October 21st, 1977
I find myself delighted with my life. Alone at home on a Friday night. Puttering around my cluttered apartment wearing my father’s old bathrobe– snuggling on the sofa with my dog– reading “How to Save Your Own Life” by Erica Jong.
She writes, “…how uncontrollable life is, how little our anxieties influence our futures.”
This little roach infested apartment in Glover Park has become my womb, my haven. I turn the lock on the door and have my own playland at my disposal. Free to wander around in an awful old robe. Free to talk crazy to my dog and hop and dance around the apartment for her amusement. Free to dye my hair and mustache dark black (which I did tonight, much to my horror. Although it satisfied a lifelong fantasy, it left me looking like Groucho Marx) Free to eat disgustingly heaped plates of Stouffer’s frozen lasagna and sit cross-legged on the sofa and eat chocolate Bavarian pie.
How different I am now than that first year after leaving Richard. I remember my awful existence in my apartment. Barren and empty and lonely. Feeling so lost and unloved. Floundering without the social equipment of a lover and a home. And my patent inability to create my own world because that would have no meaning. Making myself happy didn’t count in those days. I needed Daddy to take care of me. I spent so much tormented effort trying to manufacture my father’s love from the world around me. And that love I was seeking was epitomized by the security of a lover, a home, a white picket fence. What an awful burden I put on Richard to be my Daddy. He was such a lost little boy himself. Desperately trying to be loved by his mother.
I wonder if it was my father’s actual physical death that ended my endless search for his love. Possibly it was a natural change, a growth, that I was headed for anyway. I have moments lately– of near giddiness– when I feel my support coming from within. What a freedom that presents. Suddenly the people in my life do not bear the awesome possibility of saving me. I am free to experience them without hating them for not being my Daddy. You see, my Daddy is dead– and I am very much responsible for my own happiness. Much more than that, however, for the first time in my life– my own happiness is my primary concern.