Ghost on the Mountain

Last week, my travels took me past a town I visited often as a child.  While stopped at a gas station along the highway there, I chanced to look up at the mountain rising above.  The mountain upon which I had hiked as a third grader, searching for fossils for a science fair project.  It is a fond memory from my childhood, but it brought tears to my eyes nonetheless.  The memory has been tainted because my companion that day later became my abuser.


My parents divorced when I was young.  Distance, work obligations, and a child custody schedule typical of the 1980s ensured that I only saw my dad 4-5 days each month.  My dad is a good man.  He is a provider, and I've never doubted his love for me.  He was not, though, demonstrative, nor very talkative.  (They say women marry men like their fathers- oh how I can relate!  But I digress..)  I did not have a close relationship with my dad growing up.  We've bonded over the last several years, through health crises and common interests in couponing, genealogy and the mighty New York Yankees.  Throughout most of my growing up years, though, he was not the daddy-figure.  That role was played by my abuser.


He was the one who taught me to ride my bike.  He was the one who so skillfully covered my schoolbooks in ironclad brown paper bag and packaging tape covers.  He was the one who attended every school event, every concert, every parade.  He was the one who stayed with me at the hospital after my appendectomy, reading Little House in the Big Woods aloud, instigating my love of reading.  He was the one who taught me to respect my mother when I became too flippant.  He was the one who drove me on the back of his motorcycle to and from typing classes the summer after sixth grade because a teacher had docked me a letter grade for handing in a (neatly) handwritten report.  He was the one who was there every night for homework, for dinner, for bedtime.  He was Daddy.


And he was the one who abused me, whose actions tainted those special memories from my childhood that should bring smiles, not tears.  The juxtaposition is equally impossible to fathom and to convey.


I distanced myself as an adult, but for years he was always there.  That changed drastically and suddenly in 2011, and I've had little contact with him since.  I do not miss the man.  I do not miss the (what became for me) awkward hugs.  I do not miss feeling self-conscious in what was my home.  I do not miss feeling obligated to love and respect the man for no reason other than his role as my mother's husband.  I do not.


I do miss the idea of the man- the role he played.  I realized last week that I mourn for what could have been, for what should have been, and that is okay.  I'm allowed to mourn that, but like anything else it cannot consume me.


There's a ghost on that mountain, and I'll never not think of it whenever I drive by.  But there are other mountains, mountains I've climbed figuratively and literally with memories untainted, and as I wiped the tears that had gathered in the corners of my eyes and drove away, it was those vistas I turned to.