Everything I Gave You Was Already Yours
Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.
- John Steinbeck
There were these days when I would pull the kids in my garden wagon. Down the street to the church preschool under the electrified blue summer morning. Or beneath the canopy of autumn blaze rustling in the breeze. Three kids in the cart and I was the horse, my strength on display for all the world to see. If you had been driving down the road right then, you would have likely saluted our image, but only up in your head. Smiling at the scene, you might have told yourself that this was a wholesome little shot/ these kids and their dad/ easing down the uneven sidewalk/ passing over the gargantuan tree roots surfacing up through the aged cement.
At some point on these walks I had to cross us over to the other side. The responsibility of the move wasn’t lost on me. There’s this delicate nerve that dangles like a high voltage wire above the life of a parent. In order to move through the world with a child in tow, you must learn to ignore the fear that comes with each distinct harrowing possibility. Every slide in the park/ every free run down the frozen foods aisle/ each time you head out in the car with kids buckled in their car seats/ it all requires a spell of sorts to be cast upon the grown-up. Otherwise the possibilities of true reality can stop you dead in your tracks. Every innocent moment with children is leashed to a gossamer thread of chance. An endless array of horrors and tragedies lurk around each bend.
Where the narrow strips of grass along the sidewalk melt into the street I would check both ways, looking out for the farm boys in their wild rides. Biting my lip, I’d listen for them to come rumbling around the bend at maddening speed, but they rarely showed up. Then I would pull us out into the street like a river, the raw shards of panic urging me faster than I ever really needed to go .
We always reached the other side, emerging by a neighbor’s holly bush.
“We made it!,” I’d exclaim to the kids. But I guess it was more for my sake. They already had absolute trust and faith in me. I was unbreakable in their eyes. Back then, I would drag the wagon behind me, the veins in my arms bulging on a hot July morning, and I would glare into the eyes of danger. And each kid back there, two little boys and a little girl, was grinning ear to ear, feeling good about the world, feeling safe in the arms of love.
As it should be.
And as it rarely remains.
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Nothing back then was simple and that includes raising the kids. As much as I wish I could say that there were longs stretches of smooth sailing, that was rarely the case. Almost from the get-go, my three kids found themselves thrust into the midst of a complex and damaging divorce. Nothing, for the longest time, appeared to be what it truly was, and therefore I believe that I was forever under the impression that nothing happening was actually real insofar as real usually goes. The broken family was true enough, I could accept. But beyond that, there was a lot of unrealized emotion and psychological reaction that I just didn’t even really recognize let alone know what to do with.
I struggled, as a single dad, in privacy, while I portrayed myself as honestly as I could in my writing and on social media. The depiction though was murky. Such attempts at self-expression often are, it turns out, when the creator of the narrative is quite broken inside. And that is what I had become.
Broken. Broken by a lack of understanding. How had our marriage come to this when there was a baby on the way?
Broken. Broken by a swarm of little atrocities that were attempting to add up outside my window. Why does so much of this not feel right?
Broken. Broken by the role I found myself playing that I had never imagined myself playing at all. Was I an ignoramus in our family? Or was I now beginning to sense something I wasn’t meant, by design, to perceive?
And broken. Broken by the everydayness and the everythingness that divorce can bring on for certain types. Having no real experience with the dynamics of waking up one morning to fend entirely for myself with kids, I suppose there was a lot of insecurity that came over me. I was no longer the husband in a beautiful family. I was now the single dad emerging from a kind of wreckage no one wants to talk about.
To this day, few have ever really asked me what happened. It’s staggering in a way. People want to like your photos and your silly videos in the feed. But at the end of the day, there is very little room in most people’s world for the shock and pain of your divorce.
Why? Because it hurts too much to think about that shit. We are all crossing the street all the fucking time. That alone is enough to make us crazy. We don’t need to rub your fresh hot blood all over our skin to understand, man.
Take your little broken heart and get the fuck out of here.
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Milo, formerly Blake, formerly Violet (although that child is fading now, with time), walks somewhere deep within my bones.
They strut across the church parking lot out behind the house, right now, big construction worker headphones on, the bluetooth pouring music I don’t know at all into their head. I watch them out the kitchen window and I see their various smiles explode and then disappear within the course of any given instant. Arms in the air, the kid stims, arms upward, fingers pointing and then curling and then maybe pointing again at a sky above that never ends. An outer space none of us can grasp at all.
