There is an African proverb (Zimbabwean if I can believe what I found online) that says “The ax forgets, but the tree remembers.”

I “remember” two photos of me and my dad. One, I am about two years old on his shoulders at the zoo. The other I am maybe three and he is lying on the couch asleep and I am sitting across his chest or stomach asleep against the back of the couch. I do not remember either one of these events, but I remember seeing the photos. I remember wanting to get back to the point that those photos were taken, and I remember spending the last thirty years trying to make the person in those photos proud of me. 

I’ve spent the better part of my adult life learning to exist in a world with living ghosts. Decisions were made in the past two weeks that have reduced all of that to rubble and caused to me to remember everything again at once. A friend of mine was talking on a field radio when it was struck by lightning, and he described it as the loudest and softest sounds he had ever heard all at once. That is the closest thing I’ve been able to equate this too, and it was brought into sharp contrast or this particular holiday. I can’t pretend things are okay anymore. 

This is going to be long, and most people won’t get to far into it, they’ll look at the photos and react and move on. Most of the people who would be aghast at the very idea of sharing it are already on a list that doesn’t see my posts, and the ones I’ve missed or forgotten most likely know already. 

I want to start with some of the neat things I remember: There was once time we cut some trees down in the pasture and there were baby bats in them (we didn’t know before or we wouldn’t have cut them) and my dad brought one into the house so we could see it better. I remember always stopping to help a turtle across the road or to pick up a spreading adder and watching it play dead. I remember him stopping on the way to papaws and catching a bullfrog mid jump and then then taking it out to the pond at the back of the pasture. There is no one on this earth who is better with animals than he is. 

I remember coming home from school to see tractor parts spread out all over the floor with parts in the oven heating up so they could be taken apart more easily. I remember reading exploded schematics as early as I was reading Dr. Seuss. 

I remember going to bed super early on nights that my dad worked days because he got up at 4 or 430 in the morning. I remember staying outside all day on the days my dad worked nights so I wouldn’t make any noise in the house and wake him up while he was sleeping. 

I remember I couldn’t cook because I would burn the house down. I couldn’t wash dishes because I wouldn’t get them clean enough. I remember not having a key to the house I lived in until I had a truck. Which meant if I got off the bus and no one was home I sat on the porch or went to Papaws, and if they weren’t home I walked to Mr and Mrs Banyard’s house. They were already in their 90s when I was a kid and I loved visiting them, so I considered myself lucky at the time. I didn’t need to get into the house anyway because I had to feed everything when I got home. 

I remember having to get strong enough to carry five-gallon buckets of water without spilling them so I wouldn’t get yelled at. I remember the muscles in my face contorting before I was really strong enough to carry full sacks of horse feed. 

I remember getting spanked by him. At least twice. Once was for asking to spend the night with my grandparents and the other was for lying. I think I said I fed something when I hadn’t. That one sticks so well because that same week I was yelled at for answering a question my grandmother asked me honestly, and later told to not tell her we visited someone’s house. 

I remember looking for him in the audience at our school assemblies and stuff, but only for a year or so, I was a fast learner. I remember going to my great grandparents’ house on my mother’s side and my (great) Uncle Pete calling me “Little Ben” and how it felt really nice that someone put us together. I wondered years later what he thought about it.

I remember goin to see the Jungle Book at the Pines Theatre because at the part where Baloo was laying on the ground in the rain, before the end of the speech he scared me to make me jump because I was so caught up in the movie,

I remember people on my little league baseball team asking if some other relative was my dad because they came to some of the ball games and would sit with my mother. 

I remember him picking my up from school in Jr High because they said my allergic reaction to the stuff they cleaned the bus seats with was pinkeye and that I needed to call home. He was working nights and I was terrified. When we drove by the west steps of the jr high he said “we used to sit out on those steps and smoke cigarettes, do they still do that?” and then nothing else the rest of the ride home. I was called to the office the next day asking for a note for why I was absent the last half of the day before. They wanted me to call him again. I refused. They called. It was the last time they ever did. I know he talked to Mrs. Coe at one time because she told me several times after how much she liked him and what a great guy he seemed to be. 

