A Past Life: Part A (Emphasis on Allen)

In 2005, I turned ten.

Life was simple; I ate frozen chicken tenders and green peas, I played with busted, old, ceramic rabbits, and I was a staunch republican. I longed to be a marine biologist and a missionary and also a singer (and somehow, also a princess like Diana)

We have just moved in with my paternal grandparents: Nana and Pappy.

My Nana, Jo Ann, known by many as just Jo, had stomach cancer that had turned terminal. By moving in we were going to help take care of her, plus, financially speaking I don’t think we were doing very well.

For me, the agony of leaving the only house I had ever knew was made better by the huge back yard that opened up into acres upon acres of forest and farm land: my own Garden of Eden.

Nature would become my deepest solace to combat loneliness and depression in the coming years. I would listen to music on my cheap little MP3 player, ride my bike around the farm roads, and found many remnants of ancient homes, farms, and cabins from decades ago. If it was above freezing I would trek the extensive creek behind our new residence with my chihuahua, Lita.

Whenever I could be outdoors I would leap at it. I could always sense God’s divine presence more intimately in nature and I was/am forever chasing that high.

Viva La Lita <3

When I drive into that neighborhood now, my gaze travels far past the house, landing on that luscious land: the fish ponds, the garden, the fruit trees and berry bushes, and the Martin bird tree house village my dad built. There’s a concrete filled tire underneath it that has all of our hand prints and names immortalized there,

I want to just take one more walk among the muscadine grape and blueberry bushes, and glide under my dad’s topiary arch passing over the small creek bridge. I’d visit the patch of deep violet irises where my dog is buried and the gorgeous pecan tree that I would lay under in the late afternoon sunshine, day dreaming my childhood away and listening to music.

me as a pudgy lil baby, in my Garden of Eden

I must have explored every inch, flipped over every rock, and climbed almost every tree.

The bottoms of my feet stayed calloused and black until I was about seventeen.

Those tender eight years I spent in that house were some of the most important ones; in my consistent solitude I was free to grow and be my authentic self through and through.

Not long after moving in, things quickly escalated into drama and tension, therefore no one really ever wanted to be home.

My grandparents strongly disliked my mom and that trickled down to me and my brothers. It’s hard to live somewhere you are obviously not welcome.

After the recession in 2008, my mom had to start working, and my dad was so rarely around, burrowed in his room for hours and hours.

My brothers were getting older and the gender difference was always difficult to get around. I had been an annoying tattletale on top of being our parent’s golden child.

Besides having a few friends and socializing occasionally in the classes my mom enrolled me into, I was mostly alone with my little dog. However, as someone who already liked to be alone, only sometimes did I look around and suddenly miss human contact; I could always find something to distract me.

And when my mom would come home from work, we would take walks long into the evening and talk about life and all that is under the sun. We only got closer from here on out because we didn’t really have anyone else in our family for support. We would ride our bikes and take walks down the gorgeous back roads of our neighborhood.

We kept one another going and still do.

I rescued baby birds whose mothers had been killed, a duckling with a broken leg, and a baby skunk with one eye. In the neighbor's pond, I caught giant tadpoles and watched them transform into bullfrogs. I was fascinated with wildlife of all kinds.

I caught bugs, dropped them into a jar along with an alcohol soaked cotton ball. I hated watching them shrivel up, crossing their tiny legs over one another like the arms of a corpse in a coffin. I was uneasy knowing that every cell in their bodies was being choked and burned. I tacked a few butterflies and dragonflies on a piece of Styrofoam with the encouragement from an uncle, fully intending on starting a collection, but I couldn’t bring myself to continue; killing them sucked all the fun out of it. Obviously.

The house was a four bedroom, three-and-a-half bath house, extremely clean. To my Nana’s absolute horror, here came five messy people to turn her shag carpets brown with mud.

The neighborhood was full of retirement homes; my family of sewer rats stuck out like a sore thumb. But my father was his mother’s favorite child, and also the youngest, and this was the end of her life. She seemed to rather have him there, not preferring his extras but tolerating them anyway.

My Nana was an extremely intelligent, hardworking, stylish woman, but also very judgmental and uptight. I don’t have a lot of memories of her laughing or smiling much.

After she died, my mom found hand written notes stuck to household objects in the attic, detailing who offended her or acted badly during family get-togethers, along with the exact date it happened. She was brutal and could suck the air out of the room in an instant.

Pappy was a more mellow character, easier to get along with but he'd still insult you in a heartbeat. He was a cute old man with a rotund middle, and he loved to call me and my brother’s fat which was so pot calling the kettle, lol.