Autism is such a part of Milo that the part of me that once wondered about the mirror image of the kid/ the same child but without autism/ has weathered over time, quite naturally, in order to dissipate and drift. There’s no longer any unanswerable questions or whatever. There is only this. The life. Us. Them. Me. Everyone else, and all of us together. Everyone else and each of us apart. Structuring a monumental love around Milo isn’t easy for me. Within each passing of them by my shoulder, I feel a longing that I no longer think will be met. The kid has bright eyes and a wicked smile, their sense of themselves is stoic and well-defined. I hear them speak of the passions that they hold dear to them and I want so badly to join them in all of that somehow but anymore it seems impossible. I’m not on their radar much these days. There is an aura of invisibility around me when they are near and I can’t help but blame myself so much of the time. Even though I guess that isn’t exactly fair either.
In the past, Blake (or Violet) would bring up the times that I yelled at them. And if it wasn’t specific just to them, then I was yelling at all of the kids/ reading them the riot act conjured up by the broken parts of me they didn’t deserve. Having three children, 4, 2, and an infant, all to myself was something that is too difficult for me to explain. I don’t mean that to sound condescending or anything, but the truth of the matter is that if you have never been a single parent to some kids that age all at once, then you just aren’t going to get it. People mostly aren’t meant to get it either, I suspect. Divorce doesn’t usually happen at a time like that, when the kids are so young. But in my case it did. And there were times when I felt detached from my own reality, unable to comprehend how I was in that situation or what I was supposed to do to deal with it.
Look, a little kid shitting themself is one thing. But a little kid shitting themself in Walmart while another kid disappears around the end of an aisle far away and a baby is crying in your cart by the paper towels you have elected to buy (instead of microwave popcorn/ there’s just not enough loot) is something entirely different. You deal with it, I learned, as if all life depends on the outcome. You succeed because failure is not an option. I mean: how can it be? I would talk myself out of the ocean of anxiety bashing all around me in order to breathe enough to find order in the chaos. I had been walking a tightrope up until then, frazzled but steady, as I attempted to move us through the store, get what we needed, and hopefully look at the Halloween stuff for fun before we checked out. But I knew by then that nothing was guaranteed. So much could go wrong with my plan. And so much almost always did.
Day after day, week after week, I mixed my absolute love up with impossible panic. At once dedicated and loving but on edge and tenuous, I became a version myself I still cannot fathom let alone believe. Once, not long ago, I’d been a guitar player in a minor league band. Now here I was, a grown man struggling to survive in the single dad world (half the week/every week). I was damaged heavily by my own perspective of my experience. And I was damaged even more by the way things I had little control over were continuing to come down.
Milo, later, would mention a time one morning before school when I towered above them and told them to “Stop fucking up.” This was years ago and yet they still bring it up sometimes.
And I feel an axe in my face when they do.
I watch them walking back and forth out back/ sometimes hurrying up in an excited burst of jogging/ their face stretching and gasping like there is a hard wind blowing into it/ and I see my face in their face/ I see my limbs in the shape of their limbs/ and I feel so torn/ so unsure/ so certain/ so evolved/ so horrendous/ all at once. The pride I know in being their dad, it feels twisted and contorted by things both real and unreal. The love I have for them like fire from the furnace/ I have to pass it around/ it feels like/ to let everyone have a look at it/ spit in it/ hold it up to their own fucking face and let it flash hot in their own eye when it’s not theirs at all/ because its mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. My heart. My love. My story. My take. My version. My world.
To this day Milo has never said I love you to me. It isn’t because they don’t love me. I know they do. But love makes them cringe. Hugs make them uneasy. Expressing solid caring towards another human being seems to feel too risky, too uncertain for them to wander out in all that. And it may be the autism, I know. Hell, anyone would likely think it probably is.
But it might be other things too.
It could be the sense they got when they were so young and seemingly aloof but actually insanely dialed in. This sense, perhaps, of how much love can hurt. How much it can fuck with you and fuck you up. Even so, I want to tell them that it’s always worth it. The point of being alive is to feel real pain so that the beauty, when it shows up, overpowers your senses, and conquers- with joy- all the miles of your road.
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I will tell them these things, of course. In time. But when? I don’t know. And how? I don’t know. I guess I’m afraid they will look up from their phone for a second, annoyed that I asked such a thing, and then, after I have chosen my words carefully and expressed them with as much passion and emphasis and empathy and wonder as I can muster, they’ll say nothing/ slip their eyes back down to the smart phone/ and walk away from me standing there in the kitchen as if I was nothing but a houseplant trapped inside itself.
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As their dad, I am fiercely proud of myself.
My old man couldn’t say that.
He couldn’t even come close.
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Life has a way of burning you out if you aren’t the loutish kind. Confident people, the ones who only seem have their shit together, bore me. As far as I can tell (and for what its worth I have quite a lot of experience with it), the winners are the losers. And the losers are the winners. I have strived to be artistic and productive but it isn’t there where I have truly lived. In the shadows of all the unseen days is where my true worth lurks. Most people can never tell who you really are when you stumble through the most trying eras of your life. Hell, only one or two will even bother to try and see, and even then there is so much that will be missed. It’s easy to miss everything someone else is living.