I remember riding in the same car from Fred to Sam Rayburn and not saying a word. Fishing all day and the only thing said might be hand me this, or you’re not doing that right. Give me the yellow bait and I hand him a green one, but colorblindness is not something he believes exists so I was just being an ass. 

I remember him taking a chainsaw to the magnolia tree in my grandparent’s yard to cut the limb off that was low enough for me to jump up and swing on. This, I realized later was pretty much how he saw the world, even if it wasn’t his tree or his yard, he determined the tree didn’t need that limb and so he just cut it. 

I remember wanting to play the French horn in band in Jr. High mostly because it was an instrument the school already had and I wouldn’t have to ask my parents to buy something. I started playing it and I liked it. I was told that I wouldn’t play the French horn and had to find something else. Something else, led partly by the band director needed them was the trombone. At some point we were to go look at some models that swicegoods were bringing out to shop around to parents and I told mine, knowing full well my dad had no interest in what I was doing. I remember walking off down the hall to my room saying you can come or not it’s not going to hurt my feelings anymore. Then things became my fault. As if we’d had any sort of relationship up to that point. 

I remember I wasn’t allowed to take a job that worked during the school year, but I was expected to work from the day that school let out until the day before school started with his friend who built houses. It was great work and I did love it, but at times missed a life of hanging out, which never happened. I didn’t even want all summer off, just enough to enjoy a week maybe. 

I remember the first father’s day after I started working (Summers at 14) I had saved up and bought my dad a Calcutta fishing reel because he always talked (to other people) about how good they were supposed to be. I was so proud to have saved up, and gotten it myself, with no outside help from anyone. He refused to take it. He made me take it back, and I did, like an idiot I should have kept it, they were good reels. A couple years later my mother and I bought him a nice new recliner. He refused to sit in it. It was pushed to the side of the living room and sat there until finally, just before the return window closed my mother was able to take it back. 

I remember that everything had to have an external reason and that you could never want to try something on your own volition. I bought a bag and gold clubs from a pawnshop so I could try and learn to play golf as it was something that a lot of people I went to school with were doing with their families or each other. “you only want to do it because you see that ****** on TV.” And made me take them back, which you could only get store credit. 

I remember a huge fight between my parents about me going to church camp. I remember a lot of arguments, mostly about me and what I was doing or not doing or what I should be doing or just how things should have been instead of how they were but mostly about things that happened before I was born or that were completely out of my control. 

I remember him buying me my first computer. It was an HP with Windows 95 and Encarta 96 (among other things) and I remember him and my uncle going through and setting it up and me watching. I remember it taking a couple hours to get up the nerve to tell him “Thank you” and him telling me “you’re welcome” from the hallway walking back to the living room. 

I remember shopping for boots in Kirbyville for new boots to wear to my grandfather’s funeral and how it became a huge deal that I wanted western slip on boots with the pattern stitched on the toes instead of the chukka style laceup that was sewn better. To my knowledge that is the last thing the he ever bought me. 

I remember a lady my mother worked with taking me shopping to buy something for my mother for mother’s day without my mother there. This made me realize that we had never done this before for any holiday in which gifts were involved. I couldn’t even make her a surprise birthday cake because I would burn down the house while cooking. 

I remember saving up to buy my first truck, I wanted an 80s model stepside Chevrolet, and there was one for sale on the way into Woodville. I had enough but couldn’t do it without asking. It took me a week to get up the nerve to ask him to go look at it with me. I can’t really express the answer because it was all over the place, but you can sort of get the gist of why it took me a week to ask. Later he found me a truck that a guy he worked with was selling. I had enough for half and he had to buy the other half. It was a 1990 ¾ extended cab pickup with a one ton rear end under it and a 7.3 diesel engine. The one I wanted was junk he said and I’d spend more time working on it than driving it. I replaced batteries and started on my truck every year, couldn’t afford most of the parts, wipers $9 or it’s a diesel? That’s $90. A kid in my class bought the truck I wanted and was still driving it when I saw him one night out in Beaumont after we had graduated. This wasn’t as bad as spending the summer building a house for someone that went to high school with you and them riding around on fourwheelers and coming to check on the house while they were off and you were at work. This was compounded by the fact that this kid was dating the girl I had a crush on. 

