- "London Bridge," Ed Sheeran & Yelawolf
A little shifting of gears, for a minute. God knows I've got the time.
With all of the drugs and homelessness and jail in my life, you might think I'd have been to treatment, or at least considered it. I have considered it, but not because I hated my life. A lot of people saw the kind of life I led on the West coast, and they told me that it didn't work. In some ways, it certainly didn't seem to. I am a father of two beautiful girls, born two years and one day apart, both in my own birthday month of November; I love them both very much, though I have had the most time to get to know my youngest, Trinity. I mentioned before that I had had my own identity crises, pathological spasms and crusades of change. Well, the biggest reason is that my lifestyle has come between my baby girl and I time and again. Not because I have ever put her in danger; I have done nothing but love her the best that I can. My time with Trin was never anything but that, and if it had been I would deserve every moment with her that her mother has taken from me. The fact that I am at present not allowed to be with my daughter is, largely, due to the relationship that her mother and I have always had.
That blame certainly lies entirely with me, or rather, the me that was. When Jordan and I got together, I was thirteen years old, and I spent the next seven or so years putting her through the hell of standing by someone on a crash course through the high life. She was abandoned, cheated on, lied to constantly, and watched me father a little girl that she felt should've been hers, years before we had our own child. It could be that I did a little work taxing* as well, and she heard some of the details from some especially loose-lipped friends and myself as well when I was feeling a little self-destructive. All of this from age thirteen on up to nineteen or twenty. Basically, the time that Jordan had to spend getting to know boys romantically, the already neurotic girl spent in pain. Our togetherness was lifeless long before it was dead, and the last time we were together in the biblical sense she joked, "Well, it's your last chance to knock me up."
Oh, irony.
Unlike my oldest daughter, Alexa, Trinity had a father who was older and a little wiser, unafflicted with the guilt and pressure that comes with conceiving a child with someone he had no business sleeping with in the first place. On the night she was born, I was almost asleep in a town of a thousand people called Cle Elum, Washington, a recent Job Corps graduate new to the idea of responsibility and well-versed in a life of wheeling and dealing**. I had work the next day (I excelled in Job Corps, quickly rising to the top of whatever I involved myself in, namely my dormitory and my trade, carpentry. As a result, with a little help from sober support meetings and a sponsor, I was successful and "functional" for a while afterward), and the last thing that I expected was that at three A.M. I was going to hear Jordan's mother Mickey's voice telling me that
--
"Jordan is going into labor, Dustin."
My brain was still fuzzy from the sleep that had crept so close, my long hair (badly in need of a trim) pulled back into a ponytail that was living on a prayer after enduring the tossing and turning that often accompanied my attempts to fall asleep. "Are you sure?" I asked dumbly, and instantly regretted it.
"Yes!" Mickey shouted into the phone, and the piercing shrill of her exasperated cry cut through a little of the fog in my brain.
I'm going to be a dad again, I thought, and my pulse quickened as the idea finally became reality. I had attended birthing classes some weekends with Jordan, had met the midwife she had planned to use (she was too small at four foot eleven for the natural delivery she had planned for, and the method of delivery would have to be Caesarian section, the doctors had said), but it had all been like watching someone else's life, speculating on something that was more whisper than breeze, something insubstantial that could never really happen to me. I was too young and afraid to be much a part of Alexa's birth--I had barely known, when she was born-- and I had done all I could to make up for lost time ever since Dave, the Residential Coordinator in Evergreen dorm at Cascades Job Corps, had told me that my ex had called to tell me that she was pregnant. All of that preparation and involvement had not come close to making me ready for the fluttering starkness of the moment, the knowledge that I was responsible for yet another life tonight, better not fuck this up, Dutch boy.
"What do I do?" I asked, and the score became universe two, me zero. "Start driving to Swedish!" Oh. Right. The hospital we'd checked out and discussed about thirty times.
There was a loud noise in the background, and then some hurried conversation, and the line went dead.
I may have tried Mickey back; I can't remember a whole lot of the details as I got ready in the spare bedroom of my parents' house in that little Washington mountain town, but for some reason I can still feel the bite of November air hitting my face, see the hazy glow of the neighbors' porch light peeking through the plump flakes of snow that littered the air in lazy sheets, free-falling in slow motion onto the sleeves of my Avirex hoodie as I made my way down the steps, crunching my way across the perfect surface of the fresh snow toward my white Ford F-250. I can still feel the resistance of the frozen frame as I tugged open the driver side door, a little puff of snow falling loose when I succeeded. When I turned the wipers on, there was no layer of ice left behind; it was just new powder, soft and yielding, insubstantial, like wisps of cotton. I remembered Christmas as a kid in Redmond, in the lower half of my grandmother's three-apartment house, how sometimes the snow looked like that in the morning. I wondered if my daughter would feel the way I felt on those Christmas mornings; I wondered if I would be there to groan my way to my feet at seven o'clock when she burst in the bedroom, squealing with excitement that Santa had been to our home in the night.
I thought about Jordan, her expression tight and sour one night in my home town, Marysville, as my friend Jason and I sang along to an Iron Maiden song,two care-free and drunk metal heads with long hair and torn blue jeans. "Come on, babe," I'd said to her, wearing the crooked smile she had come to despise. I have always had a problem deciding when is the appropriate time to be serious.
I had put my arm around her, and she had shrugged it off.
"It's our anniversary," she had said to me, "and we're sitting with your friend at your parents' house, drinking beer I hate, listening to music I hate. Sorry if I'm not ecstatic."
Jordan had loved IPA and metal music, once upon a time. It wasn't the beer or the music that she'd hated, and when I sent Jason home and asked her what she wanted to do, we had spent the night fighting. Because the problem was bigger than two twelve packs and Piece of Mind (one of Maiden's best, in my opinion).
