Several months ago, I wrote about my sadness over a father's pride in a daughter's blog post. Well, there was a deja vu this afternoon, when the father, once again, referenced one of his daughter's blog posts with pride.
This father, this daughter, their respective lifestyles, their "issues", and, not least, the father's (non)relationship with me, hit so many nerves.
First, the father is a professional musician. He has been extremely helpful to me, giving me guidance about one or two things when I asked for advice, and his advice was sound. If it hadn't been for that advice, I wouldn't be doing some of what I'm doing today. On the other hand, based on our interactions on Facebook (we have never met) it is obvious that I am not part of the "inner circle". There is a way that professional musicians talk with each other that is "clubby" and exclusive that does not include serious hobbyists and to this serious hobbyist, at least, this is quite obvious.
Second, he is genuinely proud of his daughter. As an adult, a separate person. My parents loved me, but only as a child. When I began to have adult concerns (am I pretty? why am I not popular?) I was just blown off. My father died when I was in high school, at the height of our estrangement. Would he have encouraged me to sing, I wonder? (I know he would have beaten me bloody if he had ever seen me smoking.) And my mother, who died fairly recently (I was 60) never was able to relate to me as a person, only as a piece of property, which as the years went by, so obviously did not meet with her expectations. She wanted me to be "an intellectual", most particularly a writer, but only on her terms. She could never remember what I actually did for a living (making it harder for me to learn to like it and have any self-respect in that area) and when I did have a small success with a piece of writing (a play that I suppose would qualify as "chick lit"), she kept the bound copy in her bedroom, while keeping the typescript of a friend's son's postmodern novella on her living room coffee table.
Then there is his daughter's lifestyle. She is a housewife. How fortunate! I would love to have (or at least to have had) the experience of living off someone else's earnings, even briefly. And obviously I don't mean family. I mean someone who chose me because in some way I was romantically attractive to them. I learned from this recent blog post that this young woman had problems with mental illness. Well, so have a number of people I've known, and most of them have had to soldier on, bouncing from dead end job to dead end job, using the "reasonable accommodation" HR law to get them through if they needed time off. Most of them could not maintain a long-term relationship, certainly not with someone willing to support them!
In all honesty I can't say that I have ever had a major mental illness (other than active alcoholism, in the very distant past) but I have had various degrees of mental un-wellness that have probably interfered with my fulfilling my potential. I had a keen eye for jobs where I didn't have to work too hard and could take long lunches to go to AA meetings, spend hours with a phone tucked under my ear while I sized art, and, more recently, blow off steam in email and chat room exchanges.
There are people who like me and people who love me. I know that. I suppose sometimes I yearn to feel "showcased" the way that daughter was by that father.
And the bad weather doesn't help. I know I will have Carmen rehearsals starting soon. And I will have to fight with my partner, who got angry when I mentioned how fond I was of my new "sponsor" and how much that relationship means to me. And I was pleasantly surprised at choir practice last week when the choir director asked me, in front of the group, how my concert went.
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