I remember him making me tell the person who was coming to the house to pick me up for work that he was driving down the driveway too fast. And making me tell him again when nothing changed because Josh didn’t know that everyone in the world was supposed to bend to the whims and word was law. This seems to be genetic as my grandmother will be 92 in August and the entire family has been dancing around her capricious reality bending since well before I was born. I know this is where a lot of it comes from and that he had it worse than I did because I can remember having a bathroom accident at my grandparents (maybe 4? I was still young enough that she was helping me in the bathroom) and her making me come out and tell everyone in the house including the people who were visiting what I had done. 

I remember graduating high school and people I had known for decades saying “I didn’t know you had a dad.” I remember him answering the phone and telling someone “no he’s not here” and found out is was the USMC on the caller ID. That was the conversation we had about the military. I remember being so proud that he and my grandfather worked at Goodyear and I wanted to too so I was going to go into process operating and share an apartment and classes with someone I knew. Instead of saying, you know he’ll get a job because his dad is high up, you wont, here is the system that is just how it is. He flipped out. 

I remember there was no discussion about school funding or anything and that I was smart so I should get scholarships. I remember seeing the “Expected family contribution” on my FAFSA and feeling sick. I went to Lamar for a year with my two scholarships and money my grandmother gave me. I then waited until I was past the age they looked at your parents income. 

I remember going out and trying to help him do something and getting yelled at that he hadn’t asked for any help. Two months later I was yelled at for not helping unload a new dining room table. When I reminded him that he told me that if he ever needed help he would tell me I got the coldest, most hateful death stare you can possibly imagine. Actually, it’s probably worse than whatever you are picturing. 

I remember that he punched a hole in the dining room wall above the phone while he was talking to my mother at work where he called her to ask why I had sideburns. She then had to call me at my grandfathers and tell me to go home and shave. 

I remember sitting on my bed reading a book in the summer of 2002 and my mother coming in and saying “Your dad said that if you weren’t going back to college you can find another place to live, you’ve mooched off him long enough.” I found out years later that I was supposed to move out, realize rent was expensive, and then move back. You just never get the script with some people. 

I remember my aunt helping me buy a house to update and sell to have money to go back to college and people thinking I bought it with my grandmother’s life insurance (of which there was a pittance and we weren’t executer). 

I remember th first time I got out and went to live with my cousins in Kansas. This seemed to be the biggest peace for everyone so when I got back I knew I had to get out again, and I was going to back to school. 

I remember staying with my grandfather for a few months between selling a camper I had bought to live in (instead of renting, which was stupid, but it had been drilled into me that renting was a waste of money, at least the camper was mine). And getting an apartment. Papaw enjoyed the company and at one point had talked about me staying there, but I was told that wasn’t an option and I needed to get out soon. 

I remember riding with him after Hurricane Rita as we took our generators around to people to run their wells and stuff so they could shower, wash clothes, or cook or something. Load, unload, hookup, repeat, riding around saying nothing and being quiet if any visiting was going on and always being worried that whoever we were helping was going to ask me something about school or work or life.

I remember his friend (who I worked for) visiting one day and started talking to me about baseball as we had gotten tickets from the lumber yard where we bought are materials and after about ten minutes my dad telling us both to shutup. 

