I wrote this before I knew the truth about my father. I've reblogged it, without updating it, as it was the very beginning of my one woman show, Every Wrong Direction.
« It’s a special, magic rock, make a wish. »
I climbed up onto the boulder, placed my hands and knees on the four stained, cup marks in the old stone where so many hands and knees had scrabbled to before, closed my eyes and wished as hard as ever I could.
« Please let me find my Daddy, please let me find my Daddy, please let me find my Daddy. »
I was nine.
From the age of four until thirty-four, every birthday candle, every chicken bone, every lucky shooting star (always aeroplanes but I so believed in magic I needed them to be stars), every opportunity to make a wish it was the same.
« Please let me find my Daddy, please let me find my Daddy, please let me find my Daddy. »
As a child, I constructed my father from a romantic medieval tapestry of archetypes; the trail blazing, grail seeking, holy wizard knight.
He would come save me from my mother and the Mundanians.
They could never see the magic.
I would never be understood.
As an angry teenager I realised that magic dissolves soon enough into the tears used to fill the long, dull fleuve leading to that adult land The Doldrums. I became increasingly convinced that if I ever found my father he would be a drunk or a drug addict, crawling around in some gutter with maybe a lurcher on a rope as the nearest he would ever get to the white charger I seen him on so often in my, younger, mind’s eye.
So I grew myself, grew some children, got married and divorced. I learned that my mother was not ever going to wear the archetypal costume I had prepared for her. If anyone in my family was going to be a witch it was me.
I remembered how to wish.
I lit candles, I burnt incense and I plunged back into the tapestry.
« Please let me find my Daddy, please let me find my Daddy, please let me find my Daddy. »
At thirty I couldn’t manage the Mundanians any longer. I swallowed all their pills at once in an attempt to shut them up. When I woke up there were even more of them chattering in their non language.
“Why?”
They all asked me. Over and over
“Why?”
Those poor little mental munchkins, they all knew why. They could not dare to admit it or they’d have had to swallow their own pills, or worse, make their own wishes. So I went to a place where they put people who know that magic and dreams are real and have understood that we confine ourselves to the Doldrums.
I went deeper than the depths of the Doldrums.
In that dark place I was attacked by a very angry two-headed beast. She had been sleeping, chained in the pit of my stomach and was so angry to be awake, hungry, ignored and imprisoned that she leapt at my heart, falling just short due to the chains and becoming ever more angry as a result.
I was terrified.
I knew that I could no longer run.
How you can you hide from something that is chained up inside of you?
The beast was awake and she was very very hungry.
Something small and quiet stirred deeper still inside me. My own personal “still, small voice of calm”. Between the constant chatter all around me and the bass-like pounding of my fearful heart I struggled to hear. Eventually I understood. I signed up for this. Magic and dreams are real. I do not have the right to turn my back on them and live in the unreal “real” world alone.
My beast is my beast and I am as responsible for feeding, cleaning and loving her as if she were a Mundanian puppy.
I went back down there, albeit trepidatiously, this time taking a torch. She stirred and drowsily lifted one of her heads, lazily opening an eye. I held out my hand and she sniffed, sloppily banging her tail on my stomach floor. She really was only a puppy.
She was waiting, all my life, for me to realise her existence and to love her.
I enrolled on a music course. The beast, needing spiritual nourishment in order to heal and grow, came too and howled when I sang. I rolled around, playing with her. We sang, painted and prayed almost like children, almost not seeking outside approval.
I joined a band.
I relit the candles.
I closed my eyes and wished.
« Please let me find my Daddy, please let me find my Daddy, please let me find my Daddy. »
At thirty-five I was singing regularly, struggling to educate my teenage daughters and working as an addictions counsellor.
One sunny day in June my mother called.
“You’d better sit down, I have some news.”
A moment of panic for the well-being of my beloved Grandmother before remembering she was taking tea in my garden! I sat down, stood up, paced the floor and listened:
“I believe I’ve found your father.”
My mother explained that she put his name into Google from time to time and that, on this occasion, had come up with a site. The guy had ridden his white Camargue/Arab stallion from some village in the South of France to Berne in Switzerland to raise funds and awareness for autistic children. I’ll never forget her saying
“The photo bears no resemblance to the man I married but the biography –Ronnie Scott’s, Eel Pie Island, stunt work, Twickenham Rugby Club– that has to be him.”
We decided to contact the agent mentioned on the web site, maybe my father had another family and I didn’t want to be a witch in the woodpile! The response was immediate. The agent, Rob, had called my father and said
“You’d better sit down, I have some news.”.
My father sat, stood and paced just as I had done an hour before. He called my mother and then called me. My heart pounding almost as loudly as Tchaikovsky’s cannons I picked up the phone.
Father (F) « You know ‘oo this is durntya? »
Me (T) “ Yes.”
F «Er well, I don’t really know wot ter say ter ya»
T “ Me either”
And so we began, hesitantly, to talk. Or at least he did. Almost an hour later we agreed to meet soonest and said goodbye.
I moved to the south of France and began to get to know him.
Along the way, I became a singer, fell in love, wrote a lot of poems, got sick and eventually, having learned to be a daughter went back to the UK and began to be a better mother.
My father turned out to be all of those early archetypes. I suppose we all are really, it’s just that the extremes and contradictions are exaggerated in him.
He is selfish, generous, thoughtless and sensitive. He is peaceful, a bully, stamp collector and show off. He is a seeker of truth who believes nothing. He feels pain for those less fortunate, tries to help sometimes and yet constantly criticises their lack of action or their poor choices. He is kind, gentle, unkind and aggressive. He has a white charger which he cannot look after, he tries to be the knight in shining armour I saw in my childhood fantasy but, more often than not, ends up being the drunk I imagined during my adolescent anger.
He shows me, unwittingly my own faults and has, equally unwittingly, brought me to a warm adult relationship with my mother.
She still refuses to fit any archetype.
I have given up preparing costumes for her.
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