Here is an excerpt from my upcoming book "WoodSongs III: A Folksinger's Song Book, Social Commentary and Front Porch Manual" due out later this year ... about the aftermath of growing up in a violent, alcoholic home:
“Abandonment is no less a betrayal than adultery; no less cruel than abuse; no less painful than death ..."
It’s like being adrift in a stormy black sea, losing sight of your location, losing sight of the shore. You can’t breath and you can’t keep your head above the churning waters no matter how hard you try as you desperately strain to navigate yourself toward anything that resembles safe land.
And that land is “Love,” and “Family” and “Home” and the unattainable idea that you can ever be loved. Arriving at dry harbor, tired and exhausted and unsure, you crawl toward a dream seeking an allusive paradise of affection and confidence that you are completely untrained and unprepared to recognize. Love becomes an crushing internal tsunami that you do not understand, yet desperately need.
You drag yourself upon the sandy shore with no maps, no navigation, no sense of direction. It’s like walking through an island peppered with land mines, detonating and exploding around you. With each step you cup your ears in anticipation of the next thunderous roar of heartache, because you are used to it. You expect it. You have learned the art of tolerating the intolerable as you keep moving forward no matter what ... hating every moment of it and yet unable to change it. And the relationships that you form seem to be with others walking the same path, others nearest who are navigating the same mine fields.
And when you finally find that delicate rose of love, that paradise of home and family, that precious and unkind ‘moment of deception’ where you actually think you are being ‘loved-no-matter-what’ and you give your whole self, your whole heart and life force to it ... the storm winds of your youth come surging back as the mines explode at your feet. You are left alone in complete disbelief as you again pick up the smoldering, chard pieces of every dream you had.
And when the smoke finally clears and the thunder subsides, you step forward again ... with a little more fear than before, cupping your ears and bracing, waiting, anticipating the next moment of detonation.”
(Michael Johnathon c2011/Rachel Aubrey Music Inc/BMI)