He cooked a mean breakfast and was an excellent gardener, though my father would argue that he himself could knock him out of the water at gardening, and while that might be true, little old Pap knew how to keep berry bushes and fruit trees alive like nobody’s business. Each year, he grew an abundant crop of cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, and beans.

Mostly, he was a quiet man and because of his dementia, conversations with him were a long series of the same twelve stories he had told you hundreds or times before, like how he went to school to be an electrician through the G.I. Bill, after he got out of the army. He never saw combat. My Nana admitted that she only married him because he was cute. They fought constantly.

My mom found their old letters in her closet after she died. They were their correspondence during Pappy’s army service during the fifties. They fought just as much in those letters and they hadn’t even married yet!

Nana, up until the end, always had a disappointed look about her, a kind of sadness in her gold flecked green eyes.

I thought she had beautiful lips, though. Sometimes, her they would pull over her teeth in a particular way when she would smile and my husband's mouth curls in the same way.

When I first saw that in him, I felt a wave of comfort, even if my Nana and I hadn’t been close, it felt like confirmation.

I wish she was still alive today. I really do.

I know she watches over me and I know we’d be close today, and I would learn so much from her; she was seventy-three when she died. She was talented at ceramics, knitting, sewing, smocking, cake decorating, etc. One memory I have of her when I was really little was her making play dough with me on the kitchen floor.

I’ve always been protective over my mother, and it did not sit well with me to know that my Nana had rejected her. Though my mom is adamant that my grandmother had good reasons for her to dislike her, I still took that deeply personally, internalizing it within myself. My mother is one of the most humble people on Earth, someone with so little pride that it’s difficult to stomach her sometimes. But she wasn’t always like that; my brothers got an angrier, more depressed mother, and I only got the tail end of that, turning the corner into a more holy, laid back parent. But though we were attached at the hip, we still had our dumb little dramas between us, nothing a long walk talking about our feelings couldn't fix.

I love that about women.

The first two years in that house was the last two of Nana’s life. I watched as my mother took care of her, bathing her, cleaning up her messes, and keeping ice chips in her cup because she hadn’t been able to keep anything down for a long time and was on an IV drip.

As horrible as it was to watch my grandmother shrivel away into skin and bones, it was breathtakingly serene to see two women who once couldn’t stand one another begin to find love growing in-between the cracks in the concrete of their hearts.

There was a massive family blowout one day, maybe a few months before she passed. Basically what happened was: my aunts didn’t like us living with my grandparents because they were convinced that by living there, we were trying to get all the money that had been put into the house, which was not true at all. My parents genuinely wanted to help with Nana during her last few years on Earth.

It was summer. The sun was out. Everyone was yelling and us kids were sent outside. As I approached the back porch steps, I saw my dad run out of the house and freeze in his tracks when he got a little past the bird feeder in the yard. He dropped to his knees, his back still turned and let out a violent sob that shook his entire body. He fell to the ground.

I instantly ran to him and threw my arms around his neck, but he immediately pushed me away, wiped his face and walked off like nothing happened.

I’m sure it caught him off guard because he didn’t know I had been standing there watching him, but in my eleven year old mind there was nothing wrong with the fact that my dad was crying. It caused me instant pain to see him so grieved, that feeling was stronger than any embarrassment I might have briefly felt. That may have not been the first time a man had pushed me away, humiliated by the cracks in his armor, and it certainly would not be the last.

The heart of most men must be mighty heavy as it is fragile, the fallen vessel disallowing any feelings of weakness and failure, unaware or forgetful that these are where we find our strength to deal with the nuclear fallout of life.

Maybe I shouldn’t stereotype, but deep down we all know the truth.

The only other time I saw my father cry was when my oldest brother accidentally broke my new kitten Klaus’s neck and my dad had to quickly shoot it to put it out of it’s terrible agony.

My dad adores all animals, no holds barred.

However, he didn’t cry when we sold the pot belly pig to a farmer before we moved, because she was a bitch, at least, our un-snipped dog Scout seemed to think she was.

My father’s oldest sister wrote him a scathing letter that summer; I never read it but apparently it was really cruel and full of attacks on his character. They haven’t spoken since. It’s similar with me and my oldest brother now.

I’ve been known to write a few scathing letters to family members who have been abusive towards other members of the family. Sometimes that shit needs to be called out, I just tend to hit where it hurts and below the belt. I am learning to bridal that cruel part of me, the vengeful part of me, but sometimes the primal female urge to call a man a coward takes over and leaves me to the wind.

Apparently, it is totally common and normal for adult children of dying/dead parents to behave in such a way as these three siblings did. It’s all about the money and who will get what, and everyone is constantly triggered and triggering one another, not to mention the fresh, chest-heaving grief...

