My reverie was soon disrupted by the deafening slam and rattling shudder of my transmission rocketing into the next gear. With a deep sigh, I calmly pulled on to the shoulder of the on ramp and arranged a tow and a mechanic. The summer sun beat down on my face, arms and thighs through the windshield, and that post leaked from my pores like so much sweat and vodka as I quietly freaked the fuck out. After spending most of the day pacing behind the mechanic’s office, I was fortunate enough to leave in my sweet old car, but not fortunate enough to have the problem completely solved. They serviced the transmission and prescribed gentle driving to circulate the new fluid.

You want me to drive it like this?! On the interstate? And I won’t die?!

Just be gentle with it. You have no other choice. It works, it’s just dirty. Either it cleans itself out, or you need a new one.

Fifteen miles from home, I ran into a furious hard-driving rain. My foot began to shake on the accelerator; sheets of rain diluted visibility to a disorienting blur, slowing down meant having to suffer through more shifting, on old tires and poorly drained blacktop. When I’d passed through the monsoon and reached the end of the off ramp the transmission had improved remarkably. My adrenaline level had worsened about as much. When I put the car in park, my teeth were chattering.

After I had a bath, a nap and some pancakes, my acute panic cured into quiet dread. The unexpected expense, the possibility that my transmission is dying a slow death, all reminders of the precarious state of my security that provoke a toppling wave of guilt and shame. Doubt crept in overnight. I awoke to its harsh rasping. Failure, scorn, shame, rejection, death, pestilence, famine- it hissed from every dark corner, spitting if I turned the light on it.

So I’ve struggled with what to say here, how to bring perspective to the page along with my heart. Much of the joy we are able to find in this world is fleeting: stolen moments in a sea of bills that come faster than checks, broken cars and broken hearts, calamity and heartache, sickness and pain. The future remains frustratingly uncertain, a hazy horizon of ridges and valleys unknown. Lack of expectation and assumption, so delicious in love and leisure, prove harder to swallow in practical matters. Particularly when you have to hold the entire universe together with your mind.

Have you seen the girl who took this picture?

She’s needed at home.

So it’s no surprise to me that I officially fell in love with my cousin when we were driving 441 through the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and she pointed out a patch of wildflowers on the shoulder.

Our grandfather was married twice. He and his first wife Helen Eileen had my mom, and he had my aunt and uncle with his second wife, Sarah Elizabeth. My sister and I are named for both of our grandmothers, respectively (my middle name is Eileen). Grandpa was a man of his time. He had a sometimes hard shell that encased a loving softness, was old-fashioned and commanded the respect of everyone in the room. I was young when he passed, and what I remember more vividly than anything else was the joy he felt sitting at the head of the table and reveling in the warmth and laughter of his family. In those days we sat at the table for hours after dinner, the ranks thinning slowly through the night.

I’ve often wondered what he would say about the walls that stand between my Mom and her siblings, and I think he would have insisted that they lay aside the fear, pain and misunderstandings of the past, and that would have been that, because arguing with Grandpa was generally a fruitless endeavor. I don’t have to wonder what he would have thought about seeing his granddaughters take delight in each other for a full week- it would have had him bursting with pride and joy.

We are three intelligent and formidable women in our own rights, but that ancient whisper of common genes and shared history is as undeniable as it is mysterious and ethereal. Certainly, our love and respect for each other after a week together is spurned from genuine affection for the individual, but it is paired with a deeper meaning captured so perfectly by my cousin:

“And people that I barely knew love me because I’m a part of you…”

Precisely.

That’s why when my sister called me so long ago and asked me how I had a cousin that wasn’t her cousin, I took a deep breath and told her the truth, and when Daddy came to see me on the heels of my separation, I poured him a whiskey and told him the truth too. He told my Mom six months later. That, along with the day that she admitted to finding this site, are the two days that I clearly realized I had given her too little credit for years. I underestimated her pain and fear, the aching coldness of her isolation, and the motivation behind it: an absolute inability to tolerate even the perception of rejection- a demon I’ve fought all my days on this earth.

In a few short hours, I will retrieve my sister from the airport. She made her first visit in over a decade last week, and went back for a second helping this weekend. It is a homecoming for her, and she feels it in her bones. Mom paces nervously, unwilling to hope for what she sees as an impossibility: being welcomed back into the fold by her siblings with open hearts and genuine love. I have not figured out how to explain to her that she never needed to exile herself, that the very act of withdrawing is what inspires that same fear and pain in my Aunt and Uncle.

It isn’t for me to say what they should do, who should go first, what needs to be said and what can be left in the past.

What I do know is that our time on this earth slips through our fingers like sand, that all parties involved could use the comfort and joy the three of us bathed in this week, that they all want the same thing, even if there are disagreements and suspicion regarding how to get there.

So I can only repeat my heart’s refrain.

Tear down this wall!

Fuck that. I want a man that treats me the way Dad treats me, not the way he treats Mom.

