Bad News and Booty Calls
Have you ever noticed that once you hit a certain age, a midnight telephone call has an inherent meaning to it which isn’t the same as when you were younger?
In high school, that midnight phone ring was probably my friend Lisa calling to fill me in on the details of her date… or even just to gossip about the potential NEXT date.
In my college days, midnight may as well have been noon for the call traffic that came through. At 19 years old, no one but the squares were in bed at that time.
In the early 20s (for most, if not for me), a midnight phone call means one thing: Mr. Right Now is horny and in the area. And no one but you will do…
But then things begin to change. There’s no specific age when it happens, but happen it does. When you’re settled happily into domestic bliss, loved up in comfortable surroundings, in bed by ten and up and at ‘em at a respectable hour each morning…
Suddenly the world changes. The phone rings at 11:45 PM and your heart suddenly stops. Your blood runs cold and icy in your veins, and your mind begins to sort through every image you’ve ever seen involving car crashes, dead relatives, emergency rescues and police reports. You know that no one of a civilized nature would be calling this late at night, and the only possible explanation is that the person on the other end of the telephone is going to tell you something you don’t want to hear…
Last night, Mark and I watched the X Factor semi-finals on ITV and then decided it would be fun to break out the XBox and play Lips. As an experiment, we got out my ipod and plugged it in and worked “freestyle” to sing the songs we actually liked rather than the ones available on the discs. We were having a lot of fun, just singing and dancing around, not thinking about the time.
For some reason, I got the urge to sing an old country song by Sawyer Brown called The Walk. It’s really a father/son song about the rites of passage of a boys life. But for some reason it’s always touched my heart and meant a lot to me. I think of my own father when I hear it, and last night, I couldn’t even finish singing it as I started crying in the final verse.
I posted recently about the drama surrounding my current relationship with my father. But even with all that going on, I can’t help but get emotional when I think about anything happening to him…
Cue that midnight telephone call.
Not 30 seconds after I finished singing this emotional song about fatherly love, I saw my mother’s name pop up on my caller ID. I looked at the clock and saw how late it was, and I immediately cottoned on that something was wrong. Initially, I thought she might be calling to tell me that my brother’s girlfriend had gone into labour or had had her baby… It would be several weeks early, and news such as that might warrant a late night call… just about. I didn’t want to think that it could be anything worse. But as soon as I said hello, I heard the anxiety in my mother’s voice. She didn’t sound overly devastated, so I knew that whatever it was wasn’t TOO bad, but I also knew that something was very wrong.
“Your dad’s in the hospital.”
The words rung around my head. It took me a moment to process them. As soon as I did, the tears started pouring down. “What’s happened?” I asked quietly.
She’d come back from a shopping trip to find my dad suffering excruciating head pain. His face was numb and he had numbness/pain in his left arm. My thoughts immediately jumped back to my nursing training, and I thought of my grandfather (dad’s dad) who had had similar symptoms the night he went into the hospital for the last time.
She continued, “They think it might have been a mild stroke. They’re doing some tests, and they’re checking his heart, but we won’t know anything for a while. He’s doing better already, and he’s just had a Quizno’s sub. So he’s in good spirits.”
Unfortunately, being pregnant means I’m a lot more emotional than usual. When my dad told me he had cancer two years ago, I looked into his eyes calmly and rationally and simply said, “Okay. What do we do to beat it?” But at my mother’s words, I simply lost it. I began to cry. My tears were a combination of sadness, fear and anger.
My mother felt terrible for distressing me and begged me to calm down for the sake of the baby. I did my best to reassure her, telling her I was really okay and just a little hormonal. She started to regret having called me, but I made sure she knew that I was ALWAYS to be called in such a situation, day or night, pregnant or not. She then said that she hoped this would be a wake up call to my dad to not only take better care of himself, but also to bury the hatchet with me… She said that she’d call me tomorrow and let me know the test results and also see if she couldn’t persuade dad to talk to me.
When I hung up, I cried and cried on Mark’s shoulder. It took me another two hours before I was able to relax enough for us to go to bed.
At 2:30 AM, we were settling in together, and I decided I wanted to leave my phone’s sound on “just in case.” No sooner did I turn off the light then the ringing burst through the darkness at us. My mother again. My heart was in my throat, expecting the worst. I answered timidly.
