stories for my girl

Recollections on the end of a relationship

I write this for my daughter, so in time she will understand the position of her father in her childhood. If she ever feels she did not see enough of me , or if ever she thought she never had a normal family. What I cannot express in subtlety I try to make up in volume.

Does anyone in a relationship know exactly when it dies? When my marriage was long dead I went on my own river Styx , looking for an Eurydice dead and unfeeling. Because I refused to believe how a person can deny the humanity of the other in a relationship. I never saw a trace of a living soul . Many things happened which would not be featured in any play or movie, because no playwright or screenwriter would be able to come up with the necessary plotline.

In the remains of a an empty marriage I thought I could salvage some part or resemblance of a family or some kindness for my daughter. Hope does notspring eternal. I don't know if I tried hard enough but I know one party alone cannot build or resurrect anything when the other is hell-bent on destruction.

I remember that in that time my heart had become, a wasteland ( to borrow a phrase from St Augustine). A dark dark place where a river of sorrow flowed . My daughter was nothing more than a tool for her mother to hit out at me. My pain for Summer was joy for her mom. It is an evil thing to do, when we are made to be lower than an animal. Even animals have maternal feelings. But one cannot search forever among the dead for compassion or pity. From that river, eventually I came back to the land of the living.

When Eurydice saw him
huddled in a thick cloak,
she should have known
he was alive,
the way he shivered
beneath its useless folds.

But what she saw
was the usual: a stranger
confused in a new world.
And when she touched him
on the shoulder,
it was nothing
personal, a kindness
he misunderstood.
To guide someone
through the halls of hell
is not the same as love.

Orpheus & Eurydice- Gregory Orr

For the most part I have left that forsaken place since . But when I dream, I dream of what could have been for my daughter. A pale wraith holding my dreams for my girl. When I cannot sleep I hear my Euripedes calling. How to turn back?

So my darling girl, if papa cannot be everything to you, he still loves you with everything in his heart. Happy birthday my little four year old