Myself (or someone like me) v.4

I hate crying. It's not for some over-inflated sense of manly toughness or machismo. I just really don't like it. Some find weeping a release, a cathartic expression of intense grief or frustration that can't be bottled up any longer. My wife is one of these people. But I am not. Tears make my eyes burn. And loose snot trickling down into my mouth doesn't feel so hot either. I usually feel stuffy and worn out, blurry, and beaten after I cry. And sometimes faintly nauseated. So I avoid it. When the tears do fall, they often come out with such explosive force that it adds embarrassment to the already unpleasant experience. Because of that, the moments that I do cry end up being doubly humiliating. Two experiences in particular illustrate exactly what I'm talking about. These events, oh internet public, have never really been related to anyone before. Only two people in the world (other than me) know about them. (Which just highlights the false sense of security and anonymity that these blogs give to their authors.) (1) The coach. I was 20 and in college. I was in my head football coach's office. He was busily prattling on about my value as a team member and, therefore, challenging me to be more involved in the optional weekend practices during the off-season. With the trophies and the photos of him with Woody and Bo and Lou Holtz lining the shelves and windowsills, I should have been trembling with pride or athletic awe. Or at least teeming with testosterone. But I wasn't. Instead, I was thinking about the last weekend--how instead of staying on campus and working out or studying, I drove the two hours down snow-bound I-71 to my parents' house where I postured as some sort of domestic guardian. My dad had gone back to drinking again after a 5-year period of sobriety. And, as they say about alcoholics, when you fall back off the wagon, it's as if you never got on it in the first place. He was as mean and manipulative as he had been when I was in middle school and before. The big difference was that I now outweighed him by 50 lbs. and stood almost 4 inches taller. Yet, as Cap Peterson was known to repeat from social gathering to family dinner table: "It isn't the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog." My dad was meaner than me; he had a lot more fight. I was brought up learning to fear him down to my bowels and he knew that in a pinch, I would turn the other cheek and he would beat the living shit out of me. What I didn't know is that, now in his mid-50s, he was as scared of me as I was of him. So we sparred in some sort of Cold War weekend after weekend, holiday after holiday. Neither of us broached drinking or fighting, but we could see in each others' eyes that we were ready to hit each other if it came to it. When my coach asked me to commit to coming to practices through the remainder of the winter, all the frustration and confusion, the tangled emotions that I felt having to stand around my house pretending to protect my mom and sister from my drunken bar-fighter of a father burst out of my face. Few things are as humiliating as weeping uncontrollably in front of your college football coach. And unlike all those "Coach Carter" moments that we see in movies, my coach was as uncomfortable as I was. He told me to get a hold of myself. I told him I wouldn't be attending more practices during winter, summer, or in the fall. I had played football for 13 seasons, broken multiple bones and torn crucial ligaments to lay upon its altar. And I did it, in part, because I thought it made my dad proud of me. I had learned to doubt my father over those 13 years--and I didn't think that it mattered whether I played college football or not, really. Mostly I just wanted my family to work and I thought that if I wasn't there, bad things would happen. (2) The Marine. Bad things did happen, but they had nothing to do with me being there or not. I grew weary of the Cold War over the next year. I stopped coming home. Entirely. I spent my new found free-time doing things I liked to do. I became a grunge-music fanatic; I wrote "poetry"; I played rugby for fun; I made tons of new friends. At home, things did get more violent. My sister threatened to run away unless my mom left my dad (which she didn't want to do). But after a series of horrible events, they agreed to get out of there and live a life in hiding. I mostly avoided the entire situation. But on January 25th, 1996--ten years ago today--my dad brought us all out of self-imposed exile by hanging himself in the garage. I barely cried at the funeral. The whole thing seemed like it was happening to someone else, somewhere else. In fact, I went back to college after barely a week off. Perhaps because my profs were sympathetic, I did better in my classes than I ever had before. My advisor encouraged me to consider grad school. Friends and leaders with InterVarsity encouraged me to get more serious about my faith and consider leadership. I met Brooke shortly after. In all this, I never shed so much as a tear. My grief was mingled with latent anger and, perhaps more than anything else, confusion. Why did I both love and hate my father intensely? Why could I not just get the pain "over with" and move on? For the most part, my dad's life and death barely entered into my waking mind. Why, then, when I closed my eyes did I become convinced that he was still alive somewhere--waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike at me? I talked to counselors about everything. They told me it would take time to grieve--and aside from that, had no answers. But I never really grieved; I never cried. Didn't want to, really. It was a phone call some three years later that initiated my next crying fit. The conversation started normally enough. "Hello?" "Yeah, is a Carl Peterson there...?" ...which usually meant that it was a telemarketer calling from an old list that still had my dad listed as head-of-household. It irritated me that even several years later his name wasn't erased. They should have been asking for my mom, who had always made all the financial decisions anyway. It seemed unjust. It pissed me off. Figuring I would shock the telemarketer into hanging up and leaving us alone (it had worked before), I blurted out with a smile on my face: "Nope--he's dead." There was the usual awkward silence. But then, instead of a "click" or an "I'mterriblysorrygoodbye" there was a labored, "What? When did he die? What did he die of?" I couldn't take the hint: "Well, if you really want to know, he killed himself." This time, there were obviously choked-back tears. "Um...well...this is Drill Sgt. ___ ____. My nickname was 'EZ'--your dad would have called me that if he talked about me. I was a student of his in '89--in his marketing class. And I just wanted to thank him. He saved my life..." Any hint of sarcasm on my face faded. My mom walked in the room and knew something was wrong. "...I talked about killing myself all the time. I went to your dad after class one time. I told him how my dad abused us, how I was good for nothing, how I should just end it. Mr. Peterson got me interested in school. He drove me to and from work a couple times a week. I talked to him on the phone when I got really depressed. After he got me through graduation, I went to the Marines and I actually made it to sergeant. I figured I should thank him. It's been on my mind for a while now and I just kept putting it off. I can't believe he would kill himself after everything he did for me--for everyone in his classes...." I'm not sure what EZ said after that. It was the first time I'd really cried since my dad had died--and it was a hard, hard cry that seemed to last for hours and hours. It made me hoarse and embarrassed and not "better." My mom was there. She didn't have to say anything except, "He was a good man sometimes. Just not usually to us."