The Book of Coggie

Two days ago, it was my head. Pat, pat, pat.

Yesterday, eyes.

Today, it’s my left breast. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

Long ago, in a land far far away, I sat sipping apple cider, two hands firmly on a ceramic monkey mug, the air profuse with secondhand smoke. All around me were cancer stick landmines.

Did I turn off the stove?

“To see goodness and beauty amongst bad and ugly is a gift of grace.” -Micah68mjw 4:16am via Web, Twitter

I have a hard time with that. It’s only been in my 40s that my eyes have been opened to my past, mostly my childhood. So much for thinking I had all my shit together.

For better or worse, I come from a family of — to put it bluntly, no point in being coy — con artists. They had a habit of bullshitting, deflecting, bragging, covering up, doing whatever it took so nobody outside our family knew their weaknesses, at times, not even them. They also were the masters of manipulation, able to assess their victims’ (meaning, everybody, including those they claimed to love) weaknesses to their full advantage. And, despite the appearance of MENSA genius or street smarts (in the case of my mom), they were unenlightened, unevolved, and unwilling to open their minds to any sort of introspection.

This kind of dysfunction does one of two things to you. It hardens you until you quickly learn to survive by becoming one of them, or — in my case — trying hard to do everything possible to distance yourself from them.

But distancing yourself from a dysfunctional, controlling, lying, conniving family has its consequences. Namely, to peace of mind. Most of my life I’ve had to rely solely on myself as to what’s right and wrong, what’s real and what’s a lie.

I’ve become a nervous wreck, questioning everyone and everything in my life, suspecting motives, believing people, all people are coming at me with a hand out or a knife behind the back. I don’t come from a place of yes. I come from a place of, What the hell do you want from me now?

In my darkest days, I almost believe that life is pure evil and that people are born completely fucked up, and we use sports, entertainment, literature, arts, cooking, Facebook, whatever we can to further delude ourselves that we’re not in some doomed Matrix outside our animalistic control. That there is no such thing as compassion or truth, without some fucking catch, like religion, sex, or money, or all three. That if you wait long enough, people will show their true colors and fuck you over. That nobody ever does what they promise, that they only promise to throw you off so they can suck you dry and walk away.

Of course, as my counselor Gary would say, that is completely unrealistic. Of course it is.

When someone extends every kindness to me, with no thought of reward, when someone takes the time to care about me, when someone gives me a job (thanks, Mary Jane) even though I’m straight out of college — based on a good feeling, when someone stands up for me because it’s the right thing to do and I barely know them… well, all of these things encourage me to believe the opposite of what I was raised to believe.

I can’t have compassion without truth. I can’t have truth without compassion. These are the two things I grew up without, so I hunger for them now as the litmus test that you are for real, you can be trusted, and I can take a bullet for you.

I just need a whole lot of it to balance off the bullshit I was born into. I’m not even sure sometimes if it’s possible.

I see your pictures, and watch you die.

I see the ugliness and the filth in the corners of every room you don’t use anymore, because company’s coming.

I see the hate and the resentment, even the murderous rage, you try so desperately to hide behind your six-course dinners, your charming cocktail chatter, and your designer wardrobe.

I see the drugs, the sex shops, that time after the guests finally left when he punched you in the side of your heavily made-up face, and made you watch when he fucked the wife of his boss’s best friend.

I see you take every dime your child painstakingly earned from a part-time job at the library since she was a freshman in high school, because you couldn’t pay the rent, so you beat her, stuffed her bruised rags in the closet, and made it about her IOU.

I see the wasted youth spent on a boy who used his mouth to cover up his endless failures and to feed his endless greed, incapable of taking care of anyone.

I see the end product but must wait out the bullshit beginning and interminable middle, as people so many people all of them every single last one of them dip their toes into the vast pool of corruption.

It’s sunny today. I can see golden light bathing the tops of the leaves of these backyard trees—just like my childhood.

I used to live for days like this, so I could drop everything, rush out, and hustle up my neighborhood friends to play all day. We’d organize kickball games, roller derby, trot around to other blocks and see what was going on with friends from school. We were young, healthy, energetic, and free.

As I wrestled with a slowly growing flare of arthritis in my right hand, doing some dishes, and looking at the sun bringing everything to life outside, I wondered what had happened to me. Not the Mom, the Wife, the former-Journalist, or even the Aiea High School/University of Hawaii Grad. But the me who used to be the first one outside rounding up every kid I could think of for fun, the kind of kid my son James, 10, turned out to be. The kind of kid my son would’ve loved to be best friends with.

That’s where he is right now, out playing with all his neighbor friends, doing the activities I used to do, loving himself out in the sun playing his sports, running around like a whirling dervish.

What happened to me?

I washed my dishes and drinking glasses, trying to sort through legit reasons for my lagging behind. I always envisioned myself as the mom who was out there running around, one of them, forgetting my cares, remaining a kid again… I’d be the one diving for the ball while laughing my head off, plotting pranks, talking excitedly about the latest toy monsters in our collection, even killing everybody in all those cool video games we never had when we were kids (could you imagine?).

I can’t even stand upright in those military killing games.

What the hell’s wrong with me? Am I just physically handicapped with my age? Did I pick up grown-up interests that killed the child in me? Wouldn’t it be creepy to see some fat, middle-aged Asian woman running around with 10-11-year-olds?

Soon, my son won’t even want me around. I can already see it happening with his sleep-overs. But I had him from birth to 10 years old, and I wasted the entire decade trying to catch up on sleep, reading books, going online, doing boring stupid grown-up shit. I could’ve gotten to know him better, enjoyed his company, let him show me his creativity, imagination, humor—in more than a passing fashion, on the way to and from one of his events.

I feel robbed. But I did this to myself. Somehow.

He and his little friends have no idea how much fun I used to be, how I used to be one of them, and occasionally, still am. When I pipe up excitedly in their jargon, I can see shockwaves wash over them, trying to match the responsible mom to this jabbering kid challenging them all to some playoff. I used to collect Japanese monsters, like Mothra, Godzilla, Ultra-Man, Kikaida. I used to practice my Bruce Lee with all the boys on 7th Street. I used to kick all the boys’ asses in Garden Terrace, in every sport. I’d be the last one inside for dinner, unwilling to give up even five seconds of fun with my friends. Such a tomboy.

Here’s a secret: when I find myself giving my son a 20-minute lecture about cleaning up his room, like I was doing last night, I hate it just as much as he does. I’d rather be out there playing hoops with him and his friends, a kid forever.