That’s most of what all this was, but not just. That kind of event can rip families to shreds.

This was the day that I pleaded out to God to save me from whatever mental illness my entire family seemed to have. It was such a monolithic fear and honestly still has been up until recently.

I think of that frantic prayer often, or maybe it’s just God echoing it back to me to reveal how ridiculous that was to ask, because of course I’m going to have the same mental illness my family has, but I have faith and God is merciful.

Through it all, God has blessed me, taught me how to not just survive, but to live life with peace on my side. If I had to pick between inner peace and calm for the rest of my life or be awarded one million dollars every year for the rest of my life, I would absolutely choose peace, wouldn’t I?

I hope I would if that hypothetical scenario ever happened, I would choose peace. What would you do?

What I know now is that hatred for your family is just self hatred. We don’t like what we see in ourselves reflected back in them so we judge in order to deflect. That’s true for all mankind, but especially with those whose blood is also pumping through your body.

People are just people. God takes care of each and every one of us and nothing lasts forever.

People just want love; we are bottomless pits for it and only God has the plug to the drain. God is love! He fills the tub.

A Bit About Allen

My father: Born Roger Allen Helms Jr.

June 25th 1964, for my entire life, has woken up every day at around four o’clock am. He starts the Bun coffee maker and smokes a cigarette, (used to be Marlboro Reds, then he switched to Lites, then Camel, now it’s Lites again) takes a shower and a shit, watches the weather and a bit of Fox News, drinks an entire pot of coffee, not exaggerating, he drinks exactly one pot of Folgers ***always*** Folgers coffee, and eats approximately nothing at all.

Then it’s time to hitch up his trailer and leave the house by six o’clock am.

He gets home everyday around noon when he eats his first meal of the day and takes a long nap.

After he wakes up he will watch a few hours of Fox News or some Bible prophesy scam show, only getting up to eat or go to the bathroom. At approximately six or seven o’clock, it’s time for bed.

He’s had the same routine for my entire life, changing very little besides what kinds of cigarettes he smokes which signify his different eras, I suppose.

Even when he stopped drinking, his routine remained relatively the same although he had made a positive change. Before, he would just drink alone in his room and watch TV.

My father is a maniac. He’s owned his landscaping business since before I was born, so over thirty years. He was my biggest inspiration as a child.

He made me a log cabin for my dolls for Christmas one year. I think he just got my brothers those lame wooden toy guns. I remember feeling jealous of them which is crazy.

A few years later he bought a full dollhouse kit from Hobby Lobby and went absolutely ham.

He changed it up a lot: painting it a deep forest green, landscaping the front of the house with tiny flowers and shrubs. It looked eerily real. On the inside of the house, he wallpapered it and even added carpets and rugs. He decorated it finely and the most insane part is that he installed working lights in all the rooms, even some of the little lamps came on.

He did not stop there, of course, have you met my father? You should.

He found a cabinet made of two compartments, painted the outside white, set and secured the dollhouse on top, and then continued the rooms inside the cabinet. He made the compartments with two rooms, one to look like my bedroom, including a small framed photo of six or seven year old me hanging up on the baby pink walls, floral border like my room. I wish I could locate the pictures, I know they still have it.

My relationship with my dad is complicated, as many people have. I was raised to be his other half, his best parts reincarnated in the female body. I wonder sometimes with nature and nurture: is it all in the blood or did they speak it into existence, chanting a prayer that would cause me to contort myself into the shape they desired?

The minute they saw that I had my father’s face, in a way, I signified a new hope for them, a do-over.

Honestly, I maybe owe whatever success I seem to have grabbed onto for dear life is owed to that monumental expectation. Perfection is always just out of reach, but as long as I was close enough to it, it's good enough.

Perfection, to me, is family.

Sometimes, Allen acts as a mirror for me, I seem to always act as a mirror for him, which can be super uncomfortable if you’re not used to self reflecting. This is mostly a male issue, perpetuated mostly by other males and a few females.

My father, like many men of his generation, ran from himself for years and unfortunately if you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind.

It seems like I was a daddy’s girl, and I really think I was in my father’s eyes until I turned five. He just stopped touching me as much. He stopped acknowledging me as much, we didn’t play anymore. We used to tumble on the floor together; there’s an extremely old memory in this old brain, still pretty pristine in my mind’s eye: my tiny body, my father’s face hovering over mine, smiling, beautiful, mysterious, a little frightening, foreign, not my mother. But still, I am pleased to be in his arms, he is like sunshine to me.

Fathers are gods. Their approval means our entire identity, it’s enough to literally drive people to madness. See the homeless people in the street? The father wound lacerates the brain, not only the heart.

