matter who the narrator was.

Now this isn’t going to be a story about how I struggled to find myself through life because my father was missing from it. It’s a part of my story, a part of my journey but while anyone could imagine, not having my dad present in my life was never the hardest part. As of recent I’ve finally been able to pinpoint what the harshest reality has been growing up out of such trauma and it’s that I will never know my own father based on my own perspective.

Much like the toy soldiers my dad loved so much, that is what growing up with nothing but the perspectives of others has been like. Watching someone else hold that toy soldier in their hand and talk for them, and about them. Different hands, different people, different perspectives. All living with their own forms of guilt, regret and anguish.

Now I’m not going to sit and pretend either side of my family is saintly by any means. But what I can say is that I learned who I wanted to be based on what I saw in between my three families. I definitely learned who I DIDN’T want to be watching the mistakes from my older cousins, step-siblings and through the stories we were candidly told about the family in general.

One thing I can appreciate is the truth and candidness of my family. No one ever tried to gloss over the truth and that absolutely helps credibility but that guilt/remorse is still a sonnuva-B that shrouds an unknowing person’s depiction.

My Grandfather, (Dad’s dad) was apparently known as Uncle Bear. As in he had a temper and you never wanted to catch that temper. I was also told that my grandparents liked to drink. Mix the two and you’re just asking for trouble. Apparently when my dad was young, my grandfather and my grandmother were fighting, my grandfather apparently struck her and to stop him from going much further my dad, who was only 10-12ish, went to my grandfather’s truck, grabbed his gun, ran back to the house and pointed at my grandfather and told him that he was never going to lay a hand on anyone in that house again. It’s my understanding that he never did again, and that drinking became a distant memory. I never saw my grandpa Hal with a drink in his hand growing up. I only saw this temper people spoke of once as an teenager and it was momentary and not directed at me. He will forever be the crazy prankster who used to always tell me that I was beautiful like my mama, poke me in the ribs and walk away, make up stories about my grandma within earshot just to piss her off and torture the “boys” my cousins by waking them up tickling their noses with dental floss after he ran and picked up donuts for us all.

It’s because of this I take what my grandfather spoke of my dad to be pretty legitimate. He talked about him with such pride. Pretty much everyone did, but that’s the thing about guilt…it makes you appreciate those you may not have necessarily appreciated enough when they were living to the point where you end up making them into a saint. To really know someone, I feel you have to know the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s all apart of our collective being.

My aunt Colleen was my dad’s twin sister. She talked about him the most. You could tell that they were twins, because the connection didn’t die when he did. When he passed she had a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized. She wasn’t as strong mentally as my dad and my uncle. I remember loving my “Auntie Ma” the most growing up. She would always play Barbie’s with me, it’s like she was almost childlike herself. Come to find out as I got older, that is indeed where she was mentally, even until the day she passed.

The three oldest kids weren’t shy to beatings. I had it explained to me once as I got older and went into college that my aunt’s mind pretty much shut down development 12 or younger as a defense mechanism to abuse. She would tattle, argue and become affixed on one concept, much like a child. I got to a certain age, and started to “out grow” her mindset. I was confused for a long time until I started majoring in psych myself until I started to put the pieces together, then came nothing but understanding and figuring out to manage a healthy relationship with her.

She always used to tell me about how my dad would pick on her as a kid. How they would fight like cats and dogs but that when he got older he may have still picked on her, but she felt he protected her. Her son would be one of the closest people to him, as my mom and dad cared for him from time to time when she would take off. He is the one who buried him with his toy soldiers. Drugs and mental illness is a molotov cocktail.  So obviously, this narrative on these stories were a little more far fetched, patchy and guilt ridden.

