Withholding Taxes - Part 1

This picture of me was drawn by my mother when I was four. She made the dress, too. Bright blue with different colored ribbons sewn around the top. She said I spent a good part of that year saying, “I want my Daddy.” I have spent my entire life saying that.

So here it is another April and whenever I see the words Withholding Taxes, I think of my father. Because he was the most withholding man I ever knew and it taxed me as heavily as a million dollar fine from Uncle Sam would have. He died in 2001 and yet it took me three years past his death to deal with his rejecting legacy. I often look at this picture of the little 4 year-old me and wonder when exactly after that did my father turn against me.

While I was living in New York City, I had a Yorkie that at eleven years of age got diabetes and Cushing’s disease and eventually went blind. I temporarily abandoned my career to take care of him and spent two years devoting myself to my little dog. One day during this time, my father called me and said, “If I’m ever sick, you’re the daughter I want to come and take care of me.”

I had to laugh at that. When I was younger I had a Harrington Rod put in my back to fix my scoliosis and in those days, you had to spend seven months flat on your back with a cast up to your chin. Bedpans, sponge baths, TV, visitors and my Mom, who took care of me. My Dad was in the house but due to the fact that I had arrived home from California with a black eye; my father decided that he wouldn’t speak to me for those seven months. While he remained in the house. My mother had to make him put a TV in my room. I can still hear her asking him to take one from another part of the house and put it in my room and him replying “Why?” In the first month of my incarceration I would call down from my upstairs bedroom to see if he wanted to play a game of chess and he wouldn’t answer. I think once he just uttered a terse “No.” I eventually stopped asking. That was the man who wanted me to come and take care of him.

Sidebar: It was my mother who eventually told me that the reason my father didn't talk to me was because he felt I needed to be punished for getting involved with someone who gave me a black eye and for bringing him into our home. He was mad at the guy too, but he showed it by buying him 4 new tires for his car so he could drive back to California. He also gave him money to buy me roses. And he talked to him.

There are days when I don’t know whether I’ll ever get over a lifetime of being ignored by him, of having questions go unanswered, of being emotionally punished long after the infraction was committed. My reaction was always to reconnect with him, to forgive, to overlook the fact that he never told me what I had done wrong. I was needy; groveling and always emotionally begging for another chance. Because I always thought it was my fault. I must have done something wrong to cause my own father to turn against me so heartlessly. Psychologists point out that the difference between physical abuse and emotional abuse is that the scars heal from the physical.

The last year of his life he called me on my birthday and I called him on his and neither of us was home for our respective calls. Neither of us tried again. Other than leaving those messages for each other, we didn’t speak. I had lived in the cold, dark hallway of his rejection for so long that I had finally had it. He had unburdened me of the need to have a father. So when he fell and hit his head, his friends put him in a nursing facility near his home in Florida and I jumped on a plane because I remembered that he wanted me to be the one who took care of him. The irony of the situation is that my father told a friend of his to call my sister with the news. Not me.

When I got there, Dad looked awful. Emaciated and pale, he looked all of his 89 years and then some. He was disoriented. They had shaved his mustache and he had had it since the 70’s. He just looked at me and said, “Can you get me out of here?” I did.

By now my sister had arrived and we combed through a PDR trying to unlock the mystery of all his meds, many of which either canceled each other out or exacerbated the others. We took him to a hospital for evaluation and somewhere along the line he had a small heart attack. A stupid dumbfuck doctor told me this in front of my father and then left the room. Dad looked at me and said, “Did he say I had a heart attack?” (to be continued tomorrow)