But where does someone land who was both idolized and ignored by their father? How can I claim to have daddy issues if I was also highly favored?

This deeply confused me as a young child, even causing me to struggle with gender for a couple of years.

No one besides Ethan knows that between the ages of five and twelve, I was afraid to look down at my own reproductive parts in the bathtub. Sometimes, I went through a period where I would get these intrusive thoughts that I should have been born a boy and I had the wrong genitalia, but my sheltered ass had no idea at this point that gay people even existed, let alone transgender people. These thoughts were totally original.

I went through phases where I would wear my brothers’ clothes, play with their toys, and tearfully beg to join in their games; I wanted their attention and to be accepted by them as an equal. I wanted them to accept me as another boy, to not look at me as a girl. I wanted to show that I could kick their asses just like they showed me, I could hang and I was cool.

I waited and waited for that day, but in the end

I am just a girl.

Femininity was difficult for me to comprehend and it felt shameful to be so around my father, like it didn’t seem acceptable to be feminine.

"I'm so glad I'm not a girl," is something he would say often and I hated it. I hated feeling ashamed for playing with baby dolls and barbies. I was a little girl, what the fuck?

What kind of adult makes a kid feel weird for playing with toys???!!!

I think most of this complicated daddy/daughter shit a totally normal product of our modern environment, how women have been treated in the past and even now.

I fully believe God keeps sending my family boys because we can't stop fucking them up, but God, I can't wait to have a daughter. I love my boy with everything in me and I want more of them, but please... A girl someday, please.

Flower Season

My dad forced us to take these photos at the fair every year for like twenty years but I'm so glad.

My father was/is an enigma. Through the words of my mother, I knew I was a type of idol to him, his “crown jewel”, she would brag.

But he was rarely ever home, he hadn’t eaten dinner with us since I was very small, and he barely acknowledged us when he got home from work, especially in the earlier days when he worked in the dirt from dawn until dusk. I could feel he loved me, but he seemed so uninterested in me in reality. It was like my mother was making more out of it than it was, and maybe she was, but I think that was her way of romanticizing things. Because women are amazing and a little crazy, too.

I remember thinking of my dad as a stranger most of the time, I was insanely shy around him, even, sometimes terribly afraid. Strange men were such an irrational fear of mine as a child, back when most things already have the potential to be terrifying. And men can be scary as hell, even now.

Who was this incredibly tall, tan man with a big black beard and piercing eyes? And does he really love me, and why?

+++

This man's eye for color and symmetry is unique, there is no one else who quite does it like him.

He taught me that if you're gonna do it, over do it.

Fuck it up, jump all over it, and have a fantastic fucking time while you're doing it. No excuses.

He wrote in the front of our family Bible:

"Don't let your meatloaf."

Allen Helms is a mad man, a genius. Landscaping is his truest passion and he adores the work, his art.

He taught me how to love physical labor, to not be afraid to get my hands dirty, that the amount of dirt contributed to your sex appeal and ya know? He was on to something.

When I was little and he’d bring me to work with him, I would gape at his monstrously gnarled hands.

"Women see what I do with dirt and they wonder what else these hands do," he said many times. And my mother would nod in agreement as I would crumple up, squeezing my eyes closed and yelling as I crammed my fists against my ears.

From the early morning hours,

many times freezing,

many times in the rain, you could find us on our knees, crouched around freshly mulched flower beds. My job was to act as my father's shadow, to reach down under the tray, squeeze the dirt and roots of each flower to loosen it, then pull the plant from the tray and place it in his ready, open palm.

Then he would stab his left gnarled hand into the mulch bed, making a hole big enough for the roots of the flower to snuggle down into. Repeat this process about a 500/800 times a day.

You had to keep up, never missing a beat or you’d be barked at, which helped successfully train me to be hyper-aware in every situation all the time, which is like a super power now.

When we weren’t doing that, we would prepare the beds by moving a lot of dirt. I would pile mulch into the wheelbarrow and then follow my dad around while he would masterly throw it down, covering each inch of ground with one swoop, a motion done millions of times. Sometimes, the job would just be moving hundreds of pounds of rock from the truck and trailer to the job site, the sun beating down on us in the mid afternoon.

We would go home with our jaws hanging open, eyes drooping, knees trembling.

Dirt is compacted under my nails but he keeps his short to the quick. It takes a few days to fully wash all the dirt out.

But the kind of tired you are after working with my father is one of the best feelings.

I would make $100 for all that. I just recently found that he pays my brother Ben double that.