Still. Each of us knows the truth. Love born up out of someone pure of heart will never ever die. So let each man be the only judge of himself.
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The scene by our kitchen sink in the morning is all ancient Roman market. There is human traffic and voices colliding. There’s the thunderous passing of heavy animals. There are screams and cursing and raucous laughter galore (albeit from the TV in the other room). I get the different lunches together and put them in Walmart bags instead of the regular lunch sacks because the sacks are being left at school. It’s frustrating to me because I like the feeling I get when I have to fit the whole lunch into the official sacks and not just plop shit into the bottom of these formless disposables. The tiny order of things: the sandwich case on the bottom followed by the chips bag and the Kool Aid pouch, and then the brownie or the Oreos and a napkin: it loans me the sense of fragile control over something. And as any parent will tell you, the slightest mirage of control is often the only boundary between remaining present or letting go. The matter of the chaos in the predawn downstairs means that there is the one underlying endorsement that seems worthwhile to have. Life lives here. And that’s gold in your pouch if you’ve had enough sleep. But on mornings when I’ve struggled in the night, found myself doom scrolling at 2am because I can’t sleep because I’m worried about paying our school taxes or I’m freaking out about how I never go to the doctor to get any kind of tests even though I am sure I have shit wrong with me or I just open my eyes and I imagine Milo walking by me and never looking back and it scares me and I don’t know why, on those kind of mornings I feel less alive than dead. More weight than air. I feel over everything before it even happens. But which way that goes isn’t my choice; like so many things that come with being a parent, or a husband, or a person at the Sheetz with an armful of IPAs and a gallon of milk, there is a randomness to the carnival that we seem to forget. Everything is such a dream, I remind myself. I’m nothing but a bag of guts. So when the nightmares didn’t wake me last night and I wasn’t torn from my open-mouthed-pillow-slobber slumber by yet another human construct slapping me across the face like some whisky drunk ghost, then I stand there in the kitchen with my coffee cup in hand splattered from all directions by this indescribable splash, this heaving gush of apparent reality dripping down all over me like the steaming shower I still need to get. Dogs bump into the back of my legs as they seek and destroy the crumbs of hot waffles. Arle appears by the microwave in her tie-dyed sweat pants and her rainbow slides with socks. Henry tramps across the chipped floor with his hoodie up around his head, every inch the 13-year-old who thinks he’s 25. Piper lets out a loud squeal and tells his mom he’s hungry and I tap the top of his head and he swings around and fake punches me in the nuts. Charlie heads cautiously toward the living room and his Minecraft gamers on YouTube with a cup of chocolate milk so filled to the brim that it looks like a muddy eternity pool at a hotel overlooking the sea after a cyclone. Rosie (once Milla) shuffles in wearing a sort of anime punkish outfit she put together that is so fucking cool that it makes me wonder how I managed to go all through middle school and high school (and life) looking like such an unfashionable turd. The fridge swings open and closed as it if it is an automatic door. I catch the burnt-candy roast of the last half inch of the 5:30am coffee over in the pot. Outside an Amish guy drives his buggy by our house in the rain. Then a school bus swishes by going the other way. For a second as it goes, I watch it block out a Trump flag down the street. I put my two cold Diet Cokes in my backpack and it smells like sour milk. Spilt coffee, I guess. Or maybe a baby puked in it somewhere along the line. I remember the kids puking. Henry one night on his birthday. His tiny body all curled up on the couch. We sang to him as he shivered under a blanket. Everywhere I look now I see reminders of who we all are. Me and Arle in our wedding duds on the fridge. Laptops next to the bowl of rotting apples. Two-liters of Dr Pepper and Grape Sunkist on the floor beneath the record player. Deep gashes in the cardboard wood floor. A drop of pancake syrup on the butcher block island. Dishes in the sink. Teenagers gathered by the summer kitchen door. My achievement across all of this, if nothing else, is the sound of the sleigh bells as we head out to my car. I used to use them on stage during holiday shows. Now they hang round the back door knob and I hope they always will. A reminder, I think, of some snow that will come. The way the first flakes will drift down from the stoney sky. The way the air will taste strong and sharp, like a fire company turkey shoot. The way the past will marvel itself by showing up resurrected. The way the dogs will rattle their chains, look upwards to see. There will be the first cold speck upon the side of my nose. The tiniest pinhead of snow from on high. Charlie will speak of no school tomorrow. Arle will appear with Vans with no socks. Her Scottish ankles, pink and fair, will turn me on as a trash truck rumbles down Penn Street with men in hunter orange hanging off the rear. There will be a crow calling out from the woods across the creek. Christmas is coming, he will call and call. Christmas is coming and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it once again! Somewhere out there in the world some other dad, younger than me, will look down at his hands and they are covered in cake icing and the baby is crying and he can smell ripe shit and no one else is home. Nothing special. Nothing grand. There will be a click of his mailbox as the snow starts to fly. A holiday card maybe. Or maybe a bill. He’ll lick the sweet off his fingertips as I disappear, far away, into a dark wall of snow.
