R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I remember when I lost all respect for my father.  There were 2 incidents.  The first made me lose most respect and the second was the end of respecting him.  The first time I was 13 and he read my diary.  There was a lot in there where I was trying to cope with his nastiness and mood swings and the girl he'd brought into our family as his girlfriend.  He made it out that this thing was so hurtful to him and that I should be so guilty.  Yet he invaded my privacy and used what he wrote against me so that I wouldn't have that outlet for dealing with him.

  I was 14 and in the prior 2 years he had disengaged from his family in favor of an adolescent girl.  Until I was 12 he had moments when he was good to be with, even was loving in his own distorted fashion.  But  after he became openly involved with this girl that faded.  I became more and more angry with him as time passed.  The day I realized that I had given up on him in a way that made me not respect him was a day that he came to a track meet that both his girlfriend and I were competing in.  He ignored me completely, even if I walked near him and even when I was competing.  I might as well not have been there.  It was like my being on the team intruded upon his time with his "girlfriend". 

Both of those events were specific occasions but they were occasions that developed over a great deal of time.  With the things happening with my brother now I was blindsided, along with everyone else.  The shock is wearing off now.(or the meds are managing it better) and talking to Dr Mind today helped a great deal.  The idea that any of this can be true is beyond belief.  The trial is probably still a long time off.  I  think he is in a difficult situation; sometimes I am glad that I'm not really eligible to be on a jury because things can look completely different than they are.  But even these accusations are extremely hard to bear because he did get in a situation that caused them to come up, no matter whether he is guilty or not.

In the week that I've known about this I've gone through a lot of stages.  There are many more to come.  It feels like grief and we all seem to be handling it like grief so I think it will probably proceed through the stages of grief with all the back-tracing and re-tracing that takes. 

My initial reaction was that I was done.  He is an alcoholic and probably has Asperger's.  I have social skill issues but I'm a socialite compared to him.  Get him on the right topic and he'll dominate a conversation for hours.  Ty to get him interested in what you care about and forget it.  We won't play Trivial Pursuit with him after watching him win a came where nobody else got a turn.  He's extremely smart but never followed through on plans to do much with his intelligence until this last job.  He's never been easy to deal with and he's had a talent for messing things up.  In the last year he finally got a job where he felt respected and competent and in control, rather than having little control in the jobs he'd had previously.  He was making more money than ever before.  His ex-wife or almost ex-wife (don't know if they really divorced) was going to get back together with him.  He had so much going for him and if he did what they say he blew all of it.  On top of that he is accused of something I find to be particularly offensive.  I thought I couldn't ever see him again.

Time has passed now and I have accepted that I have cut my father out of my life but that doesn't mean I don't still care or wonder about him.  Just recently I found a different search site that gave me his address and indicated he may have re-married.  That's pretty odd to think about, that i have a "step-mother" but it makes me happy for him.  He wasn't equipped to live alone, but if I'd taken him in I would have been miserable.

And so my most recent thoughts have been that I will continue to listen to the daily updates from my mother on how he is doing.  I will continue to pray for him.  I will go to my extra counseling sessions and talk to someone who isn't hurting personally until I feel stronger.  At some point I will try to write a letter to him telling him how I feel and why.  He probably knows but I think that it is the right thing to do.  And then sometime before he goes to court I will meet him with my mom somewhere neutral with ground rules in place about the interaction so that I don't live with the idea that I let him go to jail if he is convicted without saying good-bye because I'm pretty sure I can't handle going into a jail.  We'll see, that may not happen and it may not be as bad as I think but I think (at this point, everything is very changeable right now) that is what I need right now.  I don't need to see him to ask questions or talk about it, I just need to see that he still looks like the brother that I thought I knew well.

Unfortunately I don't think anything less than a not guilty verdict will give me the respect I had for him back.  I didn't realize exactly how much respect is earned and that it can be gone in 5 painful words at 5 AM on a Thursday morning.  That's not fair, innocent until proven guilty, but it is just the current state of my feelings.

I am just so confused.  And that is how many entries will end for the next however many months.