My mom’s parents, never really spoke of my dad. I think they felt that was my mom’s place to talk about him. But she didn’t. We cannot judge those for their decisions if we’ve never walked a day in their shoes. I’ve only ever tried to put myself in her shoes and it wasn’t until I had a family of my own did I ever come to peace with the fact that she couldn’t, and to this day, struggles to talk about him. It’s like dealing with PTSD. No doubt living through watching what happened to him physically due to human error and then having to be the one to make such a decision at such a young age to take the love of your life off life support facing life alone with two small babies…it gives me anxiety just thinking about it. I cannot or will not say how I would have handled that because I physically cannot fathom it.

This is the god’s honest truth…when I was a kid I used to believe it was a typical family structure to live with your grandparents. I had such a secure family life that I never questioned why I did’t have a dad. I did not go wanting for what I didn’t have. My childhood was very secure in my mom and grandparents.

When I would visit my dad’s family I was always wondering…”Who is this Brad they keep referring to?” Which leads me to the only real life experience I have had with my own dad…

When I was 3-4 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night. The headboard of my bed was on the wall that ran into the doorframe. I saw a man standing in my doorway, he was just starting at me. It was a big, tall man. I thought it was my grandfather for minute, it started moving closer, my eyes focused and I screamed my head off. My mom came running through the doorway and he poofed into thin air. I didn’t tell anyone what I saw for quite a long time.

We didn’t keep pictures of my dad out at my grandparents house. One day I was visiting my dad’s family and a picture captured my eye. It was the man who was standing in my doorway that night when I was younger. I asked my grandpa who that was and he told me, it was my dad. Brad.

All of the points started to connect. I was scared. Not like I thought he was ever there to hurt me. Scared of the unknown. He was a stranger to me. I really didn’t know anything about him. All those stories I’d heard before were talking about a guy named Brad. Never did it dawn on me that Brad was my father and now that’s who I figured out had visited me that night.

I have seen or felt my dad’s presence a number of times in my life. More so when I was a child. I swear children have a better sense of these things. We as adults get busy, our minds fill with responsibilities and worry and we leave no room for these moments to be revealed anymore or when they are we are far too busy to notice.

As I have gotten older and my mom becomes more comfortable in talking about my dad, I hear a different man in her stories than I did in his family’s stories. Theirs seemed to resort to more juvenile moments, dating him back much further than the 24 year old he was when he passed.

Being married only roughly a year and a half, with an 11 month old and a baby 4 month in utero gives a much different narrative to a man whom she felt she was going to build a family and future with. Her narrative is one of their collective hopes for the future, their struggles as a young couple and of a man trying to set himself free from the bonds of his past, demons and family to find a new future for himself and his family. I get that but it’s not how I would have seen him either if I had grown up knowing him.

When someone is missing from your life, that “Should” have been there it’s not that you struggle with who you are, or who you think you are based on who they were. The struggle comes from the loss of that connection, that relationship and what it could have been. That is the real loss. That is the real struggle.

You are so reliant on the narratives of others, who have these memories of them but who is really talking for the toy soldier? Is it a genuine story or is it one biased by guilt, wistfulness, longing, or despair? Or has time changed the narrative?

I would have liked to have known my father for who he would have been to me. No one can tell me this. It’s left to oblivion.

I would have loved to hear his voice and his laugh once, just so I could say I knew what it sounded like. I wish I could have seen his megawatt smile, just once, just so I could see it light up a room like I’ve been told it did. I wish I could known his heart and his immense love for his family, it would have made growing up a little easier. Instead, those traits must have transferred to me.

I have his heart…funny how you get things from your parents and you may have never even met them before. But I know I do. I’m the one who gives without limits or bounds. I am the one who considers all else before giving myself any consideration. I am the one who will go without, who will slight myself, who will do things in spite of myself. I feel that because I have always been this way, it is repaid to me through my successes in life. What you put out in the universe will return to you one way or another. A loss of this magnitude has the power to make someone effected rather selfish. I have always been the opposite. However, It would have been nice to be on the receiving end of our type of hearts and immense love and loyalty. Instead, I guess it is just mine to give.