I remember walking into my grandfather’s house to visit and my dad getting up and leaving. This was about the time my aunt said she wanted to help me with school but not just give me money, so she cosigned on a private loan for the summer before I was eligible for Pell. A couple years later she’s having a major nervous breakdown and thinks everyone is just using her and flips out on me so I have to go into getting private loans consolidated while in school and needing another cosigner which my mother offers to do because they didn’t help with any of my school. 

I remember the first Christmas Jami and I were together and we were going to have Christmas at mom and dad’s only for my mother to have to bring presents to Jami’s parent’s house because ny father “wasn’t going to feel uncomfortable in his own house.” This was the first time someone else has been introduced to the dynamic. When I brought Jami by he said hi, but that was about it. As bad as it made me feel, it made me feel worse because he was going to treat her that way too. 

I don’t remember it because it happened while I wasn’t there, but I remember when I learned about it years after and it made me sick and angry, and confused. My cousin’s family came in from out of state for our wedding the youngest daughter was our flower girl, the oldest was a server. My cousin cooked the steaks I got from work for the reception. They stayed with my parents. My father drove to the lake and slept in his truck the night of the reception and checked into Motel 96 on the night of our wedding. My grandfather and my aunt didn’t make it to my wedding because the day before/or my grandmother had made hot dogs and everyone had gotten sick. That is everyone but my grandmother who hadn’t eaten the hotdogs. 

I remember when I graduated with my MA from OU and we had a “party” at my great aunt’s house and her brother asking where my dad was. 

I remember every single goalpost I had set for getting back to the people in those photos as they came and went. “Well, maybe the next time,” I would tell myself. when I graduate high school, when I graduate college, when I get married, when I have a child. With each one I mourned as a death, each time feeling worse than the previous because it had to be something I’d done, what could I do to make it up? How good did I have to be? Maybe I would be good enough the next time.

The last goalpost for me was when Nat was born. I had grown to live in whatever psychological aquarium that had been placed around me long ago, and Jami was independent enough then that it at least seemed not to bother her, but when he wanted nothing to do with Nathaniel the way I dealt with this in my head changed. Instead of just being sad, I was angry. I played with the idea of naming Nathaniel after my dad as sort of the last olive branch of anything resembling an relationship as it could be salvaged after a lifetime of psychological trauma. Something told me not to do it because of all the other times it failed and then I would be stuck with the strongest reminder of all that it just didn’t work. 

It also reminded me that in my early 20s I looked at what it took to change your name. A lot was the answer, and I wasn’t used to that much paperwork or legal proceedings, or anything so the unpreparedness (or shyness or whatever) paired with the importance my grandfather was in my life let me skip it, and later I found that some of our Scottish family were involved in some major historical episodes so there was that. 

My son will be three in a a week. He doesn’t know of any of this history, or any of the craziness that got us to Oklahoma in the first place. He has a chance to live without getting any of it own him. He doesn’t’ no of the holiday competitions for Supreme Alpha Batshittery—because that was the time that had the most contestants and the biggest audience—on both sides of my family. We’ve been up here for over nine years now and a month before a major holiday I still start getting anxious. 

Cutting a ghost out of your life shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but there is something about a finality of the decision as it is yours and not a passive response to how things are. I only exist to them in the case of an object lesson or a point to be made about the past. What is hardest is staring down the potential of cutting out the people who enable them, who are unable or unwilling to make that break between the toxic and the sustainable. Sometimes toxic behavior can be caring too much, trying too hard, or wanting to provide respite from the negative, like giving dogs too many treats. 

That’s where we are as I sit here and look at the father’s day posts, just like I sat in class and listened to what all my classmates had done over the summer with their dad’s and as families. I used to joke that my dynamic growing up with my parents being so young was that it was less like parents and more like living with a sister and an in-law, and you know what it got me this far. I’m supposed to say something like, “other people had it so much worse” 

“we were never physically abused” “we always had food and a place to live.” And look at my dear friends who are celebrating the first year without their dads, and how hard it is for them and even for others who are multiple years without theirs. 

