(This piece is more about what is going on inside me than in our lives. Part 2 will have more about our changing lives.)

On Saturday, Feb. 13, was the thirty-seventh anniversary of my birth. I am now older than my Dad was when he died. John D. Atkins was run off Telephone Road in Moore, Oklahoma while riding his motorcycle on May 31, 1975 – a week before his 37th birthday. Johnny’s accident had left his brain severely and permanently damaged but his body lived on for eleven years, finally dying the day after the Challenger blew up in Jan. 1986. The following summer I moved to Santa Cruz (as did my mother a few months later) and met Troy.

In this last year I have come to understand my Dad more and more. I now realize how very young he was. He was only in his mid-twenties when he met and fell in love with a married woman with three children. Then the Marine Corps. sent him for his second tour of duty to Viet Nam. Meanwhile, my mother left her first husband and moved back to Indiana. Johnny survived Viet Nam, and in 1969, quit the Marines, came back to the states to marry my mother and become our dad, then we all moved to Oklahoma – thirty years ago, the week before my seventh birthday. I still vividly remember that birthday – the little tiered cake in the motel room on the edge of town.

Johnny was not perfect, but he provided something that I desperately needed – a real dad. This man truly loved all of his daughters – even those of us not born to him. After my mother’s first husband, I was not a trusting child and I was always strong-willed and difficult. Yet, he never gave up on me and I came to truly believe in his love. His accident, only months after my 13th birthday, was a loss I still mourn.

So here I am, 37 years old. I remember how much I looked up to my dad. He seemed so very powerful. And now I see that look in my son’s eyes. He is so happy when he is with us, but he doesn’t understand why we leave him. How can he? There is no way he could understand that his daddies and I do not have the power to protect him. How could he understand that a judge who has never seen any of us took away what power we did have? I don’t understand it myself.

Being with Rowan at the holidays was the first time I had felt whole in a very long time. And I had almost forgotten what Troy looked like without dark circles under his eyes. The joy and contentment on his face was breathtaking. Lon was relaxed and happy. Not only do we love Rowan with all our hearts – we are better people when we are with him. For myself at least, I like who I am better when I am with him. I feel more grounded and peaceful. When I am away from him, I feel like a piece of me is missing. My mother read me a quote that said that choosing to have a child is choosing to allow your heart to walk around outside your body. And how does one cope with such vulnerability in such a painful world?

I think that I have spent my life waiting for the time when I would be powerful enough to stop people from hurting me. When I was young, I thought it would happen if I could just survive long enough to grow up. When I reached my twenties, things were somewhat better. But still people hurt me, sometimes even still beat me. I think I thought that if I could just fix whatever was wrong with me, people wouldn’t hurt me any more. So I have spent the last decade in striving for personal improvement -- martial arts training, conflict resolution training. and years of therapy. When people hurt me, I spend endless hours trying to figure out "what I did wrong." When friends reassure me that I don’t deserved what happened to me, it provides some comfort but no resolution. You see, self-blame gives me at least some measure of control. If it was my fault, then, at least I could fix it. To realize that when people hurt me it may be more about them than it is about anything I did or did not do – that is truly terrifying to me. Because to accept that, I will have to give up my dream of being able to protect myself and those I love, especially Rowan.

Maybe what I need is some kind of emotional Aikido – the ability to direct other people’s angry, hurtful stuff away. I don’t want to be blind or shut-off from the emotions/needs of others. Yet, I would like to find a way to be the kind of person with others as I am with Rowan. When Rowan gets mad at me because I won’t give him a cookie at bedtime, I am not hurt. I know it is because he doesn’t understand that I can’t give him everything he wants. When Rowan hits me, I catch his hand, hold it firmly and tell him that it is not okay to hit me or anyone else. When I let go, if he persists, then I put him down and move away from him. I don’t hit him but I don’t let him hit me either. When Rowan cries, no matter what the reason, I feel such empathy that compassion comes easily for me with him. He can’t tell the difference yet between needs and wants. He doesn’t understand the limitations on him or us. With Rowan I can set boundaries with compassion and respect. But Rowan is a loving child. He can not hurt me as adults can. He would not want to. Most people, myself included, are so damaged by this culture and by what they have had to endure to survive, that they often lash out at others to relieve their pain. How do I feel empathy for them and provide the support they need me (and I believe are due as friend/family) while at the same time setting safe boundaries for myself and protect myself from those whose own pain spurs them to attack those they care about? Most adults seem just as scared and angry about my limitations and powerlessness to provide everything they think they need/want from me as any child and yet they have much more power to hurt me than children. They are also much less forgiving.

I know that one of the reasons I am so good with Rowan is that I do not fear him. His love is so pure and so full, that I never doubt it. With other people I am always afraid. I actually like people a lot. I was never meant to be a loner and feel I am at my worst when forced to be. Many people see me as so "independent" that they don’t understand this part or it confuses them. Yet, liking people makes me feel intensely vulnerable. Too often I feel powerless in relationships. This may shock some of you reading this. I am told I don’t show it. In the last decade, there have been few friendships that I have been the one to end. While I am usually very aware of the "faults" i.e. limitations of my friends, I rarely feel that is cause to end a relationship. I expect that everyone has such limitations. I guess I feel that my own limitations help me to accept my friends. I suppose I expect the opposite to be true. Which, I am told, is not the way the world really works.

So as I approach forty and all of us approach the new century, I find myself wondering what living past my dad’s age can mean for me. To be honest, I don’t know if I expected to make it this far. And while work and finances are, as always, a struggle for me, I find my most important concerns focus in more intimate areas. I lived many years with the emotional equivalent of the brick façade to protect myself. Now I would like to find a way to protect myself and my family without such distancing armaments. Yet without such walls I feel I have left myself too vulnerable to the pain of others. Instead of working on making myself perfect so no one will hurt me, I want to find a way to feel centered enough in who I am to handle such attacks without attacking back. Wouldn’t it be perfect symmetry if the feeling of peace and centeredness I have learned from my son is the legacy I could leave him?