I’m a calmer person now but the old me would have flipped her shit finding that out, lol

These were the times we bonded: flower season, in the spring and in the fall. Money isn’t everything, I was paid in memories and quality time with him. I was paid in praise and stories, I was paid in jokes and shitty gas station coffee. I got to see a lot of gorgeous sun rises, learned how to run a business; I got a lot out of it.

My perspective is better, my cup is full.

Allen really believes he's God's favorite, and you know what? Nice. He could have a point.

My parents in old western drag lmao

Matriarchy

If you read Dean, you might see why that generation of women would have to rise up and cling to one another when your patriarch has run off and started another family, not to mention bringing a plague into the home of his already ailing first family during the Great Depression.

I remember hearing that as a young child and hoping that Tommie Condrey was nice and toasty in hell.

I ached with heartbreak for that poor family.

But women, though we were entrusted with carrying out the Great Mysteries of God through our wombs and our souls, we are not found without sin.

My father was spoiled by his mother and older sisters growing up, but at the same time the women in his family took complete charge and control of everything and had their men strung up by their balls in the root cellar. (figuratively speaking but isn't that funny to think about)

The women in my father’s family were wickedly intelligent, driven, hardworking powerhouses.

I use the word “were” because I haven’t seen that side of the family since I was about eighteen and all the aunts are dead now.

After Pap died and my aunt mailed my father that letter ripping him a new asshole. He had a lot of trauma around that time, those in-between years when he lost his parents and his family seemed to turn their back on him. His alcoholism really escalated during this time.

But as much empathy as I can muster from being his daughter, I can call a spade a spade and my father, with all of this wit and charm and charisma, has some serious neurosis; whatever is going on in his brain makes him say the most outrageous, rude shit. Same.

I don’t know who it was, but I believe it was one of my father's adult female relatives who molested him in the back of a car when he was a little boy.

To think of my father at that age, his straight, long nose, pale blue eyes that squint when he smiles, his then golden blond hair that later turned nearly black after twelve.

I want to go back and push that sick bitch out of that car and rescue my father, whisking him away to safety.

What an insidious curse childhood sexual assault is.

He was a beautiful child and also an undeniably beautiful man: my father.

He developed a drinking problem at sixteen.

He went to rehab the week I turned eighteen.

It was either a Sunday or Monday night in early January that everything changed; I was sicker than I had felt in years with some type of long-winded virus.

I remember spending most of that week reading The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck for school. (The House of Earth trilogy, chronicling the generational survival of one Chinese family during the war with Japan in the thirties. (Incredible read, that entire trilogy is fire, highly recommend)

That night I ran a fever so high I was writhing around in pain, sobbing.

At the very same time on this night, my father’s liver is finally beginning to complain about all the alcohol he had been dowsing it with for the past thirty-three years.

His body was shutting down and my mom was frantically trying to figure out what was going on with him whilst also trying to take care of me. My poor saint of a mother, running up and down the stairs frantically.

She didn’t know how much beer he’d been drinking; he was hiding them in his boots and placing them next to his bed.

It just made him feel normal, he was self medicating as most of us do.

My mom threatened to leave him if he didn't get help.

Early the next morning he went into a rehabilitation center to detox. He was there about three or four days, I believe, two or three nights.

Each of those nights, my mom would come into my room with a box-made brownie, Blue Bell vanilla ice cream piled on top, and we would lie there together in my twin bed while watching the whole first and final season of Freaks and Geeks on my shitty laptop. We ate our brownies and ice cream and she would rave about how realistic the entire show was to growing up in the seventies/eighties.

I turned eighteen while my dad was in rehab,

When he came home, he said he would never drink again because he got into it with some bi-polar guy and they had to be separated a few times, haha. Whatever that guy said lit a fire under his ass to stay sober and he hasn't touched a drop in over eleven years. He seriously is the type of person who cannot even have a sip of alcohol, and I'm super proud of him for sticking to it.

His alcoholism is evident in his hobbies, his excessive, overboard nature shows up more prominently the older he gets. He's also a rage-a-holic, he loves to have someone or something to be mad at, it's fun!

He's a crazy guy and I really do love him.

+++

Complicated is just such a perfect word for relationships with your parents.

In truth, you witness your parents grow up and my parents are good people with good hearts, though they’re awkward and loud and say inappropriate shit all of the time.

They’re kooky, they’re nutty and I love them. They taught me to break the mold and be different and to speak my mind, even if that very thing got me punished most of the time. They did the best with what they had at the time.

I know a lot of people who don’t speak to their parents and I feel privileged to have a mom who is my best friend and a father who is eleven years sober and has matured more over the years as he finds better ways to cope and take the right medications. I’m so grateful.

Part B coming very soon.