Open mouth insert foot - “What was she thinking?”

Have you ever had one of those days? You know the kind when everything seems to fall, break, stick, or require doing it at least three times to get it right? Those days almost seem inviting to the ones that contain that unexpected blow that comes out of left field and hits you smack in the heart.

Apparently, I set myself up for just one of those occasions when I offered my commentary of antagonistic antagonists. When something has a strange way of evolving, I have to back up and take another look at it.  

“What was she thinking?” I am glad you asked. If you note to the right side of the page you will see a poll asking if anyone would be interested in reading along as I post pages on a current novel I am writing. When the idea to do this hit me, I went to the 16 plus files that I have started and pulled out one that I really knew the beginning, middle, and end of. I guess I was picking the one that if I started this online I would not end up embarrassed when it stopped dead in the water because I had no finish for it. This story has a personal vein running through it and in my other post, I was reflecting on whether or not I would be able to bare my soul through the writing because this book has a highly recognizable antagonist - my father.

My father was the subject of the Bullies and Ticking time bombs … post. He was a bully and a ticking time bomb. And, we, my mother, sister and myself, let him get away with it. When we heard the car door slam and knew he was home, there was running all right. Running like rats abandoning a sinking ship. There was no running to greet a father who caught his kids up in his arms and gave them a welcoming kiss. We scrambled around being sure nothing was out of place that his newspaper lay untouched and folded on his chair. That no schoolbooks or personal items were left in the living room. No shoes taken off and left by a chair. If the TV was on, someone had better be watching it. The list of punishable ‘bombs’ subject to detonating goes on and on.

The ‘football’ that he kept jerking out of my attempt to kick was anything and everything I said or did. The book I was planning to post has a very unusual title. “Not enough Nuts and Raisins.” It seemed so appropriate. The title does not always come until somewhere in the writing. But this one jumped out from the beginning. Nothing…. And, when I say nothing, you will just have to take my word for it; nothing my mother, sister, or especially me ever did was good enough. Sunday dinner was usually later in the day and was the main meal of the day. According to Gil Todd that meal was generally enough and “by-god when he was growing up you were damn lucky to get it”. So something of a bread pudding or rice pudding was made and a small bowl was our evening meal.

Raisins… were put into everything! The problem being was what was the correct amount? When was it one too many raisins or one to few? We NEVER got it right. If we decided from the last pudding that he had said there weren’t enough raisins, we threw in a few more. When that pudding had “too damn many”, we adjusted accordingly. Thus, we never seemed to find the magical number.

Anything that required nuts, always walnuts, also held the same dilemma. When was enough enough? Again, never. Christmas gifts, Birthday gifts, Father’s Day, they all generated a critique of how whatever it was had something wrong with it. You would think after years of trying to please, we would get it right. He was more lenient with my sister because he liked her. I, on the other hand, was not ever going to come up to snuff. I never realized the futility of all my years of trying until long after I became an adult. Nothing I ever did all those years was ever going to be praised or appreciated by him; because they came from me.

Therefore, the main focus of the other post was totally and completely on the memories I would be stirring up and did I really want to unleash all that pain again? Little did I know that another pot was stirring. My father was the nastiest kind of bully. He mentally beat his family every day. My sister coped by shutting him out. My mother read a lot and got lost in each book’s free-spirited femme fatale. I, like Charlie Brown, lived with the crazy notion that if I just kept believing and tried harder one day I would win him over. For all my trying to please, all I ever got was pushed further and further way while the personal critiques became more and more devastatingly painful.

Although, even when strangers were around and had nothing personally to fear from Gil Todd, everyone still allowed him to continue in his bad behavior. Everyone seemed innately afraid of him, just like Lucy. He had that same invisible bubble around him that made most people tolerate his critical judgments simply because of the fear of what he might say or do. He was saying and doing it anyway so what more could we have feared? But fear we, I, did. We all did everything possible to avoid the pitfalls. And brother, when we accidentally let something we knew better than to let happen, happened… well Katie bar the door! We heard about it for weeks. Then every time something else bothered him, it all was rehashed again. We never got past it. We took our mental beating and then got beat again.
He was everything and more of what I wrote in the post. He was my total mind thought. So if anyone thought himself or herself the target of that post, I apologize. I am sorry, but you were not on my mind.

I really thought it was a very selfish opportunity to vent my personal frustrations attached to the character that I would be writing about with the hopes that he would become as iconic as Lucy. Don’t we all as writers wish for that! Seeing that this is my blog and writing is the main topic I got lost in the hopefulness of believing what I write would invoke lasting emotions. I guess it did.

Just to clarify how deeply etched the painful memories that this antagonist would call up, if I pursue this book, I’ll be even more vulnerable and share that when my father died, just to bring home the ‘ going to have it my way, get-even-with-you, I’ll show you who really is in control, one last time’ assertiveness,  neither my sister nor myself were notified of his death. She learned about it from a friend who read the obituary and she told me. It was completely after the fact.

It was his final way of showing us who was boss. Lovely memories, huh?

So, to answer any questions, “No, my post had nothing whatsoever to do with anyone else.” I guess I finally stopped being afraid of what he might do. The ticking time bomb has been defused. If the story shows up here and anyone does come and read it, they will know some of what makes up the main character,  Mr. Gilbert, a very very antagonistic antagonist.