I have been working on a book for months. It’s the intro that keeps stopping me. In trying to explain who and what I am now, I have to try to explain WHY I think I became who I am.
This is a sample of the beginning. There will, of course, be a lot more than this. If I ever decide I like the way I tell my own story.
“I always knew you were a good kid.”
This was a refrain I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard once I’d grown up and moved away from my dad. Relatives told me. His friends told me. One of his ex-girlfriends told me. And when I heard it, the only thing I could think was, “you saw it. You saw what I was dealing with. Why would you think your pretty words mean anything to me NOW?”
Sure, this requires some background. So let’s have a bit of background.
My father served in 5 theaters of war, and was wounded several times in battle. He went into the ground with German shrapnel still in his back, because the dangers of removal had caused doctors to decide that it was better to leave it be. Dad landed in Africa in a company of 205 soldiers. When the final surrender was signed 3 years later, exactly 4 of those soldiers he landed with were still alive and in uniform (he estimated around 10 others had been gravely wounded and shipped home, or wound up being shipped back for other reasons.) By the time my father was 25 years old, he was in a situation that most of us have to live 45 or 50 years to see – as in, more of the people he knew were dead than alive. As you might have guessed, it left its mark. I never knew him to sleep over 2 or 3 hours at a time. He was given to tremendous mood swings. He could flip from being a reasonable human being to a monster on a dime, and you never knew when it was coming. He could not, and indeed would not, find anything I did to be satisfactory, ever. He seemed to delight in making sure that everyone he talked to knew how unsatisfactory I was, in fact. The embarrassment from that is really hard to explain to someone who has never lived it, and I really hope you’ve never lived it. If you haven’t, trust me when I tell you it’s bad. If you have lived it, I’m very sorry.