Life is Tough Out There

and my job is to toughen you up…said Dad’s belt or the back of his hand when he didn’t use words. The message was loud and clear one way or another that I so related to the song A Boy Named Sue. 

Father’s Day was the last time we had words between us. I was twenty-two. On the other end of the receiver his cold set jaw seethed, “Have a nice life.” 

Age twenty-eight was when I learned my angry, cantankerous, wounded and bitter father had died. He was about to turn fifty-seven.

When I learned of my dad’s death, I had just met Curtis, who thought that I sounded aloof when I relayed the news to him. Well that’s another story. But twenty-eight years later, we’ve been together all this time, both committed to our marriage. Last weekend on a beautiful fall walk, I bemoaned the grief of my dad. That’s when Curtis pointed out that he has known me longer than my dad ever did. Although I’m pretty good at arguing with him, this time I couldn’t, he was right. 

Kind of funny how long a wound lingers and clings to your every day even if you don’t think you’re thinking about it. It seeps in low and slow determined to alter your view of yourself and your life unless you shed light on the lie.

Below is an excerpt from my memoir Wounded Song. 

Alone in the dining room with Dad, I pondered the heaviness of his dead body inside the box. I wondered how much he weighed so I carried him upstairs to our guest room and placed him on the bathroom scale. “Hmmm, sixteen pounds.”

This once self-elevated giant of a man who created many obstacles in my life, who made and broke me, helped shape and mold my outlook on the world and of myself and who pushed away his family with anger and bitterness, now sat on my scale. His broken mountain turned to rubble; all that remained of his wounded empire. His one man war self-imploded leaving behind sixteen pounds of unused shrapnel.

This black box, now in my life, became my crossroad. What war I made of it was up to me. I could be buried alive under my dad’s crumbled mountain, letting the decay of his dead anger suffocate the remains of my life, or with determination, I could choose to breathe and live alive climbing up and over the sorrows of my past with victory. I must decide not to let this box steal my joys of today and tomorrow. Otherwise, this sixteen-pound black box still wins.  end excerpt.

This is the year I am about to turn fifty-seven years old,

the same age my dad was when he died.

Reflection can’t help but stir up loss and brokenness, but what I do with it makes the difference in how I fight my battle.

Dad was right, life is tough. I just wish he tried to hang around and help me through it rather than fight me through it.  He never had a meal in my home, met my husband or really knew me. Sure I feel the loss on so many levels, but I’m deciding the greater loss was his.

 

Determined perseverance is a real fight for the promised hope of God’s grace and mercy to continue to restore my soul. Like salve on a wound, restoration is ongoing because life is fragile, yet hardy through His promise. I pray you see the encouragement, hope and victory in my story!

I may cry, but at fifty-seven years old, I still choose life and dark chocolate!

Wounded Song a memoir by Tammy Sue Willey

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• No More Broken Plates
• Are You a Father?