Beachball

2006?

H when I try and write to you it is so often with a heavy heart.

I worry about so many things. Whether you even get my cards and letters; whether you get them but don’t read them; how you feel when you read them and worst of all How sad and upset I feel writing them.

Sad because when I start to write it focuses all the pain I feel and how much I miss you, miss seeing your smile, hearing your beautiful voice and how much I miss being in your life.

Upsetting because what I say in my letters to you is private and personal and it is being used with malice and skill to try and further damage what little there is left. It is cruel, sick and twisted and so shocking to me that someone I loved and who loves you would do this.

Every time this happens I am left with a dilemma. Do I continue to write to you and have my words twisted and sullied leaving me raging impotently at the injustice and cowardice. I hope you understand and appreciate that all I am trying so hard to say is simply, I love you and am so so sorry for the pain this has caused you.

My other alternative is to stop writing so my words can no longer be turned against me. But what then?

“a Father who cares so little he cannot even find the time to even write” I can hear your mothers words to you clear as day.

I prefer to believe that one day the pain will be less and we can live in peace and we are all big enough and courageous enough to forgive. Until then, I must live in hope that I will one day get a sign from you that you have read my words and understand what I am trying to hard to say.

If ,as I suspect few if any of my notes and cards are ever seen by you or kept then you will one day get a copy of them. I so hope this does not end the way it did with my Mum and I.

I only got to see the waste and futility and extent of the tragedy that was my childhood after my mum died and I read through her diary, the letters had written and never sent.

Not knowing now where you even live there is little chance of you even seeing a card before it is intercepted. How very sad and ironic that both your `mum and I served our country to protect democracy, freedom of speech and freewill. How we wanted you to grow up with the chances and opportunities we never had. How we promised to never make the mistakes our parents did or to behave toward you as they did to us.

Maybe freewill is an illusion and our lives are pre-ordained. If that is true, then maybe all we have is the limited choice of how to act in each situation. We can choose the easy path and follow the herd or we can choose a more difficult route.

I have chosen and for that choice you will judge me. I could have taken the route of least resistence and been unhappy and lived a lie. I did for a while and all it caused was pain to those I loved and deep unhappiness to me.

Now I choose a different path. It is a journey that causes me great pain and perhaps even greater pain in the short–term to others. Not least you and mum. It is I truly believe, the right route and is one that is honest and fair to myself and to you both.

You will have heard many things Harriet that you believe to be true. The question you must always ask is whose truth is it?

If you walk into a room and see a huge beachball that fills the whole room from floor to ceiling and it is blue and you can touch it and see it with your own eyes and hear that lovely ping noise when you slap it, you know it is a blue beachball.

If I walk through the door opposite in the same room I also see a huge beachball like you but I see a red one! Just like you I can touch it and know it is red and that is the truth.

Just then mummy joins you in the doorway and says what a cool purple beachball. “ Mummy it is blue silly!”you say. Oh no it isn’t look! And she hands you her cool new pink sunglasses. Sure enough you put them on and laugh because now the ball is purple. I hear you from the other side of the room and shout out “it’s red H!” You look at each other and shake your heads. “fool” you turn and leave with Mummy saying “Why do boys always lie?”

The fly squashed between the ceiling and the beacball can see both sides with his compound eyes that are far superior than human eyes. They are all right he says to himself One half is red and the other blue.

The dog in the garden looking through the large window disagrees. To him it is all just shades of grey! All he wants is the ball to be outside the constraints of the room it is trapped in so he can play with it, chase it and have fun with it.

Writing this my eyes are filling up with tears and I would not be able to see a ball at all when they are like that. Maybe that is another truth. Sometimes we cannot see what is in front of our eyes even when it is plain for others to see. And sometimes we don’t see the reality of our position until it is too late or we look at things from a different position.

Love Daddy xxx