I remember four very specific things about the house I grew up in: 1.) there was a fist hole in one side of the hollow door to my bedroom from my dad hitting it. Growing up I just to place my fist into it as kind of a growth chart. 2.) There was a foot hole under the light switch in the bathroom from where my mother kicked a hole through the sheetrock. 3.) There was an arced scratch on the paneling in the hallway from my father throwing a plate. 4.) It was always just a house. I never noticed until one of my friends in high school said, “I’ve never heard you use the word ‘home.’” I asked them “What?” They said, “just every time you are talking about where you live or anything of going and visiting or coming back it is always ‘I’m going back to the house,’ or ‘I am headed to the house first then I’ll be there’” 

I’ve thought of that conversation often as being at OU a lot of people will ask you “you going home over break?” To which I replay, “I go home every day.” 

I have been dealing with these, and a host of other things that have managed to fall out of the areas of my brain where they are normally kept in solitary, for a week now. I had started writing these out because writing is how I have processed things, usually after driving around. Now I am walking more than driving since there aren’t many backroads in Norman. And I was thinking about the whole southern family ethics about airing the family’s dirty laundry in public, but that is the same cultural ethos (or pathos maybe) of “doing the right thing” that led to all this in the first place. 

The tipping point for me came on Friday when I picked Nat up from daycare. He made the little dinosaur print for father’s day for me, and he was so incredibly excited to give it to me. And when he did I and was saying, “Look! Look! It’s a dinosaur” I almost lost it right there on the front porch in front of the lady who watches him all week. I realized that I could not possibly imagine what Nat could ever do for me to feel so cold towards him, I have no idea what someone else could do to make stop having a relationship with my son, or to not try everything within my power to move heaven and earth for him even on the days he says “not you, only just mama sit by me.” 

I was secretly, or at the very least privately terrified that this was something I was going to be. I spend a lot of the time Jami was pregnant worrying that I wouldn’t know what to do or wouldn’t be able to care. And there are times it is frustrating as with everything dealing with new babies and lifestyle changes and everything but always in the back of my mind it was there. It just felt like it was waiting to take over. When Nat was just old enough to be mobile and into things we were in the kitchen one evening while he mother was at her gym job and nothing was sorted or put away so there was plenty for him to get into. He pulled a plate off the table and it broke. I snapped at him, something like “well it’s broke now,’ or “well you’ve broken it now” and he started crying. Then I did, too. I grabbed him and held him as we sat on the couch and cried it out. I think it was that moment that erased the blackness in my brain, and I think it was that moment that put the final brick in the wall of separation and acceptance for the way things had been and knowing that they wouldn’t go any farther. 

It’s also part of why I never call Nat “son.” He is my son and I talk about him as my son but to call him “son” when I am talking to him I will not do because just hearing it out loud brings back so much of what I heard growing up. It was all I was ever called. Never my own name, but always by the relationship to him, the one in control. It’s always been about control. 

I think about how many people I work with ask me about my son. I wonder how many people asked him, and I wonder even more what he told them. For a long time I wondered if the people he worked with even knew he had a son. Later I knew that some did because we went to their house, or they came to ours, or we bought a truck from them. Having company was the worst. We didn’t have it a lot, but the minute someone was there something happened and he had to make sure that whoever was there knew he was in charge. I would get yelled at within ten minutes for doing something that I had been doing for twenty minutes before they arrived 

I finally realized/admitted that it couldn’t have been anything that I, or anyone else has ever done for it to be this way, that for some people the world is never going to be right, and they are completely incapable of empathy, compassion, or love. And it may not be their fault, but sometimes in order to stop the spread of the disease you have to amputate, and sometimes that means taking it down to where something is still healthy and losing the people who have cared for you the most (and are in fact co-survivors of the same trauma and more) in order to prevent the people who’ve cared for you the least from ever having real estate in your children’s minds. 

The biggest problem isn’t that the ax forgets and the tree remembers; that is bad enough. The biggest problem is that usually when the ax fells the tree it gets turned into another ax handle.