She didn’t want me worrying all night, so she’d decided to call me with the results of some of the tests to let me know how things stood. The doctors had ruled out a heart attack and said that what he’d had wasn’t an ACTUAL stroke. It was more like the beginning stages of a stroke, which they’d luckily caught in time. Basically the problem was that my dad’s blood pressure medicine (which he’s taken for years) has stopped working. His BP had gone up to an extraordinarily high level (somewhere around 180/120!) and they hadn’t been able to get it down right away.
Eventually, though, they’d given him something in his IV which had brought it down to normal, and he was on the mend. The doctor’s said he was lucky. If he hadn’t come when he had, he might have had a full stroke and might have died.
He’s now under strict orders to lose weight and get his life on track. I can only hope he’ll listen to the doctors and do what they say.
In the end, I was able to get a decent sleep last night, though my anger at the situation threatened to keep me up indefinitely.
My upset at his recent behaviour had reached epic proportion. Here was my dad who could have DIED last night. And if he had, he would have done so having abandoned his youngest daughter at a time when she most needed his support. His stubbornness nearly cost him the ability to rest in peace. And I would have felt forever grieved at the way things had ended. I made mom promise to tell dad to grow up and forgive me already, as I’ve done nothing wrong, and I didn’t want things to go on this way.
She promised.
Today, I waited for the promised phone call, but it was already early evening before it came. Once again mom’s voice was on the other end of the phone, and she seemed in decent spirits. “Do you want to talk to your dad?” she asked me.
I gulped and said that I would.
On each side of me, someone reached out to hold me and give me strength. Mark on my right, Pat on my left.
Dad came on the phone, gruff and clearly aggravated. I kept my voice chipper and asked how he was. He sounded like someone was FORCING him to speak with me, and in a few moments, there was an added edge to my voice as I struggled to keep my emotions under control.
But just as I was about to ask some form of mundane question, he jumped in quickly with, “You understand why I’m angry with you, don’t you?”
I swallowed thickly and answered carefully. “Actually, no. I’m sorry, but I don’t really understand.”
He angrily started speaking about how I’d lied to him about my divorce and reminding me that he has strong feelings about adultery. He said that my brother had “filled him in” on the truth and he was disgusted that I’d brought Mark to his home and slept with him under his roof when I wasn’t yet divorced.
I explained to him what I’ve already explained to him in the past - which is that a UK divorce has two parts. Part one is where the divorce is granted, and part two is when the divorce is made absolutely irrevocable. I told him that part one was done and dusted, and part two wouldn’t come through until January. I apologised for not explaining it right the first time, but reminded him that I HAD gone through this with him back in September. I reminded him that Mark and I had offered to stay in a hotel or for Mark to sleep on the couch if he was still concerned, but he’d brushed my offers away at the time.
In the end, it took me next to no time to explain the situation satisfactorily, and with that one very brief conversation, my father apologised to me. He said it was his fault and his misunderstanding and he was sorry for taking it out on me.
I was astonished. Happy, obviously, but astonished, as well.
Part of me was angry, thinking that if he’d just confronted me right away, we never would have missed out on two months of each other’s lives. But I decided that it was best to look past that and just accept that we were reconciled now.
We spoke for a few more minutes, mostly about tax law, and then he said that as he’d just got back from the hospital, he really wanted a shower. And off he went, with the promise to talk soon.
It’s been a very stressful 24 hours. But ultimately I’ve realised that life is too short to hold a grudge, and the best thing I can do for myself and my baby is to just get over any residual anger and get on with being happy to have my dad back.
Of course, now there’s the issue of the baby name to deal with again. Mark and I have falled in love with Dexter David, but I now feel somewhat obligated to reinstate my dad’s name in there, as well. I timidly asked Mark if he would mind Dexter David Douglas Reed, but his reaction wasn’t as accomodating as I’d hoped, though he also admitted that he’d expected me to react exactly that way should my dad and I reconcile.
So it’s all up in the air at the moment. For me, I think I need to recognise that the names Dexter David are not negotiable. I love them both and simply need to decide if I believe in honouring my father’s name by adding it into the mix. Right now, I’m undecided about that. I guess it depends on how things go over the next few weeks….
This post originated at A Mother Thing (http://www.amotherthing.com). If you want to leave a comment, please do so here: http://www.amotherthing.com/2010/12/bad-news-and-booty-calls/#comments