If there ever was stronger evidence that I’m a daddy’s girl, I’d like to see it. My Dad has warned me against this expectation that there is a man who will love me like he does; he makes the very logical point that Mom is his wife and I am his daughter, and to expect a man to treat me as his partner the way that Dad treats me as a daughter is asking too much. I respectfully call bullshit. My dad loves my mother fiercely, but he worships me, and I frankly doubt my ability to settle for less than that.

My father loves the whole of me. I have laid my heart and soul bare at his feet. There is nothing the man doesn’t know about me, unless we’ve simply overlooked it in our conversations. He loves  me not in spite of my faults, but because of them. He understands and accepts that my worst parts are the necessary side effects of my best parts, and he looks at my ugliness with the same tender loving eyes that behold my beauty.

That isn’t to say that he tolerates it. He has this bemused smirk that can be heard over copper wires  he throws at me with a wry comment that gently but firmly puts me in my place. And then he steps back and watches in admiration and awe as I struggle to get back to the right side of things on my own.

He is adopted, and for awhile, he searched for his biological family. That search stopped cold for twenty five years the first time he held me in his arms. As he tells me at least twice a year, ” I looked into your eyes and I thought to myself: you don’t need to look for a family, because you have a family now”. He needs me. He loves to need me. He needs me unabashedly, and that is the highest compliment any man can ever pay a woman in all of eternity. He allows me to be a soft place for him to land, he accepts with gratitude and humility my undying adoration. My Dad always asks me to make him coffee or a sandwich, or to cook when he visits. It isn’t because he can’t do these things for himself or that he doesn’t care to. He wants me to care for him, because it gives us both great pleasure. I have held him while he’s wept, I have heard his darkest fears, but these are hard things for a man. Those moments of great vulnerability are precious few, but in the meantime we both relish the small exchanges of love and gratitude.

My adolescence left me struggling with his inability to meet my emotional needs. I wrote him an angry letter, telling him that I cried myself to sleep at night when he recoiled from my embrace, accusing him of not telling me often enough that he loved me- that my heart broke into a million pieces all over again when I told him “I love you” and he didn’t say it back. I considered it the worst betrayal, a cruel rejection, and his coldness left my soul frostbitten, so that any warmth was a painful contrast to what he could not give.

He came to me and said that he was sorry that he wasn’t a good enough father. That was how I knew I hurt him deeply; he’s always been a king of the snide defense. Then he softened considerably and confessed that he was not the most demonstrative man, that it was hard for him to speak lovingly and to enjoy a hug. He said that if I ever hoped to understand the depth of his love for me, that I would have to learn to see it in other things. This is possibly the greatest gift he has given me; the desire and wisdom to see love letters in oil changes, wood chores, piggyback rides, home repairs, a willingness to work tirelessly to feed my dreams, window washing, monster slaying, any number of small and silent gestures that honor who I am both as a person and as to him as a daughter.

Then he did something even more incredible.

He learned to say “I love you” first. He started giving me hugs and kissing my cheeks and putting his arm around my shoulders. He brags about me to his friends, he tells me that I am beautiful and intelligent and that his heart bursts with pride at the woman I’ve become. I think it was because I learned to see his love for me that he worked so hard at loving me the way I always dreamed he would.

I could tell you about all the things he’s done for me, all the times he’s been there when I’ve called him with nothing but blood and fire, I could tell you that he is my protector and defender. The truth is- that’s just the kind of man he is. He gives that gift to anyone he cares about and believes in. I love that about him, but it isn’t the telling thing.

That he allows me every bit of my intensity, that he trusts me with his shadow, that he knows my heart by the tone of my voice or the look in my eyes- these are the telling things.

He said something to me the last time he was here.

“You can write a story about me, Cathy. I won’t be embarrassed, not the way you tell it.”

I’m not aware that he’s read a single word here.

He just knows. Because he has entrusted me with his truth, and he feels I’ve been more than a worthy steward of it.

My father and I become the best versions of ourselves in loving each other. We simply inspire it in one another.

6- total flights R and I were listed on but did not get seats for.

27014- our room number at the Flamingo and the approximate number of times one of us said “this room is a total shitstorm”.

4- the SPF in my banana boat tanning oil.

2- miles walked to procure aloe vera gel for that pink stage I must go through to get a tan.

6- times I told an abridged version of my life story.

5- people I wish I had spent more time with.

36- consecutive hours without sleep. (Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon.)

2- times we said “fuck it, let’s just order room service.”

11,000- miles walked (approximate estimation).

5- number of epic guys we ate dinner with Thursday night.

40- gallons of vodka consumed (approximate estimation).

8- new cell phone numbers in my phone as a result of this trip.

2- adorable Canadian men who entertained me on our Vegas-Atlanta flight.

15- percentage discount offered at the Flamingo through September 30th, 2010. They took excellent care of us, those Flamingo people. Just use the offer code SINCITY when you book online.

TBD- hours it will take my feet to resume their normal size.

100- percentage chance that I will attend another meetup if it is at all possible.