I thought as I drove, and the postcard perfection of the mountains surrounding I-90 succeeded in putting the very real, tangible part of what was happening safely on the far side of a mental blanket, its sharp angles and vivid colors pillowed and made manageable by the unreality of the sparkling banks and buried, sleepy trees, a world strange and beautiful when seen from the heated cab of my truck.
When I-90 became 405 and civililization was once again evident on both sides, the twisted and cluster-fucked arterials and one-ways of Seattle turning the early morning gloom treacherous and confusing, I was still miles and miles from the truth. As I struggled to find parking around the gargantuan hospital and called Mickey time after time to no avail, as I painstakingly navigated my way to the proper wing and floor, it was all happening to a Dustin in another world, and it wasn't until I was dressed in scrubs with little shoe covers and loose plastic gloves like those the cafeteria women had worn in middle school, my baby girl in my arms, her little puff of dark hair pasted to her head with vernix, squeaking her displeasure at the room, that tears sprang to my eyes and my the oxygen was stolen from my shaking chest. I remember muttering my assent as Jordan, high as Jesus on morphine and whatever else they had put in her, told me not to let the nurses take her until the doctors had sewn her up, she wanted to hold her first. I remember Mickey's eyes beaming at me over the blue paper mask on her face, and the sinking in my gut when the nurses told me they had to take her and clean her up. I remember Mickey asking me if I wanted to help give my daughter her very first bath, and I didn't give a flying fuck that the nurse was irritated with all of us as she guided me through the process over the little metal sink on the cart at the far side of the room. It was unorthodox, and bossy; it was Jordan's will, all nails and no frills, and I loved her for it that morning on November 13th, because I didn't want those doctors to touch my baby with their cold and sterile hands, rough and clinical, loveless, any more than she did.
I gave my child up only with the greatest reluctance as the nurses came into our little hospital room throughout the night, standing over every table and every test like a hawk, one finger clutched in her tiny hands when they made her cry. I remember the flash of panicked reflex when a nurse almost dropped her, and I insisted that I would carry her wherever they needed her to go from that point. I learned to swaddle her and, when Jordan's first attempts at breast feeding had failed, feed her, and for the next three days I slept with her perched atop my chest, changed her diapers and kissed her at every opportunity. I talked to her, told her stories. And I took pictures.
And my baby girl grew.
From the start, Trinity and I were best friends. We are completely in love, and I can't recall ever making her cry before it was time to put her to bed, which she loathes.. and if anyone brought a situation around her that might not be strictly G rated in some way, I would make them wish they had been aborted.
You know what I think? I think Jordan gets irritated that, as Trinity's custodial parent, she should have to share her love with me.. she works hard, and has done an amazing job as Trinity's mother. But to her, I am still the dead beat, cheating, drug-addicted ass hole that made her teen years so difficult. She is romantically awkward and lonely now, bitter, and I know that she blames me. I also accept that blame.
"I will never keep her from you," Jordan had told me during her pregnancy and my residency at Job Corps. "We just won't be together."
It isn't the way it was, she argues when I remind her of the promise. It never is. Things change, I know they do. I have changed, probably have become something closer to that burning heart that she remembers from our youth. But that doesn't mean that, save for in my free time, I have done anything that might warrant my being cut out of her life completely. Trinity's father might not be a "saint," but how many of us are? Isn't the point that we hide the hypocrisy from our children, which I have done extremely well since day one, or are we all TRULY blameless and worthy of our children's worship? Is it the implied truth, or the stark reality of it that counts, when the hammer falls and we have to answer for who our children have or will have become?
Do I love my child, was I there when I was supposed to be? Do I want to be a father? Did I live up to her needs and Jordan's expectations, does my child love me? In many areas of my life, I have acted irresponsibly and put my middle fingers up for the world to see. My honest answers to these questions, though, are a resounding "yes." I consciously exceeded many of these expectations though I was met with much resistance and often judged entirely too harshly for my alternative lifestyle choices outside the bounds of parenthood. I am not a custodial parent, neither am I a beacon of function or responsibility. But I am a father. Trinity always had presents, when I was allowed to attend her birthdays; if Jordan had come to me with any real need, had she needed anything for Trinity--she pretty much had those bases covered with her dancing and aesthetician work--I would have, whatever my means, gotten it. I always cared for my daughter, and treated her as she should be treated. The things that keep me from her are not problems with the safety or function of our father/daughter relationship, but rather a conflict between her parents.
Before my last stint in jail, I was allowed to see my daughter. I called her mother from the collect call phone, because I often do that to let her know that I'm locked up and I won't be around for a minute. When I was released, she told me that if I wanted to see my daughter, I would have to engage in a legal battle I would surely lose because I "obviously wasn't doing what I was supposed to" if I was going to jail. There is a wide range of folks in jail, believe it or not; completely sober people are included in this blend, and may in fact account for a large portion of the population. Cops are ass holes, believe it or not; profiling, arresting ass holes, and right now even seasoned criminals such as myself are being released on their own recognizance**** back home because the jail is so full of new offenders.
And even if it weren't, how much does that really affect my daughter, one way or the other?
It's the twelfth, today. Let's hope that my brother tells her happy birthday for me tomorrow; God knows Jordan won't.
".. and I don't need a wife, I love my little girl but her mama need a life!" - "Lose my Mind," Young Buck
*taxing: when someone owes the dope man, somebody's got to go get that money
**wheeling and dealing: riding around and selling drugs or whatever's clever***
***whatever's clever: whatever seems good at the time
****personal recognizance (PR): "I got booked last night, but the judge PR'd me" released with a court date, which you are responsible for making
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