LISTEN TO THUNDER PIE LIKE A PODCAST!
Want to listen to the audio version of my writing this week? Well, here you go! Many of you have asked for this over the years and I’m finally getting around to trying it. But it will be important to hear from folks. Let me know if you like this feature?? It’s a LOT of extra work for me and especially for my wife, Arle, who is doing all of the editing and the hard stuff. So we’d like to know if you want us to continue to do it, okay?
Also: apologies for my Philly accent. There’s nothing I can do about that. Haha.
Last thing: if you download the Substack app, listening might be easier, I’m not sure.
Thanks! Have a great weekend!!
Serge
‘Everything I Gave You Was Already Yours’ - written and read by Serge Bielanko
Thunder Pie is always edited by Arle Bielanko!
Subscribe to her Substack here! Letter to You!
Photos/ Art: Serge B./ Arle B.
Things I Liked This Week.
Fall began a few days ago. I guess you knew that, huh? Well, anyway, it’s my favorite season. The days dim down, the evenings cool, time is a truck on the far road rumbling up the valley.
The new single from The Cure is called ‘Alone’ and it is magnificent.
I liked this NYTimes interview (free link for you!) with Sally Rooney, the mega author who has a new novel out. She seems quite cool. Has anyone read her? Send me one of her novels??!!
We have been watching Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior on Max. It’s true crime doc stuff and I think it’s riveting. Especially the dude who is supposed to be Jesus.
My kid Milo turned me onto this 2001 song by this band called The Microphones. ‘I Want Wind to Blow.’ Do you know it? It’s so fucking good. Like an entire film of my life. Or yours. Also: I keep reading that it was released on 9-11-2001. If that’s true, well… I just don’t know what to say.
always.always.always.
I totally dig the audio option. Also, thanks for shout out to the new Cure single. Disintegration was released my freshman year of college. And this track really takes me back to that sonic place. It's truly fantastic. Thanks Serge, as is often the case, you made my Friday brighter on this gloomy PA afternoon.
Hey hey! I love the audio option. I listened and read along, which bathe best way for me, because I do love seeing the written word. And it never occurred to me that the pronunciation was Arl-ee. Eep. My bad. I have an ex-sister-in-law (is that what we called those folks?) named Arlene and we’ve always called her Arl, and I guess I just assumed Arle was pronounced the same way. Anyway, I dug listening very much. And the Philly accent just added to it all. Note: I’d suggest folks listen to the audio at the bottom of the essay rather than clicking on the photo link (kinda like YouTube), at the top of the essay. The photo version sounded oddly AI’ed.
I went through my own divorce a few months shy of 14 years ago. My kids were older, and there was a whole level of having let them all down that went with my experience. The look on my 14-year-old son’s face that said, “I can’t believe you’re going to leave us here with *her*” that’s seared into my memory and digs daggers into my heart whenever I think of it. I think folks don’t ask about your (I’m using the Royal your here) divorce because it’s like a death; unless they’re in your inner circle they don’t know how to approach the subject; what to say. “How’re you doing?” probably feels so platitudinous a thing to ask. “Do you need anything?” perhaps a sincere but empty offer. Because no one’s gonna give you that extra $1000/mo that’s gonna pull you through. I ate those dollar store tuna and crackers snack packs everyday for lunch for months just so I could have food in the house for when my kids were there (Mondays, Wednesdays and every other weekend). And no one gave a shit. My coworkers would joke and ask if I was eating cat food for lunch. And I didn’t make a big deal about it, because you just do what you’ve gotta do. Because that’s your job. And it’s hard as shit a lot of the time. I’d lie in bed those first few years, when my child support payments were more than a two week paycheck, four a.m., anxiety racing through my blood like lightning, wondering if it was ever gonna end; trying to think of some way to pull a George Bailey. But life moves forward. And eventually things ease up. You can breathe again. And all the silent sacrifices are eventually noted and appreciated. Not that that’s why you did—it’s your job, man—but it’s nice to have your efforts recognized; to hear (from that same ex-SiL), “we didn’t know how much you did at the time”. It’s a river we’re on. Flowing forward, always. You have to ride it and do your best to traverse those rapids, not let ‘em smash your skull on the rocks just below the surface, and remember there are also those placid smooth as glass parts as well.
Thanks as always for the words and the incredible imagery (that first snow bit was ::chef’s kiss::). Have a good week.